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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...
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,…
Works Cited
All readings from: Augenbraum, Harold and Olmos, Margarite Fernandez. The Latino Reader.. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Thomas, Piri. Down these Mean Streets. Vintage, 1997.
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