How to Tame a Wild Tongue

“Attacks on one’s form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment. El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua [The white person with an innocent face ripped out our tongue]. Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.”

Anzaldúa argues that US culture violates Chicanos’ First Amendment rights, the right to free speech, by censoring their language. The statement is partly ironic, of course, because the First Amendment is part of US culture. Anzaldúa employs imagery when she describes this censorship as a white person mutilating the mestiza tongue.

“Language is a male discourse.”

Anzaldúa echoes other feminist critics of her time when she notes that, in most languages, grammatical constructions default to the masculine This phenomenon is especially prominent in inflected languages like Spanish, where all nouns have genders. With maleness as the default, language is implicitly patriarchal independent of whether the meaning being expressed is explicitly patriarchal.

“Chicanos who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other.”

This quote gives an important context for the term “wild tongue” in the title. Here, “wild” means “illegitimate” or “bastard,” derogatory terms that alienate and oppress. Chicanos internalize this characterization of their language, reinforcing the dominant culture’s desire to oppress them.