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 do something about your tongue.” (75). The closing sentence, “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” (75) sets the tone for the rest of the chapter.

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 lists off various idiomatic expressions and words decrying women for talking too much; “Language is a male discourse,” says Anzaldúa (76).

Chicano Spanish, with its mix of English and Spanish, is a border tongue, sometimes derided by Latinos and Latinas. It is a patois, a “forked tongue” (77) that identified Chicanos as a people, becoming the homeland they lacked. She lists the various forms of official and vernacular English and Spanish she speaks, explaining that “Tex-Mex, or Spanglish” (78) comes most naturally to her. She acutely details all the linguistic specificities of Chicano Spanish: the collapsing of syllables, the shifting of stresses, the use of words brought over from medieval Spain due to South Texas’s geographic isolation.