Gloria Anzaldua's How To Tame A Wilde Tongue

The importance of language is essential to every aspect and interaction in our everyday lives. We use language to inform the people around us of what we feel, what we desire, and understand the world around us. The article “How to Tame a Wilde Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua is extremely valuable since it brings to discussion important social. In this essay she writes about the problem of disapproval that Chicanos face speaking Spanish. She talks about how she connects ethnic identity to linguistic identity, and finally, she talks about how and why the Chicano language came out..

In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Anzaldua shows how the mixed language of Chicano Spanish speakers negatively affects both their private senses of self and their integration

into public life in society. She uses interjections of Spanish, historical details, and person anecdotes to show the strong relationships between ethnic and linguistic identities. Anzaldua believes that prohibition of Spanish speaking ultimately leads to a loss of identity and leaves people with low self-esteem. To illustrate this, she writes “Chicanos who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that they speak poor Spanish and their language is a bastard language” (2950). The term “bastard” here shows that the way the Chicano language is treated makes its speakers feel illegitimate, in both Latino and Anglo circles. Moreover, because of their mixed language, Chicano speakers can’t integrate fully into Mexican or U.S. culture. No doubt, that in case of such realities the community in whole would face some serious difficulties.
Gloria Anzaldua exposes her feelings about social and cultural difficulties that Mexican immigrants face when being raised in the United States.

Throughout her essay, Anzaldua interjects Spanish in order to show that she is proud of her unique language, which is a mix of both English and Spanish. The author doesn’t translate the Spanish sprinkled throughout the essay. She says , “Until I’m free to write bilingually…without having always to translate…as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate” (2951). This shows that Chicanos encounter language barriers when they are trying to read and write, and that their native language is not considered fit for print. Anzaldua drives this point further home, saying, “I tried to supplement the required texts with works by Chicanos, only to be reprimanded and forbidden to do so by the principal, who claimed that I was supposed to teach American English literature” (2952). It’s telling, here, that American English literature absolutely did not include work by Chicanos, themselves American. If Chicano literature was unfit for American lit class, there was no other space for it, making it unfit for schools in general. Clearly, Chicano Spanish was ridiculed and diminished by individuals as well as institutions, leaving no space for Chicano voices in conversation or

literature.
In the sub-section titled “Chicano Spanish,” Anzaldua connects language to identity where she makes various distinctions between Chicano Spanish and the standard Spanish spoken in Mexico.

Here she showed how changes in the Chicano language affected the people as a whole. Her point is that Chicanas had no other way to connect themselves and to identify themselves as a distinct people than by creating a new language to bond them together. She notices that, “Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization have developed significant differences in the Spanish we speak.”(2949) To that end, the new language went through a development prosses and became an integral part of Chicano identity as it helped the people identify themselves with others of their ethnicity. This also shows that, actually the new language came out of necessity. In other words, this natural process of developing Spanish happened because we need to understand that language is basically the only way to communicate with

people.
In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Anzaldua establishes language as the key to identity and validation of that identity. Language unifies and allows people to identify with one another. Language is the essence of people, a way of expressing themselves and letting the world know who they are