Gloria Anzaldua's How To Tame A Wild Tongue

In her piece entitled “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” Gloria Anzaldua uses her own life as a template for understanding the nuances and complexities of Chicano Spanish, its place within culture, both American and Hispanic, as well as the qualifiers it carries for those who speak it. First and foremost, she writes, “Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally.” (Anzaldua, pg. 2) Chicano Spanish, Anzaldua argues, is a language of necessity, a language born of Spanish-speaking people living in a country where the predominant language was English. It is a language that exemplifies that very particular identity, a language that, Anzaldua admits, carries with it a certain connotation of being somehow inherently less. “It is illegitimate,” she writes, “a bastard language.” (Anzaldua, pg. 2)

It is tied up in the culture of the people, that the language cannot be adequately criticized without calling up the ire of the people who speak it. As a result, Anzaldua says that, “if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.” (Anzaldua, pg. 3) Cultural identity, she declares, personal and independent identity, those are inherently tied up in the language we speak. That is the universal message Anzaldua champions: that language defines who we are as much as the color of our skin, our sex, or a million other