Throughout this book, there are many examples of conflict, including the problems Francisco faces at school, work, and home. At school, Francisco is called a “stinky Mexican” because his mother rubbed garlic on him to cure him of ringworm. Him
Julia Alvarez attempted to rewrite the immigrant experience from the female perspective by sharing her own life story as an immigrant seeking asylum from her oppressive dictatorship ruled homeland, the Dominican Republic. Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is a semi-autobiography of her own journey to and from the Dominican Republic to the United States by drawing on her own experiences and observations about the fractured sense of identity accompanying immigration to the United States.
In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” Gloria Anzaldua describes her experiences as a self proclaimed Chicana. She uses rhetorical strategies, including anecdotes, imagery, and appeals to both ethos and pathos, to argue that language is more than just a means of communication; it is part of one’s culture, identity, and self-expression, Gloria Anzaldua opens her argument with an anecdote. The anecdote about the dentist introduces the concept of the wild tongue and how it can be taken literally and symbolically. Another effect the anecdote has is that it hooks the reader and gets them interested in the essay. Through the anecdote Anzaldua appeals to ethos, establishing the ethical ideas of her purpose with taming her wild tongue and to establish her identity as a Chicano speaker.
State University, mentions in her critique of ¡Yo! , “The text concludes by showcasing storytelling, especially in the case of immigrants” (Tompkins 2). These immigrant stories, that so many sympathize over for a moment and soon forget all about, are not stories but the memories of real people. The word “charm” is not a word one would identify with the stories of a brutal Dominican dictatorship. Alvarez uses the word charm to show that people always look for a happy ending when listening to an immigrant’s narration of their reality.
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.
She poses more questions and introduces more concepts which leave the reader with this bittersweet feeling of nostalgia. In part three she touches on the subjects of genealogy as it pertains to desire. She extrapolates form the ideas of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Psyche to argue how the Oedipus complex has left its imprint on Chicano/a cultures. She juxtaposes four “cultural bodies”, Selena, La Malinche, Delgadina, and Silent Tongue, which if read from a third space feminist interpretation shifts the perspective to unveil women’s desires through their own agency. She analyses the Oedipus complex and introduce the Oedipal conquest triangle.
This caused her to alienate herself since her mother asked her to keep a part of herself hidden from the world by binding her and making sure no one found out she menstruated ealy (Anzaldúa 1983, 221). This will later isolate her further but ultimately lead her to reflect on the racism that surrounds her. In addition, Anzaldúa’s identity also suffer because she denied her heritage and the traditions that with it. She mentions that she felt ashamed of her mother and her loud tendencies, it is an archetype that most Hispanic mothers are loud by nature, and the fact that her lunches, or “lonches”, consisted
Lola takes advantage of her deteriorating mother whose illness represents the declining hold of the norms over Lola. Since her mom “will have trouble lifting her arms over her head for the rest of her life,” Lola is no longer afraid of the “hitting” and grabbing “by the throat” (415,419). As a child of a “Old World Dominican Mother” Lola must be surrounded by traditional values and beliefs that she does not want to claim, so “as soon as she became sick” Lola says, “I saw my chance and I’m not going to pretend or apologize; I saw my chance and I eventually took it” (416). When taking the opportunity to distinguish herself from the typical “Dominican daughter” or ‘Dominican slave,” she takes a cultural norm like long hair and decides to impulsively change it (416). Lola enjoyed the “feeling in [her] blood, the rattle” that she got when she told Karen to “cut my hair” (418).
There are approximately seven billion human beings in the world, each having their own culture and traditions. Coincidentally enough, “The Tequila Worm” is based on a small town in Texas, with a family who shares the same family traditions as mine. Viola Canales, the author, talks about the main protagonist, Sophia, and how she celebrates her culture. The making of Easter cascarones, celebrating Dia de Los Muertos, and her connection with her father, Sophia’s life is not so different from mine. Therefore, Sophia’s life and experiences are uncanny similarities to mine and that is what this essay will focus on.
Before the Internet and the invention of technologies that allowed us to discover artifacts of the past, oral and literary sources of knowledge were the basis of recorded history. To truly understand history, though, is to understand memory as a source of history and how it can be constructed to preserve the past. Memory can be defined as a recollection of information from the past, and while it can be fabricated, memory, especially in literary texts, is most useful when it overlaps historical findings. Memory serves as a central theme to the story of Dreaming in Cuban. From Celia’s letters to her Spanish lover to Pilar’s desire to remember Cuba, memory is what ties the del Pino women together throughout the novel.
Cofer addresses the cultural barriers and challenges that Latinos experience through emotional appeal, anecdotal imagery, parallelism and the use of effective periodic sentences. In her article, Cofer assesses the difficult cultural hurdles of Latin Americans with emotional appeal. She provides insight on her cultural barriers by first conveying the way she had to dress and her struggle, as it shows in this piece of text, “That morning I had organized… which to base my decision” (Cofer 5). This poignancy works to stress an agonizing feeling of uncertainty and restraint towards the author.
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.
Isabel Allende’s, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, is her memoir about her native country, yet also sheds light to other important societal roles in Chile. As she passionately writes about her experiences, Allende makes it evidently clear that she loves her homeland, regardless of what troubles the country encounters. Nonetheless, it should be noted that her memoir is solely based upon her memories, and incorporates a sense of fiction to better help tell her story through vivid descriptions of the natural landscape and/or the people she interacted with. Her book was compelling to me as her passion for her country was expressed through her usage of language and descriptive experiences that portrayed her emotions during
Meriam Pacheco Salazar When I was about five years old I would reach for my father’s typewriter, punch as many buttons as I could, roll out the paper, and run to him asking if, by any luck, I had been able to put together a word. I like to think this was the start of my affinity for reading and writing. Twenty years later, I am majoring in Spanish and Latin American Literature and minoring in Women and Gender Studies. I recently conducted research examining how the illustrations Asleep, Don Quixote fights the wineskins and Don Quixote reading, by French artists Charles Coypel and Gustave Doré, respectively, have been vital in the process of humanizing Don Quijote. I argued that despite using different approaches, Coypel highlighting the comical aspect and Doré emphasizing the sentimental aspect, both illustrators have provided a visual point of entry into the quixotic world which allows us to interpret Don Quijote’s reality from his own perspective, and therefore see him as human instead of a mad knight.
