Anzaldua Blog response #2: The Anti-Essay.

In "How To Tame a Wild Tongue" Gloria Anzuldua writes about the spanish language and how it has transformed. Like for example as pointed out by Anzuldua castilian spanish (proper spanish) you would say "maíz, cohete, lado, or mojado" but in the newly used spanish or Tex-Mex you'd say "maiz, cuete, lao, or mojao". She also writes about how our language has influenced our identity in an non-traditional way. All these points she writes about in this article is written in an academic format. In other words, it allows you or the reader to "enter" that conversation and contribute to those ideas. She wrote it this way so it can people can relate to what she is writing about. Not just one culture can relate to this topic, although it is aimed mostly to the latino community. Also, she tries to report in a way what is occurring with the Mexican culture, Anglos are trying to get rid of the Spanish language in the United States. You can see this throughout the whole essay but this is where it caught my attention the most,

“’we’re going to have to control your tongue’ the dentist says… My mouth is the motherlode. The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a whiff of the stench when I gasp… ‘We’re going to have to do something about that tongue,’ I hear anger rising in his voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. ‘I’ve never seen anything as strong or as stubborn,’ he says. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you brindle and saddle it?...” (para # 1-2.

Even though you it’s not facts or anything you see where she is going with it. It’s the attention grabber, you have to think and compare what similarities it has with the Spanish language. Basically her question is how are you going to control a language that is so strong and so present throughout the world? When she says the dentist, an American, is cleaning out her roots, she means her culture and language, and he starts getting angry because her tongue keeps interfering with the cleaning of her “roots”. Her tongue is fighting it, because you can’t control Spanish in the US like the Americans tried to do. Spanish has evolved, and is getting harder and harder to get rid of. I feel that soon it’s going to take over.