In my opinion Gloria, creates an almost impossible question because to tame a wild tongue is to conform it to a neutral almost robotic state. A wild tongue, at least in her case, is everything shes ever been before coming to the United States. All the culture shes surrounded herself in is expressed in her way of speaking and to suppress what you have always been accustomed to is very difficult. Its unfortunate to read about because an individual should never be forced to conform to a right or wrong in relation to their culture. Anzaldua’s Chicano culture was trying to be washed away as the people she was now surrounded by saw it as less then what they were but it she did not let that stop her. Throughout the story Gloria seems so insistent on not conforming, and staying true to her culture that led to her not training her tongue. The question is almost impossible as it can be done, if the individual has zero regards of where they came from and are totally okay with changing everything about themselves to fit in then taming a wild tongue is as simple as just listening to what your new surrounding tell you to do. Gloria however, makes it known that although sometimes she felt completely outcast in where she was, she made sure that she was never going to conform and would find a place where having a “wild” tongue was not just tolerated but welcomed in open arms.
Hi, thank you for sharing your perspective on this. Something I find interesting about what you said was that taming a wild tongue is most successful when “the individual has zero regards of where they came from.” This makes me think about the point that I (and some of our other classmates) have made about this “taming” being more of a generational thing that can take place over centuries. For example, some big elements of slavery in America were the erasure of the identities of the first generations of enslaved Africans and the language deprivation (they were not taught English and were severely punished for speaking their native languages). They were given new names and isolated from their native African cultures so, over the next few generations, they lost many of their native languages and began to try to learn English or form a new African-American language/dialect. In addition to the physical abuse these people faced, their “wild tongues” and minds were “tamed” or silenced.