Language as Gloria Anzaldua States in \"How

Language

As Gloria Anzaldua states in "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, "Chicano Spanish sprang out of Chicanos' need to identify ourselves as a distinct people," (447). Chicano Spanish is a "secret language" of cultural bonding and binding. This is true for the many "forked tongues" that have sprung up in communities of opposition: patios tongues that become crucial to identity formation and preservation (Anzaldua 447). The dominant culture finds "wild tongues" to be inherently frightening, evil, and subversive (Anzaldua 446). The dominant culture does all it can to stamp out, suppress, and "cut out" the wild tongues that threaten social hierarchy and preserve patterns of oppression in non-white, non-Anglo, communities (Anzaldua 446). Suppressing language is a means of oppressing people. Therefore, clinging to language diversity is a political move. When Anzaldua corrected her teacher's pronunciation of her name, and was sent to the back of the room for "talking back," she was engaging in an act of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to conformity and oppression. Political resistance highlights the boundaries and intersections between cultures: which is a common source of psychological and social conflict.

As Piri Thomas puts it in Down These Mean Streets, "I want recognition, whatever that mudder-fuckin word means," (ix). Recognition equals respect. Piri points out the struggles between various identities in "Babylon for the Babylonians." When Piri's father began making enough money to move from Harlem to Long Island, the shift startled him. He was caught between worlds classified by boundaries of race, class, and power. Anzaldua adds gender to those intersections. As Anzaldua experienced, "language is a male discourse," (446). When a young Anzaldua first heard the word "nosotras" used, it shocked her because Chicanos do not use the feminine plural to refer to a group of girls; girls submit their gender identity to the patriarchal ideal: the male-dominated discourse that pervades Spanish as well as English. Therefore, Chicano females occupy an even more distinctly "marked" territory that is at the intersection between race, class, social status, and gender. Language defines the social boundaries that are imposed externally, but those zones can also be reshaped and reformed by "owning" the territory within. To become proud of the Chicano language is to "own" the space that is the cultural boundary zone of Chicano culture. Chicano language is, as Anzaldua puts it, a "living language," one that is as legitimate as any other more "standard" form of the Spanish or English languages. This is why Anzaldua, Piri, and Nicholassa all weave back and forth between English and Spanish to show how their consciousness is shifting and complex.

Nicholassa also points out the potentially problematic boundary zones characterized by gender, ethnicity, and race. In Nilda, Nicholassa describes the experience of identity formation. From her perspective, skin color is a defining feature of personal and group identity. "Looking around the train car, she noticed there were no dark children. Except for a couple of olive-skinned, dark-haired girls, she did not see any Puerto Rican or black children," (Nicholassa 319). The budding identities of young people are shaped by their perceived racial and ethnic identities, as well as their experiences of language. Sensitivity to boundaries is possible at any stage of development, but is especially poignant for children and adolescents. As Piri, Anzaldua, and Nicholassa all show, their childhood experiences in boundary zones created formative events in their lives. These formative events shaped their core identities throughout adulthood.

Piri, Anzaldua, and Nicholassa also show that it can be equally as painful to be rejected in terms of race and language. When race and language intersect as it does for many Latinos, the experience of identity crisis can be severe. Does a black Cuban identify with being black or with being Cuban? It would seem that language might be a salient cultural feature considering that it is the primary means by which people communicate. Yet race can be a more visible marker of social class or in-group/out-group status. Piri, Anzaldua, and Nicholassa similarly experience rejection from multiple sources: from individuals in their lives, and also from entire groups, in the form of systematic or institutionalized racism and oppression. The use of language becomes central in resisting oppression, and strengthening both personal ego and collective group identity. Although Nicholassa's narrative is imbued with more palpable fear and intimidation than either Piri's or Anzaldua's, the experience of social isolation is one that is shared in common by all persons "of color," even if language is the defining "colorful" characteristic.