Gloria Anzaldua's How To Tame A Wild Tongue

Chicanos faced another problem along with their land being taken and being treated as second class citizens. Assimilating into American culture was difficult. Do you keep in touch with the roots of your homeland or do you change and adapt to the new ways of American culture? This was a struggle for Chicanos and it was difficult to adapt. A new language and a new culture in a place they once called their home. Some people tried to fit into both cultures, putting them into somewhere else entirely. This didn’t help their sense of belonging, and ultimately casted them farther as outsiders than before.

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Texas-born, lesbian, Latina, feminist, that wrote about many of her personal experiences and views of the diverse background she grew up in. Growing up a certain culture at home and being in a country with a different culture, brings along a lot of self-identifying issues. Gloria Anzaldúa uses various strategies and languages to write this powerful piece by code-switching, quoting others, diction, and rhetorical questions. Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” speaks about the social issues that Latinos face involving identity, language, and sexism.

In her passage, Anzaldua claims that language is an identity. She stresses the importance of how people who speak Chicano Spanish are viewed as inferior due to it not being a real language. Anzaldua reveals that “repeated attacks on [their] native tongue diminish[es] [their] sense of self” (532). Being criticized by the language one speaks causes a low self-esteem and a misconstruction of identity. It can lead a person to stop or hide the usage of their language thus suppressing one’s self. She highlights the discrimination of Chicanos, so people are aware of it therefore encouraging tolerance and social justice. Anzaldua argues that “until [she is] free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having to always translate. . .[her] tongue will be illegitimate” (533). This shows how truly she

Based on Cisneros’ works of literature, gender roles in a Hispanic culture revolves around patriarchal rule. The repercussions of a patriarchal rule includes the limitations of female liberation and development. Cleofilas’ abusive situation exemplifies the limitations of her independence and development as she can not make her own decisions and has to solely depend on her husband. This situation is illustrated when Cleofilas explains that the towns are “built so that you have to depend on husbands... You can drive only if you’re rich enough to own and drive an own car. There is no place to go” (Cisneros 628). Cleofilas reveals that men are the dominant gender and have more authority, and that women are compelled to depend on them in her society. It is an exceptionally rare case that a woman can afford her own car, for the men usually control the finances in a household. Additionally, Cleofilas has nowhere to seek refuge from her husband. Although she yearns to return to her father’s home, she decides not to due to the social standards imposed on her. In her society, the act of returning home after marriage is socially unacceptable. She understands that her family will be viewed in a negative light if she were to return home, as seen when Cleofilas refers to her town as a “town of gossips” (627). Similar to other men in the society, Juan Pedro’s authority is shown through his abuse. Cleofilas recalls, “He slapped her once, and then again, and again; until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood” (626).

Mother Tongue is a story that describes how Amy Tan’s mother was treated unfairly because of her “broken English”. As the second generation of Chinese immigrants, Tan faces more problems than her peers do. Her mom, who speaks “limited” English, needs Tan to be her “translator” in order to communicate with the native English speakers. Tan has felt ashamed of her mother “broken” language at first. She then contemplates her background affected her life and her study. However, she changes her thought at the end since she realizes things behind language might be more valuable than language itself sometimes. Through the various different literary devices and rhetorical strategies such as the ethos, pathos, and logos appeals, as well as a

Women themselves perpetuate their inferiority; the author recounts a moment in her life when her emotional connection with her mother was interrupted abruptly by a telephone call from her brother. In this instance, the mother chose to speak with her son, the Chicano, over her daughter, the Chicana.

Anzaldúa provides various Spanish languages to identify her Chicana identify, she provides the different Spanish languages to compare and contrast one another to provide not only her experience for the challenges immigrants face, but to put those in her shoes when growing up in America, not knowing every English word there is to know. The language uses Anglicism, words borrowed from the English language (Anzadúa 475). Anzaldúa compares and contrasts that her Chicana identity isn’t too much different; it’s a evolution of both her background and her adaptation of

In the United States early history, Native Americans, Africans and Europeans were marginalized by White People, and categorized as the minorities because they were seen as the inferior race. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar, comprising a person's appearance, their social circle (how they lived), and their known non-White ancestry. History played a major part, as persons with known slave ancestors were assumed to be African (or, in later usage, black), regardless of whether they also had European ancestry. Most often these minorities face significant discrimination in various forms whether through voting, law policy, unequal pay, or even implicit racism, minorities of all kinds have been and still are being put down today. The book Between the World and Me is a letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fifteen-year-old son, Samori. He weaves his personal, historical, and intellectual development into his ruminations on how to live in a black body in America. Not only does Coates give his personal experience in how he experience in first hand discrimination, racism, marginalization but he also gives vivid images on how he lived multiple worlds and how those experiences changed him. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldua exposes her feelings about social and cultural difficulties that Mexican immigrants face when being raised in the United States. She establishes comparisons among English, Spanish and their variations on how

Although I can’t specifically relate to Gloria Anzaldúa’s struggle between her languages in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” I can relate to her “kind of dual identity” in which she identifies with neither Anglo-American cultural values nor Mexican cultural values (1566). Being half white, half Chinese, I struggle identifying as either identity, especially because my mom (who is Chinese) never learned Cantonese and largely became Americanized in her childhood. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in when racial and ethnic identity are so significant in America and when I must interact with the world as part of both the majority and the marginalized. Considering my own struggle and the conflict Anzaldúa describes, it became clearer to me the way race relations in American not only marginalize people of color but train our consciousnesses to damage ourselves. Before I turn back to Anzaldúa, a novel I’ve recently read, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams has also been on my mind, particularly in Godwin’s portrayal of how police surveillance transforms us into agents of our own oppression. Although Caleb is a white man, he also experiences a split consciousness as his values and characteristics are whittled away by the paranoia of constant surveillance.

Cultural expectations have prevented humans from being able to lead their own lives the way they see fit. Gloria Anzaldúa and Sandra Cisneros are two notorious Mexican-American writers that wrote extensively about cultural borders and expectations. Anzaldúa came from the Mexico-Texas border, was a cultural and feminist theorist as well as English scholar, while Cisneros also comes from a Latino background and speaks from her cultural hybridity to illustrate cultural expectations. In this paper, I will use Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands / La Frontera” as a lens for Cisnero’s short story, “Woman Hollering Creek” to draw connections of cultural and gender expectations between two different genres of text.

English is an invisible gate. Immigrants are the outsiders. And native speakers are the gatekeepers. Whether the gate is wide open to welcome the broken English speakers depends on their perceptions. Sadly, most of the times, the gate is shut tight, like the case of Tan’s mother as she discusses in her essay, "the mother tongue." People treat her mother with attitudes because of her improper English before they get to know her. Tan sympathizes for her mother as well as other immigrants. Tan, once embarrassed by her mother, now begins her writing journal through a brand-new kaleidoscope. She sees the beauty behind the "broken" English, even though it is different. Tan combines repetition, cause and effect, and exemplification to emphasize

When one visualizes Latino culture, the prevalent images are often bright colors, dancing, and celebrations. This imagery paints a false portrait of the life of many Latino’s, especially those that are forced to leave their home countries. Latinos often face intense poverty and oppression, whether in a Latin country, or a foreign country, such is true in Pam Ryan’s novel Esperanza Rising. Ryan chronicles the issues that many Latino immigrants face. The first is the pressure from the home country. Many of the countries face turmoil, and many are forced to leave their homes and culture. Once in a foreign place, people often struggle with standing by their own culture or assimilating to the new culture. Latino authors frequently use young adult literature as a platform to discuss the issues they face, as young adults are coming of age they struggle with their identities, personifying the struggle of old culture against the new culture.

The passage How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua exposes the difficulties that many ethnicities of immigrants are exposed to, when they recently migrate to the United States. Gloria Anzaldua stands up for the minorities who are underrepresented, as well as talks of her own personal experiences. Anzaldua does not let linguistic terrorism be a negative influence, resulting in her own language being robbed from her, and pridefully speaks the language, regardless of the situation that she is presented with.

Anzaldua takes great pride in her language, “So if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic diversity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language” (p89). She states that her language is a part of herself so when you insult Chicano it’s like a strike to the heart of Anzaldua. Anzaldua goes on to explains that although Chicanos all over the US speak different dialects of Chicano Spanish, they are still all Chicanos. Just because the language varies a little does not diminish its authenticity. People who speak a variation on a language should not be ashamed because they speak a little differently. “There is the quiet of the Indian about us. We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture. but more we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the aeons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they’ve created” (p93). She strongly urges Los Chicanos to not give up their culture and endure. She believes that the will of their culture will outlast any obstacle they encounter and demands that they not give in to the temptation to conform.

Throughout The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson construes the origins and the history of English and the language's countless quirks.