26 pages • 52 minutes read
Gloria AnzalduaHow to Tame a Wild Tongue
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Language and Identity
Language is a key component of identity. Anzaldúa writes, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language” (39). The essay calls on Chicanos to embrace their cultural and linguistic hybridity and reconceptualize how they think about the language. From a young age, Chicanos grow up internalizing the idea that they speak “broken” English and Spanish because they speak English with an accent and do not learn formal Spanish. Anzaldúa encourages Chicanos to feel empowered speaking their languages and dialects because they are an inherent part of their identity. She argues that only by embracing one’s language can one embrace one’s identity.
Throughout the essay Anzaldúa practices this theory, embedding Spanish throughout her primarily English-language essay. This stylistic choice is significant because she demonstrates Chicana conversational language while also showcasing her literary prowess and linguistic talent. She employs code-switching throughout the essay to illustrate her argument about the interconnectedness of language and identity among the Chicano people living on the border. She writes, “Nosotros los Chicanos [we Chicanos] straddle the borderlands” (42). As a young girl who learned formal English in school and informal Spanish at home, Anzaldúa, like many Chicano children, has a “split tongue,” speaking a variety of languages that includes different Spanish and English dialects and slang. She had to learn to disregard criticism for speaking differently—for not speaking “proper” Spanish and speaking English with an accent—to embrace her Chicana identity. She encourages others to follow suit, arguing that loving our language is key to fully embracing who we are.
Epigraphs and block quotes from important works of Chicano literature and poetry reinforce her argument about the significance of language to identity. Her analysis of the distinction between the Chicano dialect and formal Spanish demonstrates her linguistic expertise. Anzaldúa reinforces her point that Chicano Spanish is its own language by articulating how the Chicano dialect differs from the Spanish of other Latinos. Anzaldúa illustrates a dialectical distinction with the word jalar, providing the word’s Latin and Germanic etymology and citing the shift in spelling that occurred in 16th-century Spain. This example illustrates her argument about the hybridity of language. Anzaldúa corrects the preconceived notions she critiqued earlier, namely that Chicanos speak a “broken” language. She presents herself as a linguistic expert, competent in all the languages and dialects she engages in the essay.
Anzaldúa argues that while language can be a tool of oppression, it can also be a tool of liberation. She refuses to internalize shame at speaking Chicano and encourages others to shed the shame they feel for the way they speak. She believes that refusing to adopt American or Mexican culture is crucial to overcoming the identity struggle that Chicanos feel. The gradual transition from feeling oppressed by language to embracing language’s power is modeled within the essay. Though Anzaldúa initially includes English translations when she embeds Spanish phrases and quotes, she gradually transitions to omitting translations completely. This choice symbolizes her growing comfort with her language: She has embraced her “wild tongue.” The piece ends as a manifesto to her intended audience, Chicanos and Spanish speakers who alone can comprehend the Spanish with which she ends.
In the penultimate paragraph, Anzaldúa’s language becomes optimistic, and she vacillates between the genre of autobiographical essay and public speech. This linguistic shift at the level of genre is accompanied by a linguistic shift into Spanish as the primary language. The shift is political, evoking Cesar Chavez’s powerful public speeches:
In the meantime, tenemos que hacer la lucha. Quién está protegiendo a los rancheros de mi gente? Quién está tratando de cerrar la fisura entre la india y el blanco en nuestra sangre? El Chicano, si, el Chicano que anda como un ladrón en su propia casa (44).
English Translation: “In the meantime, we have to fight. Who is protecting the ranchers of my people? Who is closing the fissure between the Indigenous and the white in our blood? The Chicano, yes, the Chicano who walks like a thief in his own house.”
Culture as Multidimensional
The essay charts Anzaldúa’s journey to discovering her Chicano identity through exposure to literature and pop culture. This process was not easy for a girl growing up in Texas in the 1960s and 1970s. She received an American education in English and lived surrounded by American pop culture. The dominant culture is the only coherent, all-encompassing culture represented in a given society. The dominance of American culture, its focus on American and European ideas and practices, and its use of English, meant that Anzaldúa had fewer opportunities to access Mexican culture. Chicano culture was even more challenging to access since the Chicano movement had just begun in the 1960s.
Because Chicano identity as a concept was so new, the formation of a coherent literary canon and popular culture was just beginning. For Anzaldúa, telling stories about her childhood discoveries of Chicano political and cultural icons, music, cinema, and literature is an act of archiving Chicano culture. She includes the names of the singers and bands, the type of music, and the content of the songs, along with the atmosphere in which she heard them, to emphasize how essential language is to cultural identity. She recalls “hot, sultry evenings when corridos—songs of love and death on the Mexican borderlands—reverberated out of the local cantinas and wafted in through my bedroom window” (41). The attention to detail illuminates how Chicano culture pervades all aspects of her life. This folk music is an expression of the Chicano identity; it is a cultural history that, she says, “narrate[s] one hundred years of border history” (41). Anzaldúa calls the folk musicians of her culture “our chief cultural mythmakers” (41). The music, as well as food, cinema, landscape, and scents of the borderland setting, are other “more subtle ways that we internalize identification” (42). She believes that learning to embrace their culture and let go of the shame the dominant culture imposed on the Chicano is a crucial aspect of appreciating one’s identity.
Gender and Language
The relationship between gender and language is a dominant theme of the essay. Anzaldúa writes, “Language is a male discourse” (35). She is referring to the Spanish language’s default use of the masculine plural to reference groups of people, even groups of women. The -os ending of nosotros is the masculine ending. In childhood, authority figures told her that “[f]lies don’t enter a closed mouth” and that “well-bred girls don’t answer back” (34). In her experience, language is a male discourse not only in the grammatical sense but also culturally: From a young age, her society taught women to silence themselves. She says that she was called “hocicona, repelona, chismosa” (big mouth, grumbly, gossip), signs of being “mal criada” (poorly behaved); these words “are derogatory if applied to women—I’ve never heard them applied to men” (34-35). Living on the borderland between two cultures, both of which discourage women from speaking out, posed a particular challenge for Anzaldúa, an educated woman writer and feminist.
Embracing her “wild tongue” is political in the sense that it implies embracing her ethnic identity as well as her feminist identity. Anzaldúa weaves an essay in opposition to a patriarchal culture that wishes to silence her. In the essay’s final paragraph, Anzaldúa grants that silence is often a tool of survival. She aligns silence with the Indigenous Americans whose reticence at times enabled them to overcome oppressive cultures, elevating silence to a strategic cultural trait. She ends her essay with an emphasis on inclusion. Only when women are brought into the conversation and the culture can the Chicano/a identity thrive.
