Diana Whittaker

Aisha Sidibe-Leyva

English 110

October 1st, 2018

                                                                   Between Here and There

        The United States, since its inception, has been a place where people from different ethnicities, religions, and nationalities have sought out for their own expressions, freedoms, and relief. There’s a certain irony to this same country also being a place in which people who feel they own the land (due to their naturalization or race) wish to see these “outsiders” controlled,  barred from entering, or see that they assimilate wholly to what they believe is the proper way of being an “American”. Thus, for people like Gloria Anzaldúa, who were born on American soil yet are faced with the attack and erasure of their identity and language on two fronts, there lies the questions of what, to them, makes their own language and culture? What defines the Americanness that they are expected to adopt, while stifling any culture that did not conform to said Americanness? In her essay “How to Tame A Wild Tongue” Anzaldúa uses her life experiences to give understanding to what she knows as Americanness, and in turn, her language and culture as a Chicana living at the border. Her use of compartmentalizing definitions, personal history, and metaphors shed light on her understanding of herself and life around her between the American and Mexican worldviews.

        From the very beginning, Anzaldúa makes it clear that identity and language go hand in hand – the languages she uses are a facet of her that is just as much a part of her as the next. She describes Chicano Spanish as a language born from a need to be identified as “distinct people”, using comparisons to standard Spanish and retelling the way Latinos and Latinas have expressed disdain for the “ruining” of the language. Going so far as to give examples of its conventions, she legitimizes the way in which Chicano Spanish came about as naturally as any other language – to communicate under the shared identity with others who would understand the way of living. This, however, is not the only language she speaks: Tex-Mex, or Spanglish, represents how people on the border create a language that is an amalgamation of Spanish and English and representative of the intersection of languages (and thereby identities) at the border.

        Anzaldúa’s home was, as stated before, at the border of Texas and Mexico. She describes the Chicanos as people who “straddle the borderlands”, being “constantly exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans” and hearing the “Anglos’ incessant clamoring”. Her choice of words like “exposure” and “clamor” to describe the Mexicans and Anglos’ puts in perspective the way both cultures interact with hers and where her culture stands in theirs. Chicano, as a culture, is not quite identifiable with Mexican, but is not at all Anglo-American. Anzaldúa comes to realize her culture through its definition: once given a name, she writes that Chicanos become “aware of [their] reality”, which means to say they’ve realized a common ground for the culture to be an identity. However, through her memories of cantina music and corridos, her culture existed long before it had any name. Thus, she understands culture to be linked to experiences that tie people in the same place together; the way the smell of her family’s cooking returns her to the place she grew up in in a vivid image of watching her mother season meat. It is a culture that began long before it had a name and still lingers in her memories.

        Despite living in America on a technical level, Anzaldúa rarely mentions Americanness aside from negative experiences with it. In fact, her lack of mention, in itself, speaks of how removed she is from Americanness and how she sees it as something she neither is, nor wants to become. In this, Americanness is built up to be a punishment or a relegation to her. She speaks of the treatment she received when she was young, being told to “speak American” or “go back to Mexico”, and the way she was forced to take more speech classes to drop her native accent. She describes American using the word “Anglo”, as if to take Americanness the same way the word “Hispanic” takes from Chicano origin. It’s especially prevalent in the line, “We call ourselves Mexican American to signify we are neither Mexican nor American, but more the noun ‘American’ than the adjective ‘Mexican’ (and when copping out),” that she feels Americanness is becoming less of what she really is; it reads as though Mexican is something that’s only descriptive, and American is a personhood. It’s only further shown by using the phase “copping out”, bearing a negative connotation, and later when she comes to know she is, “more than nothing: when she is not “copping out”.

        Throughout her essay, there’s a prevalence of conflicting thoughts that takes away from how Anzaldúa sees her language and culture. The way she feels her Mexicanness and Angloness standing at odds with each other to the point of cancelling each other out – thereby making her nothing – goes against the way she describes Chicano as a distinct identity rather than a mix between two other identities. However, this could point towards her later note that the “struggle of identities continues”, as she herself seems caught in a space where she is a mix of both, while simultaneously being not enough for either one.

        Anzaldúa compares the Chicano people to bandits in their own home: people who are seen as robbers of what is already theirs. The intersection of Mexican and Anglo culture and language to bring about the distinct Chicano tells a story of people who do not fit into either identities but hold influences from both. Much like a puzzle, the pieces belong to a whole but do not fit in every place. She sees a day where her culture and her language survive long after the reach of her oppressors, and avers that her people are unbreakable and persisting. Chicanos are well aware what it is like to remain under the punishment of Americanness, and have maintained with a clear culture and language that continues to evolve in spite of the people who try to tear it away.