How To Tame A Wild Tongue Summary

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In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” a chapter of the book Borderland/La Frontera, The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa, a claim is made by Anzaldúa that “wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (Anzaldúa 2947). This assertion sets up a series of anecdotes revolving around her increasingly frustrating life as a Chicana. Her intent in all of this is to highlight just how important language is to her culture. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” begins in the present day. The author establishes a first-person point-of-view, herself being the patient. “We’re going to have to do something about your tongue,” says the dentist, in a sort of ethereal parallel that is meant to metaphorically symbolize the goal of the essay (2947). This quote from …show more content…

It isn’t merely a love letter to language. It is a passionate first-person account of why language is so much more than a means of communication. Language is part of ourselves. And for some people, language is gradually dying. Anzaldúa refers to the forceful destroying of language as “linguistic terrorism” (2950). A quote by Ray Gwyn Smith, a Welsh painter and art educator, acts an epigraph before later introducing linguistic terrorism. Smith questions “who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war (2947)? She revisits the reality of her childhood where she was told her language was wrong. “Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self,” Anzaldúa asserts (2951). This just reaffirms the meaning of the chapter as a whole. Language isn’t just how to communicate with someone; it is someone. It truly makes someone who they are. “If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a low estimation of me,” illustrating her point further. She distinguishes her culture from other cultures, specifically that of Anglo-Americans, by emphasizing that there is “no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience.” She does this to identify with her fellow Chicanas. This chapter reads kind of like a powerful oration, something that would be given a rally for

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