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Gloria Anzaldua How To Tame A Wild Tongue Summary

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Home is a gift bestowed unto us--sometimes never found, often misvalued, and always missed. Many individuals experience stages of exploration, disgust, longing, and return for his or her home. As we relive the culture that shaped us, we become conflicted with the ups and downs which come with the joy and distaste of experiencing pride and nostalgia. Gloria Anzaldua explores her passion for the language and region that shaped her yet struggles with the pressure to fit into Anglicized culture. In her essay “How To Tame A Wild Tongue,” Anzaldua explores how speaking Chicano Spanish made her aware of the strength and trouble she bears as she identifies with a mix of cultures. Entering the world with a chip on your shoulder is a tiring, unfair way to interact with others. Anzaldua, proud to speak Chicano Spanish, is aware of the language’s illegitimacy: the “Chicanos who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that [they] speak poor …show more content…

Anzaldua feels uncomfortable in all of her settings--at recess where she is reprimanded for speaking Spanish, in the presence of other Latinos for speaking a bastardized version of Spanish or betraying the Latinos by speaking English, or in the professional company of her principal who doesn’t recognize the validity of her heritage. She finds that she is a rogue, a cultural vagabond. Her roots are not validated or recognized by others whose roots are so easily accepted. Since youth Anzaldua fought the commands to tame her wild tongue. Later, she identifies as her language where her pride in herself was akin to the pride in what she spoke. Even though this meant that insulting her language was an insult to her life. Until others and Anzaldua “can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex, and all the other languages [she speaks], [she] cannot accept the legitimacy of herself’ (Anzaldua

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Those were her words, but all the while her sounds wound assure me” (252). Rodriguez continued to solidify the argument that Spanish was what made him feel comfortable by expressing his thoughts about assimilation into society, saying, “Like others who feel the pain of public alienation, we transformed the knowledge of our public separateness into a consoling reminder of our intimacy” (252). Rodriguez Rodriguez exercises the rhetorical devices of pathos and logos in this example, as he effectively conveys his emotions and his connection to the language and the bond it has created for the

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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.

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In the essay, "Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood", Richard Rodriguez explains his opinion on bilingual education based on his own childhood experience. He provides reasons why it would be retrogressive to permit the non-English speaking children use their family language as the language in school. In defending his positions, he provides three ideas to support his position: • The use of family language impedes child’s social growth. Insistence on using Spanish language at home made Rodriguez and his older sister and brother to be socially disadvantaged at school.

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Written by Gloria Anzaldua, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, is an opinion easy , a retrospection of her past and a story about identity and recognition of a wild tongue. The following is a rhetorical analysis and personal response of this easy . My analysis will be divided into 4 separate parts including intended audience, main claim, purpose and situation. (a) Intended audience : The first thing that anyone who even skims through this easy would notice is Anzaldua’s multi-lingual language use.

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Confident Relationships Built on Language Wouldn’t it be exciting to grow up learning more than one language? Imagine being in Japan for a week on vacation with a group of friends, and one day decided to go to the oldest zoo in Japan, Ueno Zoo. To get to Ueno Zoo, riding the bullet train was a necessity, except knowing which line was the correct line, when to get off the bullet train, or even which ticket to buy was a daunting task. Nobody in your group has the confidence to ask the workers for help since they don’t have the knowledge of Japanese to help them.

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Both authors go in detail about their ethnic backgrounds and blend their language for us to better understand throughout their story. Gloria Anzaldua describes herself as a Mexican-American Chicana

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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.

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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.”

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Chicano/a is a mix of almost everything, from the standard Spanish to Southern Texas Spanish. All with different ways of speaking, many people believed that Chicano’s cannot speak Spanish properly. By the experiences that she passed in school she never thought of being ashamed of her identity and language. Gloria illustrates that talking different languages with other people that she doesn’t know is hard for her, because she needs to talk good English or good Spanish and not talk both languages at the same time.

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A tongue is one of the most important body parts, if that’s what we shall call it, that a human being has. If it was not for the tongue, it would be a very quiet world. Gloria Anzaldúa, born in 1942, near the large Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, was bound to make a difference in lives before she ever knew it. When Gloria turned eleven she started to work in the fields as a migrant worker and then started on her family’s land after the passing of her father. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s the short story, How to Tame a Wild Tongue, she describes her upbringing and growing up in a dual culture society split in two.

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Contrary to Baca, Marin knew how to write well and excelled in it. As a Mexican-American, Marin struggled with her identity as she wasn’t fluent in Spanish and desired to know more about and fully embrace her culture. Through out her life, she encountered many instances of discrimination toward her knowledge of language. During college, which was an accomplishment in itself, phrases like “Mexicans don’t write that well.” and “You people don’t even speak the language correctly.”

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