Gloria Anzaldia Borderlands La Frontera a a send etn Aunt Lute Books SAN FRANCISCO5 How to Tame a Wild Tongue “We're going to have to control your tongue,” the dentist says, pulling out all the metal from my mouth. Silver bits plop and tinkle into the basin. My mouth is a motherlode. The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a whiff of the stench when I gasp. “I can’t cap that tooth yet, you're still draining,” he says. “We're going to have to do something about your tongue,” I hear the anger rising in his voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. “I've never seen anything as strong or as stubborn,” he says. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down? “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” —Ray Gwyn Smith! I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess—that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for “talking back" to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. “If you want to be American, speak ‘American. If you don't like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.” “I want you to speak English. Pa’ hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el inglés bien. Qué vale toda tu educacton st76 How to Tame a Wild Tongue todavia bablas inglés con un ‘accent;" my mother would say, mortified that I spoke English like a Mexican. At Pan American University, I, and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of our accents. Attacks on one's form of expression with the intent to cen- sor are a violation of the First Amendment. E/ Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancé la lengua. Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out. Overcoming the Tradition of Silence Abogadas, escupimos el oscuro. Peleando con nuestra propia sombra el silencio nos sepulta. En boca cerrada no entran moscas. “Flies don't enter a closed mouth’ is a saying I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls don’t answer back. Es una falta de respeto to talk back to one’s mother of father. I remember one of the sins I'd recite to the priest in the confession box the few times I went to confession: talking back to my moth- er, hablar pa’ 'trds, repelar. Hocicona, repelona, chismosa, hav- ing a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being mal criada. In my culture they are all words that are derogatory if applied to women—I've never heard them applied to men. The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word “nosotras,” was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we're male or female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse. And our tongues have become dry the wilderness has dried out our tongues and we have forgotten speech. —Irena Klepfisz? Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren oner candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de academia.7 How to Tame a Wild Tongue Oyé como ladra: el lenguaje de Ia frontera Quien tiene boca se equivoca. —Mexican saying “Pocho, cultural traitor, you're speaking the oppressor's lan- guage by speaking English, you're ruining the Spanish language,” I have been accused by various Latinos and Latinas. Chicano Spanish is considered by the purist and by most Latinos deficient, a mutilation of Spanish. But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally. Change, evolucién, enriquectmiento de palabras nuevas por invencién o adopcién have created variants of Chicano Spanish, un muevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corre- sponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language. For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either stan- dard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A lan- guage which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves—a lan- guage with terms that are neither espariol ni inglés, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages. Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos’ need to identi fy ourselves as a distinct people. We needed a language with which we could communicate with ourselves, a secret language. For some of us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest—for many Chicanos today live in the Midwest and the East. And because we ate a complex, heterogeneous people, we speak many languages. Some of the languages we speak are: Standard English ‘Working class and slang English Standard Spanish Standard Mexican Spanish North Mexican Spanish dialect Chicano Spanish (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have regional variations) ‘Tex-Mex Pachuco (called cal6) ay aes ex78 How to Tame a Wild Tongue My “home” tongues are the languages I speak with my sister and brothers, with my friends. They are the last five listed, with 6 and 7 being closest to my heart. From school, the media and job situations, I've picked up standard and working class English. From Mamagrande Locha and from reading Spanish and Mexican literature, I've picked up Standard Spanish and Standard Mexican Spanish. From los recién Hegados, Mexican immigrants, and braceros, | learned the North Mexican dialect. With Mexicans I'll try to speak either Standard Mexican Spanish or the North Mexican dialect. From my parents and Chicanos living in the Valley, I picked up Chicano Texas Spanish, and I speak it with my mom, younger brother (who married a Mexican and who rarely mixes Spanish with English), aunts and older relatives. With Chicanas from Nuevo México or Arizona I will speak Chicano Spanish a little, but often they don’t understand what I'm saying. With most California Chicanas I speak entirely in English (unless I forget). When I first moved to San Francisco, 'd rattle off something in Spanish, unintentionally embarrassing them, Often it is only with another Chicana tejana that I can talk freely. Words distorted by English are known as anglicisms or pochismos. The pocho is an anglicized Mexican or American of Mexican origin who speaks Spanish with an accent characteristic of North Americans and who distorts and reconstructs the lan- guage according to the influence of English.? Tex-Mex, or Spanglish, comes most naturally to me. I may switch back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the same word. With my sister and my brother Nune and with Chicano tejano contemporaries I speak in Tex-Mex From kids and people my own age I picked up Pachuco. Pachuco (the language of the zoot suiters) is a language of rebel- lion, both against Standard Spanish and Standard English. It is a secret language. Adults of the culture and outsiders cannot understand it. It is made up of slang words from both English and Spanish. Ruca means girl or woman, vato means guy or dude, chale means n0, simén means yes, cburo is sure, talk is periquiar, pigionear means petting, que gacho means how nerdy, ponte dguila means watch out, death is called Ja pelona. Through lack of practice and not having others who can speak it, I've lost most of the Pachuco tongue.79 How to Tame a Wild Tongue Chicano Spanish Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization have developed significant differences in the Spanish we speak. We col- lapse two adjacent vowels into a single syllable and sometimes shift the stress in certain words such as matz/maiz, cobete/ cuete. We leave out certain consonants when they appear between vowels: lado/lao, mojado/mojao. Chicanos from South Texas pro- nounced fas jas in jue (fue). Chicanos use “archaisms? words that are no longer in the Spanish language, words that have been evolved out. We say semos, truje, haiga, ansina, and naiden. We retain the “archaic”, as in falar, that derives from an earlier b, (the French halar ot the Germanic halon which was lost to standard Spanish in the 16th century), but which is still found in several regional dialects such as the one spoken in South Texas. (Due to geography, Chicanos from the Valley of South Texas were cut off linguistically from other Spanish speakers. We tend to use words that the Spaniards brought over from Medieval Spain. The majori- ty of the Spanish colonizers in Mexico and the Southwest came from Extremadura—Hernén Cortés was one of them—and Andalucia. Andalucians pronounce // like a y, and their d’s tend to be absorbed by adjacent vowels: tirado becomes tirao. They brought el lenguaje popular, dialectos y regionalismos.4) Chicanos and other Spanish speakers also shift to y and to s.5 We leave out initial syllables, saying tar for estar, toy for estoy, bora for abora (cubanos and puertorriquenos also leave out initial letters of some words.) We also leave out the final sylla- ble such as pa for para. The intervocalic y, the Was in tortilla, ella, botella, gets replaced by tortia or tortiya, ea, botea. We add an additional syllable at the beginning of certain words: atocar for tocar, agastar for gastar. Sometimes we'll say lavaste las vacijas, other times /avates (substituting the ates verb endings for the aste). We use anglicisms, words borrowed from English: bola from ball, carpeta from carpet, mdchina de lavar (instead of lavado- ra) from washing machine. Tex-Mex argot, created by adding a Spanish sound at the beginning or end of an English word such as cookiar for cook, watchar for watch, parkiar for park, and rapiar for rape, is the result of the pressures on Spanish speak- ers to adapt to English. We don’t use the word vosotros/as or its accompanying verb form. We don't say claro (to mean yes), imaginate, or me