How to Tame a Wild Tongue is a chapter from a book called Borderlands. The chapter is about the author Gloria Anzaldua describing her upbringing in 2 separate, different cultures. Her mother tongue is Chicano Spanish which is a language that is considered to be inferior in society and is oppressed and subaltern. Growing up in the United States, the author herself had to learn English and conform to the language as in school she was forced to speak English while she was being pulled away a certain distance from her native Chicano Spanish, which was a discriminated language.
From my class discussion, one key quote that I can takeaway from the text which had a lot of meaning was "Because we speak a language of fire, we are culturally crucified". The key from this quote was to really analyze the meaning of "language of fire" and since the quote refers to her native Chicano Spanish, it can be identified that it's an oppressed language. Language of fire means a language of a culture that has been discriminated and/or colonized which indicates that it's a language that it losing it's speakers and declining. Language of fire also relates to a language "being burned in fire" as people who speak a language of fire are forced to leave their language, conform to a new culture and learn a new language since their language is inferior in the social class and doesn't hold any power.In this case, Chicano Spanish in the story is a language of culture since people like the author herself are forced to stray away from their native tongue.Culturally crucified means a subaltern culture that is discriminated and therefore a possibly abandoned. In the text, being culturally crucified refers to Anzaldua herself having to move away from her own culture and conform to another one (American in this case). In this case of being culturally crucified, killing your own culture and leaving it can most likely be beneficial for the person him/her self as it reduces their chances of being victims of racism and being discriminated. Crucifying a culture means killing it and burning a culture into ashes since the culture is not a culture that seen in a bright light and is generally respected in society and with that the language itself follows and will also be burned as it holds a big part of what the culture exactly is.
The story and the quote itself relates to language and power because when looking at just languages in the world, we are able to recognize the most spoken languages (English, Spanish, Arabic etc) and we can see what power they hold and what great positions those languages are since they are spoken in multiple countries other than their origins. From this story we can now see the other end of the spectrum as looking at Chicano Spanish, you can identify with a language that serves as more of a disadvantage than advantage and is considered to be inferior and a language that can possibly lose its speakers and overall its heart. I can also relate this to real life as back in Sydney, I had a Thai-Australian friend who didn't want to learn Thai since he felt that the language serves more as a disadvantage and that only speaking English was better for him than speaking both English and his mother tongue and he pretty much felt in a similar situation to the author.
