How to Tame a Wild Tongue

The eponymous wild tongue of Anzaldúa’s essay represents the Chicana women who proudly speak their culture’s language. The tongue is a traditional synecdoche—a rhetorical trope in which a part represents the whole—for language, and the use of synecdoche emphasizes the embodiment and aliveness of language for Anzaldúa. She writes, “Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir. [A language that corresponds to a lifestyle.] Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language” (35).

One word for language in Spanish is lenguaje, etymologically linked to lengua, meaning tongue. Anzaldúa uses lenguaje when she wants to emphasize that Chicano Spanish is a living language. Language is embodied, and it lives through the body. Anzaldúa’s language is spoken through wild tongues—the tongues of Chicanos who resist the pressure to speak “proper” English or Spanish.

When Anzaldúa asserts that “wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (34), she is perhaps referencing the US government’s use of mutilation as punishment. Native American boarding school staff often cut off children’s braids and forced them to speak English. Some also claim that boarding schools mutilated the tongues of children caught speaking their own language.