How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was the daughter of Urbano Anzaldúa, a man of Spanish Basque aristocratic ancestry, and Amalia Anzaldúa, a working-class, Indigenous, and possibly Black mestiza woman. The Anzaldúa family were early settlers of South Texas who lost their status and wealth over the course of generations. Anzaldúa’s father worked as a tenant farmer and sharecropper after their family lost land to, Anzaldúa believes, the greed and manipulation of white settlers.

Anzaldúa was the valedictorian of her Texas high school. She pursued an undergraduate education in art, English, and secondary education from the University of Texas-Pan American, and a master’s in English and education from the University of Texas at Austin. She briefly worked as a teacher in Texas before moving to California, where she enrolled in a PhD program in literature at the University of California-Santa Cruz, supporting herself by teaching, lecturing, and writing. Anzaldúa was a prolific writer and Chicana cultural theorist who helped create the field of Chicana Studies. She also wrote essays and children’s books, and coedited scholarly books on Chicana and BIPOC feminist studies. Anzaldúa died in 2004 while completing her dissertation; it was awarded posthumously in 2005.