“Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?”
-Ray Gwyn Smith
Gloria Anzaldúa’s piece is one filled with raw emotions, harsh criticisms of language and the way we use it, and an exploration of her inner-self and how she has coped with the hardships she has faced being a Chicana woman.
Growing up on the physical borderland of the Texas-US Southwest/Mexican border, Anzaldúa lived in a place she called a “place of contradiction where hatred, anger, and exploitation are part of the landscape but also where she finds a certain joy, especially at the unique positioning consciousness takes at the confluent streams.” (page 356). Anzaldúa grew up in a place where she was reprimanded for speaking Spanish on the playground and was told to control her Spanish tongue in order to seem more professional and to be respected in a society that did not understand her and her people.
Anzaldúa lived her life constantly grappling with the many languages and dialects she was able to speak such as Standard English, Tex-Mex, and Standard Spanish. For her, Tex-Mex was her preferred language – it made her feel welcomed and at home. She was often told by other people that her Chicano Spanish was incorrect, when really, it was a border tongue which developed naturally; it was a living language. (358)
The thing about being a Chicano is that if a person has a low estimation of her native tongue, they automatically have a low estimation of her. (361) From the other readings we have looked at in class, we can understand that this is very specific to people who do not speak English or even “proper” English dialects. Anzaldúa experiences language as a monumental part of who she is.
“I am my language.”
-Anzaldúa (362)
When looking at Tara Lockhart’s analysis of Anzaldúa’s piece in “Writing the Self: Gloria Anzaldúa, Textual Form, and Feminist Epistemology”, she offers insights of how Anzaldúa’s switching between English and Spanish throughout the piece is meant to be a strong, polemical statement. Reading Anzaldúa’s piece, I noticed how powerful it was because of the fact that it integrated both English and Spanish so effortlessly, showcasing Anzaldúa’s familiarity with both languages, and somehow making the reader uncomfortable in a way that Anzaldúa definitely meant to do. Her incorporating Spanish was to make English-only-speaking readers confront their own limitations and turn them into the “other” – something that they may feel as though they cannot identify with if they consider themselves a part of the dominant culture.
An important, interesting aspect of Anzaldúa’s piece that Lockhart brings to light is the fact that Anzaldúa’s essay is formatted in a way that she utilizes many page breaks and uses the white space to her advantage.
“Patches of speech and ideas are simultaneously held apart for contemplation.”
-Tara Lockhart
Anzaldúa uses these page breaks to make the reader pause and think about what she has just discussed, especially when she incorporates Spanish into the piece – she wants the reader to feel uncomfortable, to feel confusion, to feel the raw emotion Anzaldúa is emitting at being at a crossroads and ultimately, being a crossroad of multiple identities and languages herself.
I’ll end my response with a quote from Lockhart that caught my eye and for me, really captured Anzaldúa’s message:
“Chicanos are held together by their differences and this realization and recognition of difference is crucial to hybrid identity.”
-Tara Lockhart
E367: Writing and Diversity 