26 pages • 52 minutes read
Gloria AnzalduaHow to Tame a Wild Tongue
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Tongues
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. The passage also evokes the Greco-Roman myth of Philomela, whose sexual abuser cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling her story; Philomela’s ingenuity led her to weave a tapestry illustrating her story. Alluding to both imperialist oppression of Indigenous people and sexual oppression of women, the wild tongue serves as a powerful motif for Anzaldúa’s essay on Chicana identities.
Borderlands
The Mexican-American borderland is the geographic context of the essay. Moreover, the essay’s structure mirrors the structure of the map. She distinguishes Chicana culture first from US culture to the north, then from Mexican culture to the south. Her descriptions of the border landscape and climate bring the setting to life. She writes, for example, of “an immense blue sky; woodsmoke perfuming my grandmother’s clothes, her skin. The stench of cow manure and the yellow patches on the ground” (42). Landscapes also shape words, as Anzaldúa demonstrates in her analysis of Chicana Spanish. Chicanos in South Texas still retain elements of early modern Spanish because, she writes, they “were cut off linguistically from other Spanish speakers” (37).
Serpents
Anzaldua uses the image of a serpent as a motif to explore the relationship between identity and language. Chicanos speak a language deriving from both English and Spanish, which she analogizes to the serpent’s “forked tongue” (36). The snake is also a prominent symbol in Mexican culture, appearing on the national flag. According to legend, the Aztecs were told to build a city where they saw an eagle eating a snake. Anzaldúa writes, “We are neither eagle nor serpent, but both” (43). The serpent has a second significance in Anzaldua’s essay, since it also alludes also to the serpent who tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. She writes, “I will have my serpent’s tongue–my women’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice” (40).
