Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
Jamestown research project
Jamestown research project
Jamestown research project
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Jamestown research project
Jamestown research project
Jamestown research project
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Rhetorical Analysis on Anzaldua’s How to Tame a Wild Tongue The passage How to Tame a Wild Tongue is a very defensive and straightforward argumentative essay which defends her language and the people who speak it against the discrimination that the author herself has experienced first hand (Ethos). From this text we can infer that the author is most likely from hispanic descent as she is speaking spanish a lot of the time throughout the text. This text mainly speaks about the discrimination many Mexican-Americans suffer because they are spanish speaking.
Borderlands/La Frontera. United States: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Print. In the article, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldua, a Mexican American and a scholar of Chicana cultural theory, argues that language is part of her identity, and she can not truly accept and be proud of herself unless she accepts and is proud of the languages she speaks first.
Gloria Anzaldúa, in the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (1987), claims her experiences as a Chicano taught her that her culture was not looked at highly in comparison to the English language. Anzaldúa argues her view about her Chicano language by giving examples of both cultures Chicano Mexican and American cultures. Anzaldúa’s purpose is to inform her audience on how it is to grow up in a Chicano speaking family. Anzaldúa writes in a frustrating tone throughout the story of her life experiences. Thesis: Anzaldúa use of her personal experiences, and Music, Film and Literature are relevant sufficient and
Anzaldúa was a Mexican American who was a well-known writer and had a major impact on the fields of queer, feminist, and cultural theory. Her most famous work is Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza which includes poems, essays, and short stories. Anzaldúa was no stranger to the use of literary theories in her writing, which is evident in her short story “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Here, the author uses a combination of feminist, reader-response, and psychoanalytic theory to show the struggle of being oneself when they’re Mexican-American. Through the use of feminist theory, she explains how a female is labeled as an “habladora” when she tries to voice out her opinion about something; reader-response theory provides the reader with an understanding of the struggles of self-identity, which they are able to relate to, especially Mexican-Americans; and lastly, psychoanalytic theory illuminates on her childhood experiences, which could explain why Anzaldúa believes in what she does, such as the idea that Anglo people have tried to tame her tongue—in other words, her language.
Immigrants, fleeing their homeland to escape oppression for religion or to find better opportunities for employment, were drawn to the booming American land of industrialization and urbanization. Old immigrants from Western Europe entered the country prominently in the 1880’s. But from the 1890’s to the outbreak of World War I, New Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe flooded the country. These immigrants, bringing with them lesser-practiced customs and religions that could shape the culture of America, mainly congregated with people of similar nationalities in ethnic neighborhoods in the growing cities, thus limiting their assimilation into American society. Another factor limiting the influence of immigration on America was the resistance of the “native” Americans to the New Immigrants.
My Rhetorical Analysis Language is a part one’s identity and culture, which allows one to communicate with those of the same group, although when spoken to someone of another group, it can cause a language barrier or miscommunication in many different ways. In Gloria Anzaldua’s article, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, which was taken from her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she is trying to inform her readers that her language is what defines her. She began to mention how she was being criticized by both English and Spanish Speakers, although they both make up who she is as a person. Then, she gave convincing personal experiences about how it was to be a Chicana and their different types of languages. Moreover, despite the fact that her language was considered illegitimate, Anzaldua made it clear that she cannot get rid of it until the day she dies, or as she states (on page 26) “Wild tongues can’t be, they can only be cut out.”
Reflecting On “Hyphen Nation” Matthew Frye Jacobson’s “Hyphen Nation” focuses on America’s ethnic revival and the evolution of race and culture in America. Jacobson claims that the ethnic revival changed political and social culture, American textbooks and the nation’s identity, and credited the movement with the restoration of Ellis Island into its present museum. These accreditations are all justified and Jacobson presents a thorough history of proof through our nation’s progress and struggle with ethnicity and multiculturalism. The ethnic revival began with the Civil Rights Movement.
He shows this through his many experiences with bilingual court and education. At the end of his essay, Espada concludes with a basic summary of what he has learned. Espada claims “The repression of Spanish is part of a larger attempt to silence Latinos, and, like the crazy uncle at the family dinner table yelling about independence or socialism, we must refuse to be silenced.” Through the summary the reader understands despite English being the prevalent language the in the U.S. today the Spanish culture is still being preserved through bilingualism. On the other hand Rodriguez argues that in order to gain a public identity, one must be willing to sacrifice some part of their own cultural identity.
Although the previous chapter mention the situation of judging and attempt to remove Chicano Spanish, the “Chicano Spanish” section explain the evolution of her culture and how the author presents her language to society through the use of comparison, repetition, and code switching. Anzaldúa explains the dialect of the Chicano Spanish on what words the change or have in common with other languages. She continuously says “We leave out… We also leave out…We don’t use…We don’t say,” to represent the Chicanos as a whole and how they developed their identity into a language as a way to different from the other types of Spanish. However, throughout Anzaldúa’s essay, she states her opinion or facts in Spanish with a translation, which is known as code-switching,
For generations, many Americans have seen their country as a haven for immigrants, a “melting pot,” of different cultures. These different cultures and traditions brought from countries across the world shaped the modern American identity, some would argue. While it is true many cultures from Europe, Africa, Latin America, etc. have contributed to molding the modern American society, immigration history is marred by resistance. Patterns in immigration throughout American history have created a culture de jour that is at the center for the most ardent opposition. From the Irish, to the Asians, and now Hispanics, it is easy to interchange the culture or race, while keeping the hysteria in any given decade from America’s past.
Accordingly, the ideals of America used to be we were many ethnicities, all blended into one, but now we are a bunch of discordant ethnicities living in one country under one name just with different groups. Two essays on this topic are A Quilt of a Country by Anna Quindlen and The Immigrant Contribution by John F. Kennedy. JFK regarded that “everybody is an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant” (JFK page 23). Quindlen characterized that “America was held together by a notion that all men are created equal and that America is made up of bits and pieces” (Quindlen page 13-14). America transpired a unique nation made up of different parts.
The issue of education for the Native Americans living in the West was such an important issue back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that many white reformers pushed for a compulsory education for them. The schools where the Native Americans were forced into taught them everything they needed to know to become Americans culturally. Things such as rights, freedoms and the institutions that made America the country it was, were taught in class, but these schools also had another goal in mind, total erasure of their culture and complete assimilation of the tribes into American culture. This essay will tackle the motives of such reformers to push for the assimilation of the Native Americans by using their direct texts written
The Jonestown cult suicides resulted in the loss of 909 lives. The degree to which the temple members’ suicides were out of free will or coerced is debatable. The solidity of the minds of the members could have been subjected to proselytization and therefore could have weakened their ability to make a self-consensual decision about the suicide. The conditions and current state of mind they were in, due to the weapons of persuasion used by Jim Jones and the temple leaders were deemed effective in the execution of the ‘revolutionary suicide’. The techniques of persuasion used by Jones and his leaders of the people’s temple could be classified as - entrenchment of credibility, manipulations, authority, “illusions of choice” and peripheral cues.
The background of my cultural identity I am an African American female but that isn’t all there is to know me for. I am an African American girl who is very interactive with my religion and also my culture. Cultural identity can be hard to explain because some people don’t know what’s really in their culture and they fail to see , and understand it. I know what my cultural identity is because of my ethiopian flag, the baked macaroni, and the movie the lion king.
Throughout my experiences in this course so far, I have had many opportunities to reflect on my own past and have begun to better understand my own cultural identity. It has been much more difficult to wrap my head around than I would have predicted it to be because so many things play into the construction of an identity that it can be hard to look at all of those separate pieces together. My cultural identity, like all others, is more complicated than it first appears. I identify as a white person, a woman, an American, a gay person, and a feminist, just to name a few. While all of these labels carry with them stereotypes and expectations, they also interplay with the cultural influences I was subject to throughout my childhood.