How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Gloria Anzaldúa

A poet, teacher, scholar, and political activist, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942–2004) is known for her writings about the social and cultural marginalization of disenfranchised people. She grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas, where her parents were sharecroppers. She received her BA from Pan American University and her MA from the University of Texas at Austin. Anzaldúa was completing her doctoral degree from the University of California–Santa Cruz at the time of her death; it was awarded posthumously in 2005. She coauthored with Cherrie Moraga This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981). Her most well-known publication is Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), which is a combination of narrative, historical and linguistic analysis, and poetry about the concept of borders among classes, cultures, genders, and languages. The following essay from Borderlands/La Frontera explores the relationship of identity and language.

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Notes

  1. Ray Gwyn Smith, Moorland Is Cold Country, unpublished book.
  2. Irena Klepfisz, “Di rayze aheym/The Journey Home,” in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, eds. (Montpelier, VT: Sinister Wisdom Books, 1986), 49.
  3. R. C. Ortega, Dialectología Del Barrio, trans. Hortencia S. Alwan (Los Angeles, CA: R. C. Ortega Publisher & Bookseller, 1977), 132.
  4. Eduardo Hernandéz-Chávez, Andrew D. Cohen, and Anthony F. Beltramo, El Lenguaje de los Chicanos: Regional and Social Characteristics of Language Used by Mexican Americans (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1975), 39.
  5. Hernandéz-Chávez, xvii.
  6. Irena Klepfisz, “Secular Jewish Identity: Yidishkayt in America,” in The Tribe Dina, Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepfisz, eds., 43.
  7. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, “Sign,” in We Speak in Code: Poems and Other Writings (Pittsburgh, PA: Motheroot Publications, Inc., 1980), 85.
  8. Rodolfo Gonzales, I Am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1972). It was first published in 1967.
  9. Gershen Kaufman, Shame: The Power of Caring (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Books, Inc., 1980), 68.
  10. John R. Chávez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Images of the Southwest (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 88–90.
  11. “Hispanic” is derived from Hispanis (España, a name given to the Iberian Peninsula in ancient times when it was a part of the Roman Empire) and is a term designated by the U.S. government to make it easier to handle us on paper.
  12. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo created the Mexican-American in 1848.
  13. Anglos, in order to alleviate their guilt for dispossessing the Chicano, stressed the Spanish part of us and perpetrated the myth of the Spanish Southwest. We have accepted the fiction that we are Hispanic, that is Spanish, in order to accommodate ourselves to the dominant culture and its abhorrence of Indians. Chávez, 88–91.