How To Tame A Wild Tongue

How to Tame a Wild Tongue is the title to an essay in Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldua. In this essay the wild tongue is literally the narrator's uncontrollable tongue as it wiggles around while the narrator is at the dentist's office. The idea of a wild tongue may also represent a foreign language or a non-standardized language. In this essay, Chicano Spanish is an example of one such non-standardized language. The narrator states that Chicano Spanish, which is neither Spanish nor English, is considered by many to be "a mutilation of Spanish" (Anzaldua 55). Those who speak Chicano Spanish have a wild tongue and this tongue supposedly must be tamed. This title is ironic because it sounds like an instruction manual, as though the narrator is planning on relaying different ways in which a wild tongue can be tamed. On the contrary, the narrator rejects the idea of taming a wild tongue. She believes that if a wild tongue is tamed, then identity and culture are likewise tamed and suppressed. The narrator explicitly states, "Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out" (Anzaldua 54).

Samantha Sears