How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Gloria Anzaldua was born in 1942 inside Rio Grande Valley ofSouth Texas. At age eleven.she began working within the fields like a migrant worker and after that on her family's land after the death ofher father. Working her way through school, she eventually became a schoolteacher then an academic, speaking and currently talking about feminist, lesbian, and Chi- cana issues resulting in autobiography. She is most widely known for This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), which she edited with Cherrie Moraga, and BorderlandsfLa Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Anzaldua died in 2004.
"How to Tame a Wild Tongue" is from BorderlandsfLa Frontera. In it, Anzaldua is worried with many forms of borders - between nations, cultures, classes, genders, languages. When she writes, "So, if you wish to really hurt me, talk badly about my language" (par. 27), Anzaldua is arguing for your methods identity is intertwined using the way we speak and for the ways in which people can be made to feel embarrassed about their particular tongues. Keeping hers wild - ignoring the closing oflinguistic borders- is Anzaldua's way ofasserting her identity.