Path of Growing Up as A Chicano

‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’ is one chapter in a book called Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, written by Gloria E. Anzaldua, who was a Mexican American lesbian feminist writer, poet, scholar, and activist. In this chapter, Anzaldua talks about the hardships of growing up as a Chicana(a people caught between two warring cultures) that lived in a country that stripped them of their language and their culture; a country that forced them to speak English and treated them like second-class citizens in their own home.

Many stories like this were shared by many people, one of the most prominent being Anzaldua. Her use of anecdotes, or small stories about a real event or person, to portray her experiences to her audience, directly related to Chicanos like her that weren’t accepted, and laid out the brutal history of the Chicano culture to the average white American.

In the beginning of the chapter, Anzaldua introduces the reader to the text with an anecdote of her dentist, who is getting progressively more frustrated with her tongue, which ‘pushes out the wads of cotton, pushes back the drills, the long thin needles’ and when he makes a comment about having to do something because her tongue was so strong and stubborn, she understood that to be the language she spoke.

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She then leads with that into the text, where she remembers ‘being caught speaking Spanish at recess’ and that that was good for ‘three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler’, followed even after that with the infamous phrase we hear even today, if we’re unlucky enough: “If you want to be American, speak ‘American’.

If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.” It’s worded slightly differently than it’s spoken today, but it’s still just as nasty and just as hurtful as it was back then. It’s possibly even more offensive because the Chicanos had problems with the Mexican Latinos too, what with the insults and being told that they’re ‘ruining Spanish by speaking the oppressor’s language’. Taking into account the inherent racism(because that’s what it is-- racism) from both sides in the meaning behind those statements, it’s pretty fair to say that anyone would be angered by the blatant disregard of anything even remotely resembling respect, especially since many people today seem to place such great importance in respect, some even going so far as to say ‘If you don’t respect me, I won’t respect you.’ Now, that phrase is used by petty people to get out of being polite to others they feel don’t deserve their respect (but sometimes there are times where that’s a valid statement) so just imagine what might go through their heads if one class or race of people in power took it upon themselves to take their culture from them.

McCurry

Imagine if the situation was reversed; imagine if white Americans suddenly weren’t allowed to speak English anymore; that it was effectively illegal, and they had to learn to speak good Polish without an accent. That in and of itself is already easier said than done. Imagine being punished whenever you spoke English and that as time went on, you sometimes mixed English and Polish because you forgot a word in one language. In essence, a new language was made over time, with its own slang and all the accompanying accoutrements... but it was poorly received and widely considered obscene in both Polish-speaking America as well as English and French-speaking Canada. At that time, it’s too late to go back and not mix those languages into something new, so all your future generations are now saddled with this odd mish-mash of a language that everyone calls an ‘illegitimate bastard language’. (It bears mentioning that the author of this paper does not believe the mish-mash language should be called such a rude name.)

In other words, ‘your future generations’(or the children of all Chicanos) grew up, living their lives thinking that the language they spoke was poor, and afraid to speak it to anyone except to the people they’re closest to. From others, they hid who they were and when asked about their heritage, they’d say, ‘I am Hispanic’ or, ‘I am Spanish-American’, to avoid further explanation on a subject they’re not comfortable with.

In sharing these stories of hers, Anzaldua was manipulating the emotions of her readers to get them to see what she needed them to see in order for them to understand the years of turmoil, distrust, and skepticism that the Chicanos have felt all their lives-- to open their minds and teach them something that the history books don’t mention. She brings to light many things that need to be acknowledged by Americans as a whole before we can all truly move on, instead of trying to sweep it under the rug and pretend it isn’t there and that it didn’t happen. That doesn’t work when it’s the elephant in the room laid out on the floor with a rug draped over it like a too-small blanket. It is very noticeable, and everyone sees it, but no one mentions it, because no one knows what to say about the obvious attempt to hide it.

All things considered, Anzaldua’s anecdotes are awesome, emotion-stirring, thought-provoking stories that anyone(given enough time to break them down) could understand. They did as they were supposed to and got the reader thinking... Thinking about things like right and wrong, about loneliness, and about our differences as just people living in the same country.