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The Importance of Language

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In "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," Gloria Anzaldua uses the rhetorical appeal of pathos to communicate her feelings and personal struggles between language and identity. Her essay is a cathartic and complex expression of her frustrations of being discriminated against for the language she spoke, the culture she came from and her being a woman. She grew up on the border of Mexico and Texas, "Borderlands” and border tongues. Her language was neither here nor there. Her technique of using different languages and voices pushes her audience away but her vivid and distressing flashbacks, anecdotes, and imagery use sympathy to draw you back and understand her on an emotional level. When reading Anzualda’s essay, what is immediately visible is her varied juxtapositional use of multiple voices, languages and literary styles that shift throughout her writing. First you are reading English than she will randomly throw in a poem, then switch to Spanish, then a combination known as “Spanglish.” When she interweaves the Spanish into the work she does so without any translation to catch the reader off guard. The audience is not sure from one sentence to the next or from one paragraph to the next where Anzaldua will take the reader next. This hodgepodge of styles, voices, unpleasant flashbacks and languages creates an emotionally interactive experience with the reader. One example where Anzaldua uses both Spanish and a poem at once to push the reader away but later draw them back in is in the passage, “Deslenguadas. Somos los del espanol deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestizaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak the tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huerfanos- we speak an orphan tongue” (80). Although her syntax and diction of using multiple voices and languages keeps the prose alive, interesting and unpredictable it can simultaneously frustrate and alienate the reader which is precisely what she wants. “As long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate” (81). She wants the English readers to “accommodate” her and her language and accept it when reading her writings. At the same time she wants to, in a sense, “legitimize” her language and make if worthy by writing it in that format. She uses Spanish to make the reader to feel uncomfortable and to be forced to be in her shoes. You are seeing the world through Anzaldua’s eyes. This tactic is convincing and backs up her strong polemical expression. Her language is very important to her. “Until I take pride in my language, I can not take pride in myself” (81). “Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas, Spanish, Tex Mex and all other languag

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