Borderlands La Frontera

The epigraph for Chapter 5 is by Ray Gwyn Smith, sharing an anecdote of being at a dentist who keeps declaring, “We’re going to have to do something about your tongue.” (75). The closing sentence reads, “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” (75).

Anzaldúa describes getting in trouble for speaking Spanish in elementary school; at Pan American University, she had to take speech classes to get rid of her accent. She then lists off various idiomatic expressions and words that decry women for talking too much. “Language is a male discourse” (76), says Anzaldúa.

Chicano Spanish, with its mix of English and Spanish, is a border tongue, sometimes derided by Latinx people. It is a patois, a “forked tongue” that identifies Chicanos as a people, becoming the homeland they lack. She lists the various forms of official and vernacular English and Spanish she speaks, explaining that “Tex-Mex, or Spanglish” comes most naturally to her (78). She acutely details all the linguistic specificities of Chicano Spanish: the collapsing of syllables, the shifting of stresses, and the use of words brought over from medieval Spain due to South Texas’s geographic isolation.