How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Anzaldúa’s autobiographical essay explores how she came to embrace her Chicana identity through her language, issuing a call for other Chicanos to do the same. The essay interrogates how authority figures from both American and Mexican cultures surveilled and chastised her as a young girl to correct her “broken” English and Spanish. As a spirited and smart young woman, Anzaldúa rejected these attempts, embracing the cultural influences of her homeland—the foods, languages, literature, cinema, and music of the Chicano people.

Anzaldúa views language as inextricable from identity. Through reading literature, watching movies, and listening to lyrics about love and life on the Mexican-American border, Anzaldúa realized how integral language is to her identity as a Chicana. Switching between English and Spanish throughout the essay illustrates her argument that language and identity are intertwined. By code-switching and including Spanish phrases, often followed by an English translation, Anzaldúa writes in the Chicana language. The act of writing in a mixture of English and Spanish demonstrates both her linguistic hybridity—her ability to speak multiple languages and dialects—and her empowerment. Her writing style accentuates the lesson of her essay: that the Chicano people should embrace their language rather than conform to “proper” English or Spanish.

This empowerment is directed specifically at a Chicano and Chicana audience. Anzaldúa shifts between the first-person singular (“I,” or yo in Spanish) and the first-person plural (“us,” or nosotras) throughout her essay. A major component of Anzaldúa’s argument is the inclusion of women in culture and language, and her most extensive engagement with the intended audience focuses on her discovery of the feminine word nosotras, meaning “us women.” Like Anzaldúa’s discovery of Chicano literature in the 1960s and 1970s, when she found the language to describe the formation of the Chicano people, the discovery of the word nosotras gave her the language to describe the formation of female identity in Spanish. Together, these revelations enabled her to understand the formation of the Chicana identity and to become a key figure in the Chicana literary movement.