The How Question (using Anzaldua) in 150 words or less.
Gloria Anzaldua creates a staccato, rapidly shifting and strident story-telling style in "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" to support her position that Chicano language and identity should not simply be accepted but that they will, eons hence, triumph.
Anzaldua hits her audience rapid-fire with stories - three in paragraphs four and five alone - of discrimiation against and resistence from her tongue, Spanish. Increasing the staccato, she alternates between English and Spanish, driving home her points not once but twice: " En boca cerrada no entran moscas. 'Flies don't enter a closed mouth.'"
She is both nostalgic and strident. She strings nostalgic images of the manure, sizziling cheese and the crack of a .22 rifle from her homeland as easily as she reminds the reader "we mestizas and mestizos, will remain" after norteano-americano society falls.
The "intent to censor [is] a violation of the First Amendment" she says, and backs it up using plain Span-gilsh the reader can understand.
