...“How do you tame a wild tongue?” Gloria Anzaldua asks. Today, we live in a society where we are stripped and torn apart by the way we act and where we come from. In the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Anzaldua makes it known to us that the different languages and the various ways we speak is something that separates us from each other. Anzaldua chooses to focus this topic on the Spanish culture and uses her personal experience to further dive into the struggle of growing up in a place where speaking Spanish was not accepted. Early in the essay, she mentions how at a young age, she was mistreated for speaking Spanish in the classroom and was told to “go back to Mexico where [you] belong”. Because of the culture she grew up in and the language...
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...on linguistic identity in her essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”. As a child growing up in south Texas to Mexican immigrant parents, Anzaldua found herself questioning her teacher’s unfair treatment of Spanish speakers at her school. Her essay continues by dissecting her problem of creating a self-identity through language in a suffocating Anglo-Saxon environment. Anzaldua’s main claim is that the strength of her Chicano roots over power any attempt to uproot her linguistic culture. Anzaldua’s self-identity is shaped through language by her writing style, evidence of robbed freedom and strong culture. In order to properly analyze Anzaldua’s text I will examine her use of language. After reading her essay it is evident that she manipulates her use of English and Spanish in order to raise a reaction from her reader. Linguistic use also drives home her thesis of a strong culture shaping self-identity. The next top of dissection will be Anzaldua’s person identity. As a feminist, she definitely uses language as a tool to express who she is as a person. She feels as though language robs her of her freedom to completely express herself. Lastly, I will examine the magnitude of Chicano culture. Much like a magnetic pull, Spanglish draw’s its culture participants in and gives the speakers an ultimatum: either speak Spanish or be considered a traitor. Each of the topics are thread that weave together to create Anzaldua’s essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”. The most visible evidence...
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...culture quite fast and we become used to perceiving our group of people as the only thing that is "good." We fear wanting to assimilate or broaden our knowledge to other cultures, for it is our natural instinct to shut out anything unfamiliar to us. In her essay, "Arts of the Contact Zone," Mary Louise Pratt argues for importance of understanding the point where two cultures clash, the contact zone, and that it can be powerful to engage in one's culture by expanding our grasp of knowledge and wisdom in the diversity we live in today. Pratt introduces three major concepts in her argument that exemplify the objective of her essay: the contact zone, autoethnographic texts, and transculturation. Upon viewing two other pieces by Richard Rodriguez, “The Achievement of Desire” and Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Rodriguez and Anzaldua demonstrate Pratt's argument by supporting her concepts about the influence of contact zones between two juxtaposing cultures. In her argument, "Arts of the Contact Zone," Pratt introduces the theme of her argument, the contact zones: the point where cultures clash and come together in unison. Where one culture has a lot more power than the other. A contact zone is the root of how every race and ethnicity should come under a consensus as to understanding the underlying meaning of each other's differences and looking at perspectives in order to break down unnecessary barriers people put up. Pratt demonstrates an example of this when...
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...primary focus of the essays by Richard Rodriguez, Leslie Silko, Firoozeh Dumas, and Gloria Anzaldua. Rodriquez’s “Achievement of Desire” illustrates how education can take the place of one’s cultural tradition in pursuit of knowledge. The loss of language is the focus of Silko’s speech, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”. “The F Word” by Firoozeh Dumas shows how profound words in one language can be funny in another, as well as hurtful. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua, she talks about how the education system tried to remove her culture by taking away her language. The two authors take opposite views on education and how it directly affected their lives. While embracing education by becoming a scholarship boy, Rodriquez shows how his desire for knowledge overcame his families’ desire for cultural tradition. Anzaldua expresses her feelings about how education continually tried to forcefully remove her Spanish heritage. The term “scholarship boy” came from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and means that the student must move between two culturally extreme environments during their progression of education. In Rodriquez’s account of his early educational experiences, he demonstrates Hoggart’s core definition of being a scholarship boy to the tee. While finishing his dissertation in the British Museum, Rodriquez reflects on how he managed his success from early to higher education. He talks about how he admired his early...
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...In "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." Gloria Anzaldua uses interjection of Spanish, historical details, and person anecdotes to show the strong relationships between language and identity, and that one's language must be preserved and celebrated in order to appreciate and have pride in oneself. The article has a solid argument base which can be corroborated by scholars such as Foucault, Goffman, Zizek and Fannon. Currently, she was influenced by the social turmoil when she wrote the article. In other words, the richness of her writing goes beyond knowledge; it also comes from personal experience. Anzaldua connects language to identity is by using historical details to show how changes in the Chicano language affected the people as a whole. In the sub-section titled "Chicano Spanish" she makes various distinctions between Chicano Spanish and the standard Spanish spoken in Mexico and most other parts of the world. Mexico-Americans didn't feel a connection to either two languages, so Anzaldua thinks it is necessary for them to have a new language. At the end, the new language became an integral part of Chicano identify and help them to identify with other's ethnicity. She writes her discovery of Chicano works made her feel pride not only in Chicano words, but also showing the strong connection between language and identify. In Anzaldua's essay, she mixes in personal anecdotes throughout every part of the essay. For example, at the beginning of the essay, she writes about how she uses to go to the dentist when she was younger...
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...The Personal is Still the Political “Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you” (Berlin). These iconic lyrics were part of a cheerful duet in a 1940’s Broadway musical making jest that a woman could compete against a man in various tasks such as singing and archery. Little did society know that women truly believed that this was the case, and it was an idea worth fighting for. Over the course of the twentieth-century, women have fought and protested for equality among men in a male-dominate society. Women have rallied under one of the best known slogans of the movement the “personal is political”, the concept that the personal (private) life should be addressed equally with the public (political) life that had yet to integrate women into its realm. “the personal is political refers to the private life or “realm” of women having anything to do with marriage, children or household roles and the public realm of men having anything to do with business, politics, art, or sports. Renowed poet and writer Gloria Anzaldua has her own interpretation of what the “personal is political” means and what she was challenging specifically when she argued using her own experiences such as the loss of culture through the loss of language, and sexism in language as a starting point. “The personal is political” played a very significant role in helping shape the women’s rights movement from its roots all the way to its end in the 1960’s with the advent of the Civil...
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...conveying of opinions publicly without interference by the government: “freedom of expression. (1)” Many artists express themselves through various ways; for various reasons. Frederick Douglass in his essay “How to Read” and Gloria Anzaldua’s essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” both express themselves through publicly released literature, and these two essays have successfully achieved to have common similarities and unique differences. For example, both authors have the same interpretation for literacy, and literacy to them means to overcome negativity and prevail from hate from another individual that shows them injustice. For differences, Franklin’s essay was to learn how to read (and also write), while Gloria’s essay was about having to speaking English and suppressing her various styles of the Spanish language. After reading this fabulous essay, you will understand why the authors chose their topics, their relation to each other, and why they are different. Douglass was raised a black male slave in the 1840’s. For slaves, reading and writing was not acceptable because the man did not want black people to have any sense of resisting slavery. Although that rule was in effect, Douglass found a way to get around that law. He would sneak magazines and newspapers to read, and he was taught how to read and write by his mistress and some “little white boys”, who he’d convert into teachers. Most thought that “...education and slavery were incompatible with each other” (347), but Douglas proved...
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...Both essays, Mother Tongue by Amy Tan and How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua, seem to be different at first glance. However, when you look deeper into them, one would find similarities and differences at the same level. While it is more important that Tan and Anzaldua speak different languages, have different identities, and are immigrants from different countries. What’s more important is how they conform to the new society due to struggles they face because of the way they speak the dialects of their languages in America. In both essays, language is one of the themes that both authors focus on. Tan and Anzaldua are struggling with speaking their language. Amy Tan is struggling with her mom’s broken English, while Gloria...
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...from this despicable truth, social transformation is brewing and forming in the suffering of artists existing in the midst of this oppression. Through their experiences, they create art that not only reflects their culture and ethnicity, but also celebrates the very category that is used to marginalize and control, bringing awareness to their plight. Gloria Anzaldua an author and poet, brings awareness to borders in her essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), using her talent as a means for social transformation. Anzaldúa posits there is more to a border than a simple divide and borders can exist in both actual and implied spaces. Through her poetry and prose Anzaldua cultivates cultural appreciation and calls for public awareness of the oppressed, specifically speaking to her own experience of linguistic borders. She writes “In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives” (Anzaldua p.39). Anzaldua’s experience of oppression and marginalization based on her...
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