Gloria Anzaldúa

The article of “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” the author Gloria Anzaldua experiences in a young age how many people are ashamed about their identity, where they belong and how they speak. Gloria had always struggled with identity. Gloria describes a moment where she is sent into a corner for trying to pronounce her name to the teacher, and these types of memories can put deep scars into one’s identity. Growing up, she was also surrounded by lots of sayings that only women had to follow, relating to how you should act and such. She identifies herself as a Chicana. Chicano/a is a mix of almost everything, from the standard Spanish to Southern Texas Spanish. All with different ways of speaking, many people believed that Chicano’s cannot speak Spanish properly. By the experiences that she passed in school she never thought of being ashamed of her identity and language.

Gloria illustrates that talking different languages with other people that she doesn’t know is hard for her, because she needs to talk good English or good Spanish and not talk both languages at the same time. She explains how she was treated in school and how many people including her, are capable to speak both of

Anzaldúa was born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas on September 26, 1942. Anzaldúa was a descendant of many of the prominent Spanish explorers and settlers to come to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and also had indigenous ancestry. Anzaldua’s major work is ‘Borderlands/La Frontera’ which was published in 1987. It was first published by a book with two sections, the last section was in an article that she called “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”. Her intended audience for this article were the people who come to another country and they forget their identity and their language, is about the people who are ashamed to speak their own language. (Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers,