gloria anzaldua
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
[1987]
FOR THE MEXICAN AMERICAN writer Gloria Anzaldua (1942-2004), "borderlands" is a concept with many levels of meaning. Literally, it refers to the border between the United States and Mexico. But borderlands also exist wherever different cultures, languages, value systems, or sexual identities come into contact with each other. "Borderlands," she writes, "are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy."
Anzaldua spent most of her life positioned on the borderlands that became such an important image in her work. She was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas. Most of the members of her family were farm laborers, and neither of her parents attended high school, but she excelled in school and became the first in her family to attend college. She received degrees from Pan American University and the University of Texas at Austin and, in 1972, went to teach children of migrant families. During this time, she also edited several important volumes of essays by women of color. She taught English, women's studies, and cultural studies at Georgetown University, the University of Colorado, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
In her most influential work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Anzaldua proposes that borderlands of all kinds give birth to a category of person she refers to as the mestiza, or "mixture." The mestiza exists between cultures, fully embracing—and fully embraced by—neither. For Anzaldua, borderland culture must be considered distinct from and equal to the cultures that combine to produce it. The chapter included here, "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," is a kind of mestiza, as Anzaldua blends styles, genres, and even languages to produce a written text that cannot be reduced to single categories: it is at once English and Spanish, poetry and prose, narrative and analysis, academic and autobiographical. It deals specifically with the languages of the borderlands. Mestizos usually speak multiple languages; Anzaldua's languages include not only Standard English and Standard Spanish but also various dialects that have emerged out of the collision of the two. Because language is a primary part of a person's identity, Anzaldua insists, it is vital to validate all of the languages that people speak and claim as their own. In an academic context, this means allowing people to speak and write in their native tongues and trying to understand others by learning their languages rather than by forcing them to learn ours. To ignore the imperative need that people have to speak, write, and create in their native tongues, Anzaldua claims, is an act of violence.
Rhetorically, Anzaldua works toward a synthesis of two different positions: the view that Americans should all speak English and the view that all people of Mexican descent should speak Spanish. The Chicanola language, like its speakers, is both a linguistic and an ideological synthesis.
"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 says.
"We're going to have to do something about your tongue," I hear the anger rising in his voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. "I've never seen anything as strong or as stubborn," he says. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?
Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?
RAY GWYN SMITH1
I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess—that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for "talking back" to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. "If you want to be American, speak 'American.' If you don't like it, go back to Mexico where you belong."
"I want you to speak English. Pa' hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el ingles 5 bien. Que vale toda tu educacion si todavia hablas ingles con un 'accent,' " '2 my mother would say, mortified that I spoke English like a Mexican. At Pan American University, I, and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of our accents.
2. At the author's request, all Spanish phrases in the text have been left untranslated. [Editor's note]
All notes are the author's unless otherwise indicated.
1. Ray Gwyn Smith, Moorland Is Cold Country, unpublished book.
Attacks on one's form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment. El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arranco la lengua. Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.
Overcoming the Tradition of Silence
Ahogadas, escupimos el oscuro. Peleando con nuestra propia sombra el silencio nos sepulta.
En boca cerrada no entran moscas. "Flies don't enter a closed mouth" is a saying I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls don't answer back. Es una falta de respeto to talk back to one's mother or father. I remember one of the sins I'd recite to the priest in the confession box the few times I went to confession: talking back to my mother, hablar pa' 'tras, repelar. Hocicona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being mal criada. In my culture they are all words that are derogatory if applied to women—I've never heard them applied to men.
The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word "nosotras," I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we're male or female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse.
And our tongues have become dry the wilderness has dried out our tongues and
we have forgotten speech.
3
IRENA KLEPFISZ[94]
Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de academia.
Oye como ladra: el lenguaje de la frontera
Quien tiene boca se equivoca. MEXICAN SAYING
"Pocho, cultural traitor, you're speaking the oppressor's language by speaking 10 English, you're ruining the Spanish language," I have been accused by various Latinos and Latinas. Chicano Spanish is considered by the purist and by most Latinos deficient, a mutilation of Spanish.
But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally. Change, evolucion, enriquecimiento de palabras nuevas por invencion o adopcion have created variants of Chicano Spanish, un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corresponds a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language.
For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves—a language with terms that are neither espanol ni ingles, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages.