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.