Gloria Anzaldua's How To Tame A Wild Tongue

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

speakers and fellow Spanish speakers, and retells how she and fellow Chicanos had to take two language courses in college to learn to speak proper English without an accent,” At Pan American University, I , and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes.

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

don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nadie.”

Anzaldua appeals to the readers’ emotions and desire to belong by recounting the very common ostracization by the very people who she is supposed to belong to . Anzaldua also creates a bit of a feeling of frustration in the reader when she tells of how she must change her dialect of Spanish or even forsake Spanish when speaking to certain other Hispanics. “ Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other.”
Perhaps if Chicano Spanish had been allowed in the early years of the United States, the Chicano people would not feel like aliens to both the English and Spanish speaking culture, maybe if they had not felt obligated by parents, educators, and society to learn and speak perfect English they would feel more a part of an ethnic group.

Anzaldua’s tone is almost authoritative, she is stating the facts and the problem with the facts. She knows why Chicanos have a sort of identity crisis and what the root of that crisis is, but at the end of her essay states that Chicanos truly are the Mexicans and are strong, that her people will survive the compromise of others, leaving her reader with a sense of hope for the future.