Gloria Anzaldua's How To Tame A Wild Tongue

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How to Tame a Wild Tongue, by Gloria Anzaldua is a piece that really emphasises that ethnic identity and language go hand-in-hand. The author does a really good job combining her own personal experiences and ideas together to form a well-crafted, persuasive essay. Anzaldua wrote this essay in 1987 shortly after the Chicano Civil Rights Movement led by Cesar Chavez. Anzaldua is a Chicana, which is made clear by the many recounts of personal experiences speaking Spanish sprinkled throughout the artifact. In her essay, Anzaldua explains that there is a very prominent divisiveness in the Chicano/Latino/Hispanic/Mexican culture due to the difference in dialects. The author claims that this divisiveness is due to the complexes surrounding Chicano Spanish. According to Anzaldua, Chicano Spanish was wrong to both English …show more content…

Their purpose: to get rid of our accents.” Anzaldua also recounts how she was often ridiculed by her own people for not speaking proper Spanish, “Even our own people, other Spanish speaker nos quieren poner candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas academia…..Chicano Spanish is considered by the purist and by most Latinos a deficient, a mutilation of Spanish.” The author claims that instances such as these have left her people, Chicanos, with an identity crisis, even a feeling of nothingness “ Chicanos and other people of color suffer….This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity- we don’t identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we

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