Language
As Gloria Anzaldua states in "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, "Chicano Spanish sprang out of Chicanos' need to identify ourselves as a distinct people," (447). Chicano Spanish is a "secret language" of cultural bonding and binding. This is true for the many "forked tongues" that have sprung up in communities of opposition: patios tongues that become crucial to identity formation and preservation (Anzaldua 447). The dominant culture finds "wild tongues" to be inherently frightening, evil, and subversive (Anzaldua 446). The dominant culture does all it can to stamp out, suppress, and "cut out" the wild tongues that threaten social hierarchy and preserve patterns of oppression in non-white, non-Anglo, communities (Anzaldua 446). Suppressing language is a means of oppressing people. Therefore, clinging to language diversity is a political move. When Anzaldua corrected her teacher's pronunciation of her name, and was sent to the back of the room for "talking back," she was engaging in an act of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to conformity and oppression. Political resistance highlights the boundaries and intersections between cultures: which is a common source of psychological and social conflict.
As Piri Thomas puts it in Down These Mean Streets, "I want recognition, whatever that mudder-fuckin word means," (ix). Recognition equals respect. Piri points out the struggles between various...
Anzaldua Gloria Anzaldua has a wild tongue, a tongue that roams free from the confines of both formal English and formal Spanish. Anzaldua's wild tongue, which she describes in Borderlands: La Frontera in the chapter "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," is Chicano Spanish, a "border tongue which developed naturally" by immigrants from Mexico living in the United States. As Anzaldua notes, "wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be
Gloria Anzaldua captures the essence of the Aztlan homeland and its mestizo nature in "Wind tugging at my sleeve." Using diction conveying a strong sense of place and geography invokes the specific qualities of the land and climate necessary for anchoring the reader. The importance of geographic space is a core theme of the poem, as the speaker refers repeatedly to issues related to political borders and the artificial separation
Anzaldua Like our genes, our native tongues are both unique and passed down from generation to generation. Native tongues are integral and inescapable parts of our personal and collective identity, like skin color or gender. Therefore, language can be a stigma, an indicator or race, ethnicity, and culture. In the book Borderlands: La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua explores expressions of Chicano culture in America through an analysis of the language she calls
Language defines identity, and creates boundaries between self and other. In Borderlands: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua refers to the "broken" and "forked" tongues that represented the boundaries and intersections of social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender identities. The roots of sociolinguistic hypotheses of language suggest that at the very least, language impacts the social construction of reality, as well as psychic self-perception. According to Noam Chomsky, language use is
Tame a Wild Tongue Language and Identity in Anzaldua How to Tame a Wild Tongue How to Tame a Wild Tongue is a fascinating internal expose of the evolution and development of language among immigrants of Spanish linguistic heritage. Gloria Anzaldua recognizes herself as a "blended" individual who speaks and contributes to a myriad of native and blended languages that are all varied and regionally expressive of both native Mexican and
As Baldwin indicates in "If Black Language Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me What is?" "It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity." This concept can be readily demonstrated in Anzaldua's
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