...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...
Words: 303 - Pages: 2
...Language forms an integral part of the formation of identity and the gradual development of personal esteem. Despite the ubiquitous nature of lingua franca such as the English language, people who are conscious of their indigenous identity are keen to incorporate aspects of their mother tongue in common languages. However, not all individuals feel proud of expressing their forms of synthesized language. The relationship between cultural identity and language is mutual. Language plays a vital role in placing an individual in an appropriate societal position (Val and Vinogradova 2). Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue and Anzaldua Gloria’s, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” are exquisite examples of the formation of language and cultural identities due to interactions with American culture. A comparative analysis of both texts can reveal that each author...
Words: 1629 - Pages: 7
...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...
Words: 1149 - Pages: 5
...Glora Anzaldua is one of the important writers during the Chicano movement. Not only fought for the rights of Chicanos but also was a well known feminist. She was a prominent writer because she knew how to send various messages to by appeal to different readers. She used this to her advantage to gain support for the Chicano feminist movement. Anzaldua believed that language was the base of culture, that language both created and destroyed the Chicano identity and that if people were to progress there needed to be tolerance and unity. Anzaldua views language as a base for individual identity and ultimately for culture. Individual identity starts to for at a young age it starts off as a mixture of their likes and what is instituted on them by...
Words: 1022 - Pages: 5
...In her essay, How to Tame a Wild Tongue, Gloria Anzaldua function, negations, and denotation in order to express her experience with language. Starting off, Anzaldua’s use of function within a fictitious anecdote about an experience in dentist’s office implies that her language causes a daily struggle by relating it to something that cannot be controlled easily: the human tongue. She qualifies this implication by later using actual anecdotes that demonstrate the oppression and shame that Anzaldua and many Chicanos felt growing up because of the way people treated them due to their heritage. Moreover, Anzaldua uses classification by describing a list languages that different situations have caused her to adopt, which further suggests how much...
Words: 300 - Pages: 2
...Gloria Anzaldua, in How to Tame a Wild Tongue, argues that one's primary language influences who they become. She uses Chicanos as a way to strengthen that argument. Chicanos, speak both English and Spanish, it’s a mix of two distinct cultures, therefore, how one identifies themselves, influences how they dress, speak and act. The language you speak is a part of your culture, it is who you truly are, and what defines you the most. Anzaldua uses pathos to also argue that in order to fully have a sense of happiness, one must “accept the illegitimacy of their wild tongue” Anzaldua is able to learn to take pride in her own identity and culture and insinuates that we as readers need to put an end to discrimination and be more accepting instead of judgmental of other people's native language. Anzaldua repeatedly expresses how speaking Chicano impacts how others view her. It is frustrating to have others look down on you for speaking a language different from theirs. The treatment she receives when she speaks...
Words: 546 - Pages: 3
...In Gloria Anzaldúa’s, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” she tells the story of the many difficulties she faces throughout her life. These difficulties coming from her ethnic identity along with her lingual identity. Gloria has had a lot of literacy sponsors throughout her life. Some of these sponsors being encouraging and others not. One discouraging literacy sponsor she encounters in her life are her school (Elementary and College) teachers. In Elementary school, on page 200, she says she received three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler because she was caught speaking Spanish at recess. Another time she was sent to the corner of the classroom for “talking back to” the Anglo teacher when all she was trying to do was tell her how to properly pronounce her name. At Pan American University, her, and all the other Chicano students were required to take two speech classes to try and get rid of their accents. Gloria’s mother said she was...
Words: 669 - Pages: 3
...“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...
Words: 377 - Pages: 2
...Thesis: All three authors portray the voice of many people, who, on a daily basis, are underprivileged of speaking their own language, thus, emphasizing onto the lives of linguistic minority students around the world and how they struggle to cope in school and at home. Audience: Class HUM-111 and Dr. Connelly Purpose: To highlight the difficulties students have at school and at home when it comes down to learning a language which they aren’t acquainted to and the consequences of such, depending on their social background. Reflection on readings using Comparison and Contrast Maxine Hong Kingston (Tongue Tied); Richard Rodriguez (Aria); Gloria Anzaldua (How to Tame a Wild Tongue) In the short story’s ‘Tongue Tied’, ‘Aria’ and ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’, written by Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez and Gloria Anzaldua respectively, each author interrelates the issue of bilingualism and bi-culturalism as a personal, narrative-style, life experience. Their personal experience all share the same setting; them during childhood deprived of speaking their own language, struggling to get through school and get accepted in the American society and the impact on their lives as a result of such pressure. When comparing the short stories, it is clear that each individual writer share several aspects in common, as well as differences. One of the most recurring aspects that each author conveys in their short story is the notion of one’s self recognition – identity – as...
Words: 1350 - Pages: 6
...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...
Words: 1679 - Pages: 7
...GLORIA ANZALDUA How to Tame a Wild Tongue Gloria Anzaldua was born in 1942 in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. At age eleven. she began working in the fields as a migrant worker and then on her family's land after the death of her father. Working her way through school, she eventually became a schoolteacher and then an academic, speaking and writing about feminis t, lesbian, and Chicana issues and about autobiography. She is best known for This Bridge CalJed My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color ( 1981), which she edited with Cherrie Moraga, and BorderlandsfLa Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Anzaldua died in 2004. "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" is from BorderlandsfLa Frontera. In it, Anzaldua is concerned with many kinds of borders - between nations, cultures, classes, genders, languages. When she writes, "So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language" (par. 27), Anzaldua is arguing for the ways in which identity is intertwined with the way we speak and for the ways in which people can be made to feel ashamed of their own tongues. Keeping hers wild - ignoring the closing of linguistic borders - is Anzaldua's way of asserting her identity. "We're going to have to control your tongue," the dentist says, pulling out all the metal from my mouth. Silver bits plop and tinkle into the basin. My mouth is a motherlode.· The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a whiff of the stench when I gasp. "I can't cap that tooth yet, you're still draining," he...
Words: 4793 - Pages: 20
...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 of...
Words: 635 - Pages: 3
...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 she describes the letter Guaman Poma sent to the King of Spain. "Written in a mixture of Quechua and ungrammatical, expressive Spanish,"...
Words: 1885 - Pages: 8
...prohibited the inhabitants of much interaction with people from other societies. Today however, people can speak with each other regardless of location, which emphasizes the importance of the power of language. The negative consequences that come from this is that those who do not master a language perfectly or differ from perfect speech are discriminated against in the general community. A phenomenon, which writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who wrote the article “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” calls “Linguistic Terrorism.” According to her, linguistic terrorism negates not only the speaker, but also the experiences and culture behind that person (Anzaldúa). Thesis: Although language can be used as a tool of power, the use of faulty and imprecise language negates the speaker and causes negative consequences. Body 1, Tan: An accent is an example of imprecise English, which causes people to make negative or positive assumptions about the speaker based on the information that accent reveals. Example: In Amy Tan´s essay “Mother Tongue,” she provides an example drawn from experiences her mother had in America as an immigrant with English as her second language. Quote: “I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not even hear her”...
Words: 1241 - Pages: 5
...Cats are the and fuzziest friends can have because they keep company when you very sick.They love to play with anything they find,they also eat anything they find as well. Cats can be big or small depending on rather they are wild or tame. You can teach cats how to do tricks. They are lazy depending on their environments. Cats can make a hundred creepy and cool sounds in your house or in nature. When cats chase their prey they keep their heads up. Cats can get tapeworms from eating mice because are rodents and rodents are wild not tamed.The average cat sleeps 16-18 hours per day. Cats knead with their paws when they are happy, they also purr as well. Calico cats are always female because male calico cats are very rare because one in one...
Words: 310 - Pages: 2
