Reading Response to Gloria Anzaldua

        Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” reveals how language helps form culture, how language forms identity, and how culture can form identity and language. All of them help each other exist; I don’t think either would survive alone. Language is important to your identity. One’s language must be preserved to understand oneself and have pride. Language is a microscope of where you come from. No matter where you come from, like Anzaldua, it is who you are and your way of life. Anzaldua shows that Chicanos’ identity and language is developed through the experience of alienation from majority groups. There was no other option for people who were made of complex identities than to make their own identity and with it their own culture and language. It was a way to differentiate themselves from those who would judge and oppress them, as Anzaldua explains, “For a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left [to Chicanos] but to create their own language... Chicano Spanish sprang out of a need to identify ourselves as a distinct people”(55).

        I think this chapter resonated with me so much more than any other because daily I would walk around hating the way I spoke, the fact that I spoke Spanish with an accent and that I never used the proper words. And then there was speaking English, I unconsciously would mix in Spanish words or syllables and I knew people who weren’t from the Valley wouldn’t understand. After reading this book, I came to realize that not being proud of my language I was rejecting my culture and myself. I reject people who had paved the way for Mexican Americans, like Gloria Anzaldua, Cesar Chavez, or Corky Gonzalez. Anzaldua has taught me a lot about who I am as a Chicana.         

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