English

ll ___

mouth

of the

GL0R1A ANzAL»oA 1-Iawto Tanie a \Vild Tongue

,,..E.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 is a motherlodc.

The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a v,foff stench when I gasp. ''I can't cap that tooth yet,

you're still draining," he says. "\Ve'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, hmv do you bridle and saddle it? Hovv do you make it lie down?

"vVho is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than ,:var?"

-B,w CvvYN Sl\11T11 1

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 comer of the classroom for "talking back" to the Anglo teacher \.vhen all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. "If you want to be Ameri­ can, speak 'American.' If you don't like it, go back to Mexico where you belong."

"I ,-vant you to speak English. Pa'hallar buen tmbajo tienes que saber hablar 5 el ingles hien. Que vale toda tu educaci6n si todavia hablas ingles con un 1accent,' '' 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 viola­ tion of the First Amendment. El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arranc6 la lengua. Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.

OVERCOMING THE TRADITION OF SILENCE

Ahogadas; escupim,os el oscuro. Peleando con. nuestra propia s01nbra el silencio nos sepulta.

En boca cerrada no entran m.oscas. "Flies don't enter a closed mouth" is a saying I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora ,vas to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. J\!Iucliachitas bien criaclas, well-bred girls don't answer

Fro111Borderlands/La Frontera (]987), esslfys mu/ 11ie111oirs11 collection of experi111e11tal that combine English, Spcuzish, and Chicano Spanish. All 1wles are the mitlwr's.The m1tl10r has ashed that no translations of Spanish or Chicano Spanish be inclmlecl.

L Ray Gwyn Smith, Moorland Is Cold Country, unpublished book.

411

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.f I2 CI. 0 HI,\ i\ :'s ZJ\ L ll Lt\

back. Es 111m falta de respeto to talk back to one's mother or father. I remember one of the sins J'd recite to the priest in the confession box the few times went to confession: talking back to my mother, hablar pa' 'tras, repelar. Hoci­ co1w, repelu,w, chis111osa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being mal cricula. In my culture they are all vvords that are deroga­ tory if applied to \H>men-I\,e never heard them applied to men.

The first time [ heard t\\'o women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the vmrd "nosotras,'' I was shocked. I had not knmvn the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros \\'hether 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 \cvilderness has dried out our tongues and we have forgotten speech.

-IHENA K1.1:PI ISi.'

Even our ovvn people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la hoca. They wou Id hold us back with their bag of reglas de acade1nia.

Oye coma Zadra: el lenguaje de la frontera

Ouien tiene boca se elJ11ivoca.

-;\lEXIC:1\N S.'\YINC;

IO "Pacho, cultural traitor, you're speaking the oppressor's language by speak- ing English, you're ruining the Spanish language," I have been accused by vari­ ous 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, evoluci6n, enriqueciniiento de palabras nuevas por invenci6n o adopci6n have created variants of Chicano Spanish, mz nuevo lenguaje. Un lengua}e que corr­ es12q11dea.im nwdo 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 v,1hich Span­ ish 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, Castilian) 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 ,,.,ith terms that are neither espaiiol ni ingles, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages.

2. Irena Klcpfisz, "Di ray::e alieym/The Journey Home," in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish \Vomen's Anthology, i\lelanic Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, eds. (Montpelier, VT: Sinister \i\lisdom Books, l 986), .+9.

How To TAI\IE ,\ \i\ 1 1Ln To;--.;ca.:1.::

Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos' need to identify ourselves as a distinct people. We needed a language with ,vhich 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 Midv, 1est and the East. And because we are a complex, heterogeneous people, we speak many languages. Some of the languages we speak are:

I. Standard English

2. Workino class and slano Enolish b b b

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

8. Pachuco (called cal6)

My "home" tongues are the languages I speak with my sister and brothers, vvith my friends. They are the last five listed, viith 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 l\!Jamagrande Locha and from reading Spanish and Mexican literature, I've picked up Standard Spanish and Standard Mexi­ can Spanish. From los recien llegados, Mexican immigrants, and braceros, 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 Mexico or Arizona I will speak Chicano Span- l 'i i~h a little, but often they don't understand what I'm saying. With most Califor- nia Chicanas I speak entirely in English (unless I forget). When I first moved to San Francisco, I'd rattle off something in Spanish, unintentionally embarrass- ing 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 recon­ structs the language according to the influence of English. 3 Tex-Mex, or Span­ glish, 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.

3. R. C. Ortega, Dialectologia Del Barrio, trans. Hortencia S. Alwan (Los Angeles, CA: R. C. Ortega Publisher & Bookseller, 1977), 132.

. .p4 CLORI/\ ;\~Z/\LDL'A

From kids and people my own age I picked up Paclmco. Paclinco (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, elude means no, si1116nmeans yes, chum is sure, talk is periquiar, pigionear means

Pettino- que aaclw means how nerdy ponte aauila means \Vatch out death isb' b ' (.._, ' called la pelona. Through lack of practice and not having others who can speak it, I've lost most of the Paclmco tongue.

CHICANO SPANISH

Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization, have developed signifi­ cant 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 niaiz/ maiz, cohetelcuete. We leave out certain consonants when they appear between vowels: ladollao, mojadolmojao. Chicanos from South Texas pronouncedf as j as in jue (Jue). Chicanos use "archaisms," words that are no longer in the Spanish language, words that have been evolved out. \i\fe say senws, truje, haiga, ansina, and 11aiden. We retain the "archaic'' j, as in jalar, that derives from an earlier h (the French halar or the Germanic halon v,1hich 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 Hernan Cortes was one of them-and Andaluda. Andalucians pronounce ll like a y, and their d's tend to be absorbed by adjacent vowels: tirado becomes tirao. They brought el lenguaje popular, dialectos y regionalisnws. 4 )

Chicanos and other Spanish speakers also shift ll toy and z to s.5 We leave out initial syllables, saying tar for estar, toy for estoy, hara for ahora (cubanos and puertorriqueiios also leave out initial letters of some words). \i\Tealso 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 v,1e'll say lavaste las vacijas, other times lavates (substituting the ates verb endings for the aste).

20 We use anglicisms, words borrowed from English: bola from ball, carpeta from carpet, 111,achina de lavar (instead of lavaclora) from washing machine. Tex-Mex argot, created by adding a Spanish sound at the beginning or end of an English word such as coohiar for cook, watcliar for watch, parldar for park,

4. Eduardo Hernandez-Chavez, Andrew 0. Cohen, and Anthony F. Beltramo, El Len­ guaje de los Chicanos: Regional and Social Characteristics of Language Used by Mexican Americans (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1975), 39.

5. Hernandez-Chavez, xvii.

and rapiar for rape, is the result of the pressures on Spanish speakers to adapt to English.

\,Ve don't use the word vosotroslas or its accompanying verb form. \,Ve don't say claro (to mean yes), imaginate, or me emocio11a, unless we picked up Span­ ish from Latinas, out of a book, or in a classroom. Other Spanish-speaking groups arc going through the same, or similar, development in their Spanish.

LINGLJISTIC TERRORISM

Deslenguadas. Somos los del espaiiol deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic n1esti::aje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of flre we are cu !tu rally cru­ cified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos hue,fanos-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 hesi­ tation. 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 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 dimin­ ish 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.

7 If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she 25 I also has a low estimation of me. Often with niexicanas 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. 6 By the

6. Irena Klepfisz, "Secular Jewish Identity: Yidishkayt in America," in The Tribe of Dina, Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepflsz, eds., 43.

I

CLOHii\ /\:'>:Zi\LD0A

end of this century English, and not Spanish, vvill be the mother tongue of most Chicanos and Latinos.

So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic iden­ tity 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 legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-iVlcx and all the other languages speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until l am free to write bilin­ ouall)' and to switch codes without havino alwavs to translate while I still t, b J '

have to speak English or Spanish when I vmuld 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 \".1ill no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. l ,vill have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue-1ny woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

My fingers move sly against your palm Like ,,,omen everywhere, we speak in code ....

7-1\] i'.l.i\N IE KAYl.:fKAN'fROWITZ

"Vistas," corridos, y co1nida: My Native Tongue

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. For days I v.ralked around in stunned amazement that a Chicano could write and could get published. \\Then I read I Ani ]oaquin 8 I was surprised to see a bilingual book by a Chicano in print. When I savv 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 stu­ dents, I tried to supplement the required texts with ,vorks by Chicanos, only to bg reprimanded and forbidden to do so by the principal. He claimed that I was 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. "Vtimonos a las vistas," my mother would call out and we'd all-grandmother, brothers, sister and cousins-squeeze into the

7. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, ''Sign," in We Speah in Code: Poems and Other \Vritings (Pittsburgh, PA: !Vlotheroot Publications, Inc., 1980), 85.

8. Rodolfo Gonzales, I Am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquin (Ne,,v York, NY: Bantam Books, ] 972). lt was first published in 1967.

I

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I !ovv To TAi\IE A \V11.n To.';CL'F

car. We'd wolf clown cheese and bologna white bread sandwiches while watch­ ing Pedro Infante in melodramatic tear-jerkers like Nosotros los pobres, the first ''real'' Mexican movie (that was not an imitation of European movies). remember seeing Cuando los hijos se van and surmising that all Mexican mov­ ies 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 Mejfa. 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 or tune their radios to holero, rancherita, and corrido music.

The whole time I was growing up, there was norteFzo 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, ba_jo sexto, 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. In the Rio Grande Val­ ley, Steve Jordan and Little Joe Hernandez 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, ,,vho in turn had borrowed the polka from the Czechs and Bohemians.

I remember the hot, sultry evenings '-'vhen 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.

Corridos first became widely used along the South Texas/Mexican border during the early conflict between Chicanos and Anglos. The corridos are usu­ ally about Mexican heroes who do valiant deeds against the Anglo oppressors. Pancho Villa's song, "La cucaracha," is the most famous one. 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 Depres­ sion, ml'.ldeher a sing~_r oJ the people. The everpresent corridos narrated one hundred years of border history, bringing news of events as well as entertain­ ing. These folk musicians and folk songs are our chief cultural myth makers, 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 agrin­ gado 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 T 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

CLORIJ\ ANZALDL'J\

reek of cordite. Homemade v,,hite cheese sizzling in a pan, melting inside a folded tortilla. My sister Hilda's hot, spicy menuda, chile colonulo making it deep red, pieces of panza and hominy floating on top. My brother Carito bar­ becuingfajitas in the backyard. Even now and 3,000 miles away, I can see my mother spicing the ground beef, pork and venison with chiLe. My mouth sali­ vates at the thought of the hot steaming tamales I vvould be eating if I were home.

S . l · .,, "0 ,,, ...,,t e preguntas a nu 1nania, ~-ue eres( "Identity is the essential core of who we are as individuals, the conscious experience of the self inside."

-KAUF;\L\N 9

Nosotros LosChicanos 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 our­ selves we don't say nosotros las americmws, o nosotros las espaiioles, o nosotms las hispanos. We say nosotros los niexicanos (by mexicanos we do not mean citi­ zens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity, but a racial one). vVe dis­ tinguish 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 coun­ try 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 dire quien eres. (Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are.)

-i\ilEXICAN SAYING

Si le preguntas a 1ni mama, '2Que eres?" te dira, ''Soy mexicana." My brothers and sister say the same. I sometimes will answer "soy mexicana'' and at others

·11 " Cl · " " · " B I 'd 'fi d "R " b f Iw1 •Say soy . iicana o. soy teJana.. ut. 1 ent1 e. as aza . e ·o.re. ever identified as "mexicana" or "Chicana."

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 predomi­ nant Indian genes. We are 70 to 80% Indian. 10 We call ourselves Hispanic 11 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 12 to signify we are neither Mexican nor

9. Kaufman, 68.

10. Chavez, 88-90.

1l. "Hispanic" is derived from Hispanis (Espafia, 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.

12. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo created the Mexican-American in 1848.

How To TAME A \1\11LD To Neu E

American, but more the noun "American" than the adjective ''Mexican" (and vvhen copping out).

Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturat­ ing. 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 n 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 liasta ciiando 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 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 Joaquin was published and la Raza Unida party was formed in Texas. 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. \\Te began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become.

Yet the struggle of identities continues, the struggle of borders is our real­ ity still. One day the inner struggle will cease and a true integration take place. In the meantime, tenenios que hacerla lucha. ~Quien esta protegiendo los ran­ chos de mi gente? ~Qiiien esta tratando de cerrar la fisura entre la india y el blanco en nuestra sangre? El Chicano, sf, el Chicano que anda conio un ladr6n en su propia casa.

Los Chicanos, how patient we seem, how very patient. There is the quiet of the Indian about us. 13 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 norteaniericano 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. Hiimildes yet proud, qiiietos yet wild, nosotros los mexicanos­ Chicanos will walk by the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stub­ born, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the niestizas and mestizos, will remain.

13. 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. \Ve 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. Chavez, 88-91.

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