Anzaldua Gloria Anzaldua Has a Wild Tongue, Essay

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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 cut out," (76). Yet to cut out Chicano Spanish would mean obliterating an entire culture and way of life. Chicano Spanish is essential to Chicano culture and Chicano Spanish is also essential to Anzaldua's identity. "Identity is the essential core of who we are as individuals, the conscious experience of the sale inside" (84). Gloria Anzaldua perceives language as an indicator for identity, culture, and gender differentiation and her essay effectively conveys how language is an essential component in adapting to a dominant culture.

Anzaldua touches on the nature of one's identity not as a function of nationality but as function of race or ethnicity: "by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity but a racial one" (84). Distinguishing nationality from ethnicity is one of the hallmarks of Anzaldua's argument. Showing how Chicano Spanish is more a product of culture than of nationality is one of the reasons why her essay is effective in conveying the importance of language.

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Language is an important part of racial and ethnic identity and like food and music, language is a major marker of cultural identity. In Europe, where many different nations sit close together, languages help to show a person's place of origin. Because of the European Union, borders are almost nonexistent in Europe, so when people travel, the only way they can perceive cultural identity is through language. Anzaldua describes a similar experience: when she travels regionally throughout the American Southwest and throughout Mexico, she adapts her tongue. "With Mexicans I'll try to speak either Standard Mexican Spanish or the North Mexican dialect ... With Chicanas from Nuevo Mexico or Arizona I will speak Chicano Spanish a little, but often they don't understand ... " (78). Anzaldua's Chicano Spanish, her wild tongue, marks her place of origin and is thus a key indicator of her culture and her personal identity.

Learning new languages is the primary way that individuals adapt to new cultures. Using English as a common tongue is something that many people have to deal with, especially immigrants to the United States. Anzaldua claims that adapting to a dominant tongue is "the result of the pressures on Spanish people to adapt to English" (79). Because English is the first language of most citizens of the United States and because….....

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