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5How to Tame a Wild Tongue1

“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 push- ing 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 2

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

1. This chapter focuses on the intersection of linguistic and ethnic identity for Chicanxs. Juan Mah y Busch offers a reflection on the title of the chapter, which plays on Anzaldúa’s resistance to conform to fixed or prescriptive theories: “The chapter’s title is ironic because, of course, Anzaldúa is not interested in writing a manual on how to tame a wild tongue. She writes about how particular tongues have been silenced historically; and, significantly, she writes about how to strengthen a Chicana’s wild tongue” (145).

2. Author’s note: Ray Gwyn Smith, Moorland is Cold Country, unpublished book. The epigraph following the story of Anzaldúa’s visit to the dentist is from an unpublished piece that Santa Cruz-based visual artist Ray Gwyn Smith wrote while taking a women’s writing workshop with Anzaldúa at the University of California, Santa Cruz in June 1986. Asked about her relationship with Anzaldúa, Gwyn Smith explains: “I grew up in Wales near the border with England and we had a strong connection and understanding about growing up in an area colonized by the oppressor” (Personal email communication, February 7, 2016).

From Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. The Critical Edition, edited by Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez and Norma E. Cantú, Aunt Lute Books, 2021, pp. 119-131.

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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.” 3

“I want you to speak English. Pa’ hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el inglés bien. Qué vale toda tu educación si todavía hablas 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 censor are a violation of the First Amendment. El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua. Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.

Overcoming the Tradition of Silence

Ahogadas, 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 or 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 mother, hablar pa’ ’trás, repelar. Hocicona, repelona, chismosa, 4 having 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,” I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we’re male or female. 5 We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse.

3. Panayota Gounari discusses this passage in an essay-length study of this chapter focused on language ideology and rights in the United States:

Gloria Anzaldúa’s painful memories of linguistic repression at school resonate with many similar testimonies from adults who found themselves in “No Spanish Rules” schools in the Southwest in the two decades following Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. “No Spanish Rules” meant that “the use of Spanish in the classrooms, at lunch time, and on the playgrounds was strictly prohibited.” (Gounari 75)

4. Here and throughout the chapter, Anzaldúa uses colloquialisms and Chicano slang. For “hocicona” see notes 1 and 6 to Chapter 2, p. 71 and p. 73.

5. Translated as “we,” the masculine plural form and the generic plural are the same in Spanish. “Nosotras” is only used when all the members of the group are feminine. In her later writings, Anzaldúa theorized the concept of “nos/otras” to refer to intersubjectivity, (internal) group differences, and intercultural communication:

As an identity narrative, nos/otras has the potential to overturn definitions of otherness. When we examine the us/them binary deeply, we find that otra-ness may be deceptive, merely a cage we assign to others. According to Buddhism, the primal distinction between self and other is illusory because the existence of self is, itself, an illusion. This distinction is responsible for all evil and sorrow. There is no wrong, no vice, no evil in this world, except

And our tongues have become dry the wilderness has dried out our tongues and we have forgotten speech.

—Irena Klepfisz 6

Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de academia. 7

Oye cómo ladra: el lenguaje de la frontera

Quien tiene boca se equivoca. —Mexican saying 8

“Pocho, cultural traitor, you’re speaking the oppressor’s language by speaking English, you’re ruining the Spanish language,” 9 I have been accused by various Latinos and Latinas. 10 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, evolución, enriquecimiento de palabras nuevas por invención o adopción have created variants of Chicano Spanish, un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corresponde 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 standard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves—a language with terms that are neither español ni inglés, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages.

what flows from the assertion of entirely independent selfhood. There are no “otras”—we all emerge from humanity’s basic shared, communal ground, an emotional-spiritual ground of being. (Light 81)

6. Author’s note: Irena Klepfisz, “Di rayze aheym/The Journey Home,” in “The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology,” eds. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, special issue, Sinister Wisdom, no. 29/30 (1986): 49. Anzaldúa mentions Jewish poet and educator Irena Klepfisz in the Acknowledgments section. They were both contributing editors of the journal Sinister Wisdom at the time Anzaldúa was composing Borderlands. See note 7, p. 46, and note 19, p. 125. The poem “Poets have strange eating habits” is dedicated to Klepfisz (p. 214).

7. This is a reference to the prescriptive rules of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, based in Madrid since 1713, and, more generally, to the conventions of academic writing and speech.

8. “Who has a mouth, makes a mistake” would be a literal translation. A more general translation would be: “One who speaks, errs.” This is a popular saying throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

9. “Pocho” is a derogatory term used in Mexico to refer to Americanized Mexicans and other Hispanics or Latinxs whose speech in Spanish is influenced by English.

10. Anzaldúa is referring here to Latinxs in the United States; today the term is used to refer to all Latinxs, but in her use it is clear she means all except Chicanxs.

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Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos’ need to identify 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 are a complex, heterogeneous people, we speak many languages. Some of the languages we speak are:

1. Standard English 2. Working class and slang English 3. Standard Spanish 4. Standard Mexican Spanish 5. North Mexican Spanish dialect 6. Chicano Spanish (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have

regional variations) 7. Tex-Mex 11

8. Pachuco (called caló) 12

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 llegados, Mexican immigrants, and braceros, 13 I 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, I’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

11. “Tex-Mex” is, for Anzaldúa, the term for the Texan variety of Chicano Spanish; more generally, it refers to a variety of Spanglish or a regionally specific code-switching practice among Spanish- English bilinguals in the United States.

12. “Pachuco” is a term used to define the slang of Mexican-American urban communities since the 1930s. Slang is a key element of the Pachuco subculture, related to zoot suits and an attitude of defiance and cultural pride among working-class Mexican American youth. See also note 15. “Caló” is sometimes the word used in Spanish instead of Pachuco slang, especially when the emphasis is on archaic 15th and 16th century Spanish vocabulary, verb forms and expressions that have continued to be used in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

13. For translation and information on “braceros” and the foreign workers program known as the Bracero Program (1942–1964), see Chapter 1, note 42, p. 66.

an accent characteristic of North Americans and who distorts and reconstructs the language according to the influences of English.” 14 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 lan- guage of the zoot suiters) is a language of rebellion, 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 no, simón means yes, churo is sure, talk is periquiar, pigionear means petting, qué gacho means how nerdy, ponte águila means watch out, death is called la pelona. Through lack of practice and not having others who can speak it, I’ve lost most of the Pachuco tongue. 15

Chicano Spanish

Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization have developed significant differences in the Spanish we speak. We collapse two adjacent vowels into a single syllable and sometimes shift the stress in certain words such as maíz/ maiz, cohete/cuete. We leave out certain consonants when they appear between vowels: lado/lao, mojado/mojao. Chicanos from South Texas pronounced f as j as 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” j, as in jalar, that derives from an earlier h, (the French haler or the Germanic halôn 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 majority of the Spanish colonizers in Mexico and the Southwest came from Extremadura— Hernán Cortés was one of them—and Andalucía. Andalucians pronounce ll like

14. Author’s note: R.C. Ortega, Dialectología del barrio, trans. Hortencia S. Alwan (Los Angeles, CA: R.C. Ortega Publisher & Bookseller, 1977), 132.

15. Caló or Pachuco uses linguistic play and metaphor, and these terms are prime examples. “Ruca” generally meant an old hag or, in the masculine (“ruco”), an old geezer, but in Caló it has widened to mean any female, but usually a girlfriend or wife. “Vato” may have its origin in an everyman character in a folk play, La Pastorela, where one of the shepherds is named Bato. “Chale” is a nickname for “Carlos” but is also used to mean “no,” while “simón,” the proper name, is used for “yes” and is an extension of “sí” (yes). Caló terms often create metaphorical associations with animal behavior: “periquear” is to be like a parrot—talking—but it can also mean to lie or exaggerate; “pigionear” is to be like a pigeon, no doubt an allusion to lovebirds; “ponte águila” is to act like an eagle, vigilant or watchful. In Chicano Spanish, “qué gacho” means “how awful” or “how terrible,” or, in English slang, “what a bummer.” “Pelona,” which translates as “the bald one,” refers to a skull and is one of many terms for death.

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a y, and their d’s tend to be absorbed by adjacent vowels: tirado becomes tirao. They brought el lenguaje popular, dialectos y regionalismos. 16)

Chicanos and other Spanish speakers also shift ll to y and z to s. 17 We leave out initial syllables, saying tar for estar, toy for estoy, hora for ahora (cubanos and puertorriqueños also leave out initial letters of some words.) We also leave out the final syllable such as pa for para. The intervocalic y, the ll as 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 lavates (substituting the ates verb endings for the aste).

We use anglicisms, words borrowed from English: bola from ball, carpeta from carpet, máqina de lavar (instead of lavadora) 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 speakers 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), imagínate, or me emociona, unless we picked up Spanish from Latinas, out of a book, or in a classroom. Other Spanish-speaking groups are going through the same, or similar, development in their Spanish.

Linguistic Terrorism 18

Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestizaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos—we speak an orphan tongue.

Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other.

Chicana feminists often skirt around each other with suspicion and hesita- tion. For the longest time I couldn’t figure it out. Then it dawned on me. To be close to another Chicana is like looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what

16. Author’s note: Eduardo Hernández-Chávez, Andrew D. Cohen, and Anthony F. Beltramo, El lenguaje de los chicanos: Regional and Social Characteristics of Language Used by Mexican Americans (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1975), vii, xvii, 39. This collection of scholarly articles on Chicano speech is the main source for Anzaldúa’s ideas on Chicano Spanish. This section summarizes some of the main ideas in the book, and offers representative examples.

17. Author’s note: Hernández-Chávez, Cohen, and Beltramo, vii, xvii. 18. Lilia I. Bartolomé studies this chapter, arguing that Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of “linguistic

terrorism” illustrate how “the English-only movement functions to domesticate people of color while it serves to integrate white immigrant groups into the dominant culture” and that Anzaldúa’s approach to activism can be especially effective in the field of education (25). Andrea Lunsford argues that this section and this chapter in general capture “one of the driving forces within the field of rhetoric and writing: giving students the opportunity to explore their own voices, to be heard by a wider community, to take pride in their language and take pride in themselves” (185).

we’ll see there. Pena. Shame. Low estimation of self. In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives.

Chicanas feel uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their censure. Their language was not outlawed in their countries. They had a whole lifetime of being immersed in their native tongue; generations, centuries in which Spanish was a first language, taught in school, heard on radio and TV, and read in the newspaper.

If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a low estimation of me. Often with mexicanas y latinas we’ll speak English as a neutral language. Even among Chicanas we tend to speak English at parties or conferences. Yet, at the same time, we’re afraid the other will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be the “real” Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience. A monolingual Chicana whose first language is English or Spanish is just as much a Chicana as one who speaks several variants of Spanish. A Chicana from Michigan or Chicago or Detroit is just as much a Chicana as one from the Southwest. Chicano Spanish is as diverse linguistically as it is regionally.

By the end of this century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in the U.S., a country where students in high schools and col- leges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more “cultured.” But “for a language to remain alive it must be used.” 19 By the end of this century English, and not Spanish, will be the mother tongue of most Chicanos and Latinos.

So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legit- imate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.

I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

My fingers move sly against your palm

19. Author’s note: Irena Klepfisz, “Secular Jewish Identity: Yidishkayt in America,” in “The Tribe of Dina,” eds. Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepfisz, 43.

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Like women everywhere, we speak in code . . . . —Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz 20

“Vistas,” corridos, y comida: My Native Tongue 21

In the 1960s, I read my first Chicano novel. It was City of Night by John Rechy, a gay Texan, son of a Scottish father and a Mexican mother. 22 For days I walked around in stunned amazement that a Chicano could write and could get pub- lished. When I read I Am Joaquín 23 I was surprised to see a bilingual book by a Chicano in print. When I saw poetry written in Tex-Mex for the first time, a feeling of pure joy flashed through me. I felt like we really existed as a people. In 1971, when I started teaching High School English to Chicano students, I tried to supplement the required texts with works by Chicanos, only to be reprimanded and forbidden to do so by the principal. He claimed that I was

20. Author’s note: Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, “Sign,” in We Speak In Code: Poems and Other Writings (Pittsburgh, PA: Motheroot Publications, Inc., 1980), 85. The ideas in this paragraph follow what Anzaldúa wrote in the 1982 manuscript draft “Esperando la serpiente con plumas,” in a section titled “The Body Split”:

We don’t have a language nor a vocabulary to talk about the body, about making love—a sexual tongue—if there was one we never learned it and if we did we’ve forgotten it . . . The body split. We know absolutely nothing about our bodies. . . . Oh you body, mujer overcoming the tradition of muteness. Let me hear you sing. Only by transforming my relationship to you, Oh Body, can I trasnform [sic] my relationship to another’s body. There can be no political liberation without a sexual liberation first. (Anzaldúa Papers 78.9)

“Overcoming the tradition of muteness” is also the title of one of Anzaldúa’s unpublished poems (Anzaldúa Papers 87.39). “Overcoming the Tradition of Muteness—Women and Language” was the title of a panel Anzaldúa was part of at the conference “Common Differences: Third World Women and Feminist Perspectives,” held April 9–13, 1986, at the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Anzaldúa quotes leading Jewish and feminist writer and activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, who worked closely with her during the 1980s. See notes to the Acknowledgements section, p. 45. Kaye/Kantrowitz wrote an early review of Borderlands in which she praised Anzaldúa’s approach to shame and described this chapter as “a smashing success” (237). In a study of queerness in Borderlands, Ian Barnard argues:

This quotation [of Kaye/Kantrowitz] is surrounded by Anzaldúa’s discussion of the ways in which Chicano (Anzaldúa uses the masculine ending) culture and speech have historically been punished, marginalized, and misnamed. The insertion of the lines from Kaye/Kantrowitz acts as an intervention into one-dimensional political history by suggesting additional meanings of “women” and “code” here, not only by paralleling lesbian invisibility with Chicana and Chicano marginalization, but also by deploying race and gender metonymically to stand for one another, so that transcategorical intertextuality and interpretation becomes itself an extension of the queer’s penchant for cross-identifying and eluding identity. (42)

21. “Vistas” for “movies” is another example of Tejano Spanish; “corridos” are traditional ballads popularized during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and remain a thriving music genre.

22. This is a reference to City of Night (Grove P, 1963), the groundbreaking novel by gay Chicano writer John Rechy that continues to be essential to understanding the beginnings of the gay movement in Los Angeles. Beth Hernandez-Jason discusses Rechy’s and Anzaldúa’s work comparatively, including evidence found in the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers of Anzaldúa reading City of Night in the mid-1960s (23–38).

23. Author’s note: Rodolfo Gonzales, I Am Joaquín / Yo soy Joaquín (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1972). It was first published in 1967. This epic poem, written by Chicano political activist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales (1928–2005), was enormously influential in the first stages of the Chicano Movement.

supposed to teach “American” and English literature. At the risk of being fired, I swore my students to secrecy and slipped in Chicano short stories, poems, a play. In graduate school, while working toward a Ph.D., I had to “argue” with one advisor after the other, semester after semester, before I was allowed to make Chicano literature an area of focus.

Even before I read books by Chicanos or Mexicans, it was the Mexican movies I saw at the drive-in—the Thursday night special of $1.00 a carload—that gave me a sense of belonging. “Vámonos a las vistas,” my mother would call out and we’d all—grandmother, brothers, sister and cousins—squeeze into the car. We’d wolf down cheese and bologna white bread sandwiches while watching Pedro Infante in melodramatic tear-jerkers like Nosotros los pobres, the first “real” Mexican movie (that was not an imitation of European movies). I remember seeing Cuando los hijos se van and surmising that all Mexican movies played up the love a mother has for her children and what ungrateful sons and daughters suffer when they are not devoted to their mothers. I remember the singing-type “westerns” of Jorge Negrete and Miguel Aceves Mejía. 24 When watching Mexican movies, I felt a sense of homecoming as well as alienation. People who were to amount to something didn’t go to Mexican movies, or bailes 25 or tune their radios to bolero, rancherita, and corrido music. 26

The whole time I was growing up, there was norteño music sometimes called North Mexican border music, or Tex-Mex music, or Chicano music, or cantina (bar) music. I grew up listening to conjuntos, three- or four-piece bands made up of folk musicians playing guitar, bajo sexto, 27 drums and button accordion, which Chicanos had borrowed from the German immigrants who had come to Central Texas and Mexico to farm and build breweries. 28 In the Rio Grande Valley, Steve Jordan and Little Joe Hernández were popular, and Flaco Jimenez was the accordion king. The rhythms of Tex-Mex music are those of the polka, also adapted from the Germans, who in turn had borrowed the polka from the Czechs and Bohemians.

I remember the hot, sultry evenings when corridos—songs of love and death on the Texas-Mexican borderlands—reverberated out of cheap amplifiers from the local cantinas and wafted in through my bedroom window. 29

24. A quote from the movie Nosotros los pobres is in Chapter 1. See note 34, p. 64. Cuando los hijos se van (When Children Leave, 1941), directed by Juan Bustillo Oro, is also a classic from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema (early 1930s to late 1950s/early 1960s). Anzaldúa singles out Jorge Negrete (1911–1953) and Miguel Aceves Mejía (1915–2006), prominent singers and actors of that time.

25. This is a reference to the message conveyed by South Texas society that, in order to succeed, one had to leave behind Mexican cultural practices.

26. These music genres—bolero, slow-tempo romantic songs; rancherita, country or conjunto style songs; and corrido, ballad music—are often played at dances or parties.

27. “Bajo sexto” is a twelve-string guitar. 28. The norteño music genre—literally “northern,” as in northern Mexico—is recognized by its use of

the accordion, bajo sexto, and guitar. 29. Anzaldúa quotes two corridos, or Mexican border ballads, in Chapter 1. See note 12, p. 56, and

note 26, p. 61.

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Corridos first became widely used along the South Texas/Mexican border during the early conflict between Chicanos and Anglos. The corridos are usually about Mexican heroes who do valiant deeds against the Anglo oppressors. Pancho Villa’s song, “La cucaracha,” is the most famous one. 30 Corridos of John F. Kennedy and his death are still very popular in the Valley. Older Chicanos remember Lydia Mendoza, one of the great border corrido singers who was called la Gloria de Tejas. Her “El tango negro,” sung during the Great Depression, made her a singer of the people. The everpresent corridos narrated one hundred years of border history, bringing news of events as well as entertaining. These folk musicians and folk songs are our chief cultural mythmakers, and they made our hard lives seem bearable.

I grew up feeling ambivalent about our music. Country-western and rock- and-roll had more status. In the ’50s and ’60s, for the slightly educated and agringado Chicanos, there existed a sense of shame at being caught listening to our music. Yet I couldn’t stop my feet from thumping to the music, could not stop humming the words, nor hide from myself the exhilaration I felt when I heard it.

There are more subtle ways that we internalize identification, especially in the forms of images and emotions. For me food and certain smells are tied to my identity, to my homeland. Woodsmoke curling up to an immense blue sky; woodsmoke perfuming my grandmother’s clothes, her skin. The stench of cow manure and the yellow patches on the ground; the crack of a .22 rifle and the reek of cordite. Homemade white cheese sizzling in a pan, melting inside a folded tortilla. My sister Hilda’s hot, spicy menudo, chile colorado making it deep red, pieces of panza and hominy floating on top. 31 My brother Carito barbequing fajitas in the backyard. 32 Even now and 3,000 miles away, I can see my mother spicing the ground beef, pork and venison with chile. 33 My mouth salivates at the thought of the hot steaming tamales I would be eating if I were home. 34

Si le preguntas a mi mamá, “¿Qué eres?”

Identity is that essential core of who we are as individuals, the conscious experience of the self inside.

—Kaufman 35

30. “La cucaracha” is a traditional folk song popularized during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). The lyrics tell of a cockroach that cannot walk because it only has five legs, but, in one variant, it cannot walk because it has run out of marijuana to smoke.

31. Menudo, the popular Mexican stew made with tripe—panza—and red chile, is known to be a remedy for hangovers.

32. Fajita refers to the beef skirt cut of meat that is popularly grilled for many events in south Texas. 33. Chiles are hot peppers—usually jalapeño and serrano, although hundreds of varieties exist. 34. Tamales are a steamed delicacy prepared with corn dough spread on a corn husk; filled with beef,

venison, beans, chicken, or other filling; and folded. 35. Author’s note: Kaufman, 68. [italics in original] This definition of identity, from Kaufman’s

Shame: The Power of Caring, shifts the topic toward the psychological damage caused by linguistic

Nosotros los Chicanos straddle the borderlands. On one side of us, we are constantly exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans, on the other side we hear the Anglos’ incessant clamoring so that we forget our language. Among ourselves we don’t say nosotros los americanos, o nosotros los españoles, o nosotros los hispanos. We say nosotros los mexicanos (by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity, but a racial one). We distinguish between mexicanos del otro lado and mexicanos de este lado. Deep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul—not one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders.

Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres. (Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are.)

—Mexican saying

Si le preguntas a mi mamá, “¿Qué eres?” te dirá, “Soy mexicana.” My brothers and sister say the same. I sometimes will answer “soy mexicana” and at others will say “soy Chicana” o “soy tejana.” But I identified as “Raza” before I ever identified as “mexicana” or “Chicana.” 36

As a culture, we call ourselves Spanish when referring to ourselves as a linguistic group and when copping out. It is then that we forget our predom- inant Indian genes. We are 70-80% Indian. 37 We call ourselves Hispanic 38 or Spanish-American or Latin American or Latin when linking ourselves to other Spanish-speaking peoples of the Western hemisphere and when copping out. We call ourselves Mexican-American 39 to signify we are neither Mexican nor American, but more the noun “American” than the adjective “Mexican” (and when copping out).

Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating. This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity—we don’t identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy.

When not copping out, when we know we are more than nothing, we call ourselves Mexican, referring to race and ancestry; mestizo when affirming both our Indian and Spanish (but we hardly ever own our Black ancestry); Chicano

discrimination against Chicanxs. 36. For “Raza,” The People, see Chapter 2, note 15, p. 76. 37. Author’s note: Chávez, 4, 88–90. 38. Author’s note: “Hispanic” is derived from Hispanis (España, a name given to the Iberian

Peninsula in ancient times when it was a part of the Roman Empire) and is a term designated by the U.S. government to make it easier to handle us on paper.

39. Author’s note: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo created the Mexican-American in 1848.

Borderlands / La Frontera — Critical Edition 131130 Chapter 5 Translations

when referring to a politically aware people born and/or raised in the U.S.; Raza when referring to Chicanos; tejanos when we are Chicanos from Texas.

Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965 when Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers united and I Am Joaquín was published and la Raza Unida party was formed in Texas. 40 With that recognition, we became a distinct people. Something momentous happened to the Chicano soul—we became aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language (Chicano Spanish) that reflected that reality. Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together—who we were, what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become.

Yet the struggle of identities continues, the struggle of borders is our reality still. One day the inner struggle will cease and a true integration take place. In the meantime, tenemos que hacer la lucha. ¿Quién está protegiendo los ranchos de mi gente? ¿Quién está tratando de cerrar la fisura entre la india y el blanco en nuestra sangre? El Chicano, sí, el Chicano que anda como un ladrón en su propia casa.

Los Chicanos, how patient we seem, how very patient. There is the quiet of the Indian about us. 41 We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture. But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they’ve created, lie bleached. Humildes yet proud, quietos yet wild, nosotros los mexicanos-Chicanos will walk by the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain. 42

40. “La Raza Unida,” literally “The United Race” was a political party in South Texas. See note 36 earlier in this chapter.

41. Author’s note: Anglos, in order to alleviate their guilt for dispossessing the Chicano, stressed the Spanish part of us and perpetrated the myth of the Spanish Southwest. We have accepted the fiction that we are Hispanic, that is Spanish, in order to accommodate ourselves to the dominant culture and its abhorrence of Indians. Chávez, 88–91.

42. The sense of patience, survival, and vigilance in the final paragraphs connects with the conclusions to Chapters 2 and 4 and Anzaldúa’s insistence on the resilience of mestizxs.

How to Tame a Wild Tongue

120 Pa’ hallar buen trabajo . . . To find a good job you must speak English well. Your whole education can be ruined if you have an accent.

120 El Anglo con cara . . . Feigning innocence, the Anglo stripped us of our tongue.

Overcoming the Tradition of Silence

120 Ahogadas, escupimos el oscuro . . . Choked, we spit out our dark side. / Fighting with our own shadow / silence buries us.

120 Es una falta de respeto It is disrespectful

120 hablar pa’ ’trás, repelar . . . to answer back, argue. Loudmouth, complaining woman, gossip

120 mal criada ill-bred

121 nos quieren poner candados . . . want to place locks on our mouths.

121 reglas de academia rules of the academy

Oye cómo ladra: el lenguaje de la frontera Listen to How She Barks: The Language of the Borderlands

121 evolución, enriquecimiento de palabras . . . evolution, enrichment with new words coined or borrowed from other languages

121 un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje . . . a new language. A language that corresponds to a way of life.

122 los recién llegados the newly arrived

Chicano Spanish

124 lavaste las vacijas Did you wash the dishes?

124 el lenguaje popular, dialectos y regionalismos The language of the people, dialects and regionalisms

Linguistic Terrorism

124 Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente. Tongue-less women. We are those whose Spanish is deficient.

124 burla teasing

124 somos huérfanos we are orphans

125 agringadas anglicized

“Vistas,” corridos, y comida: My Native Tongue “Movies,” Ballads, and Food

127 “Vámonos a las vistas” “Let’s go to the movies”

127 bailes dances

128 la Gloria de Tejas the Glory of Texas

128 “El tango negro” “The Black Tango”

Si le preguntas a mi mamá, “¿Qué eres?” If You Ask My Mom “What Are You?”

129 nosotros los americanos . . . we the Americans, or we the Spanish, or we the Hispanics.

129 mexicanos del otro lado . . . mexicanos de este lado Mexicans from the other side and Mexicans from this side

129 Si le preguntas . . . If you ask my mom, “What are you?” she will tell you, “I am Mexican.”

129 A veces no soy nada . . . Sometimes I am nothing and nobody. But until that time, I am something and somebody.

130 tenemos que hacer la lucha. we have to fight, to go for it.

130 ¿Quién está protegiendo . . . Who is protecting my people’s ranches? Who is trying to close the fissure between the Indian and the white components in our blood? The Chicano, yes, the Chicano who is like a thief in his own house.

130 Humildes . . . quietos Humble yet proud, motionless yet wild