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Part 1, Section 4: La herencia de Coatlicue / The Coatlicue State
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Borderlands / La Frontera, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Borders, Hybridity, and Identity
History and the U.S.-Mexico Relationship
Chicana Feminism
Language, Storytelling, and Ritual
Summary
Analysis
While Anzaldúa is having dental work done, her tongue starts wandering around her mouth and getting in the dentist’s way. He calls her tongue stubborn, and she asks, “how do you tame a wild tongue?” In school, she was punished for speaking Spanish, and in college, she and other Chicano students were forced to take accent-reduction classes. “Wild tongues can’t be tamed,” she concludes, just “cut out.”
Anzaldúa’s stubborn tongue represents her refusal to express herself and use language in the ways that are expected of her. Of course, the clearest example of this is the way she juxtaposes English, Spanish, and different dialects thereof throughout her book. Here, she will explain that decision and its importance for her—which makes this section particularly significant for audiences who do not read Spanish.
Themes
Overcoming the Tradition of Silence. In Anzaldúa’s culture, young women are taught to speak little and never talk back to adults—especially men. There is no similar expectation for boys. To talk about a group of themselves, Chicana women even use the masculine “nosotros” instead of the feminine “nosotras.”
Disciplining people’s use of language is a way to restrict their sense of identity and empowerment. But this means that taking charge of one’s language can also be a step towards liberating oneself from oppression. For instance, as Chicana women are taught to stay silent and use the male plural “nosotros,” speaking out and reclaiming “nosotras” are both paths to empowerment through language.
Themes
Oye cómo ladra: el lenguaje de la frontera. Many people treat Chicano Spanish as a deficient form of the language, or even as a mixture of Spanish and English. But actually, it’s a natural living language that people developed to fit their specific way of life and unite their identity as a community all around the US. Still, many Chicanos speak several other dialects too, including standard, vernacular, and regional versions of both English and Spanish. Anzaldúa finds that only people like her—Chicanos from Texas—really understand her regional dialect of Chicano Spanish. Spanglish (or “Tex-Mex”) feels most natural to her, and her school classmates taught her Pachuco, a slang dialect full of codewords.
Reclaiming Chicano Spanish is not only a way for Anzaldúa to express her own authentic voice, but also a way to assert that Chicano identity is legitimate. Too often, Chicanos are defined negatively, as not-fully American and not-fully Mexican, in part because their language is measured against the standardized versions of English and Spanish used in the US and Mexico. By instead defining Chicano Spanish positively on its own terms, as the unique product of a particular group’s distinct history and identity, Anzaldúa hopes to help Chicanos define themselves positively, too.
Themes
Chicano Spanish. Chicano Spanish’s pronunciation and vocabulary differ from standard Spanish; many of its traits are actually closer to medieval Spanish. This is partially because the Spaniards who colonized North America mostly came from southern Spain, partially because the language has evolved in isolation ever since, and partially because of English influence.
This quick history lesson is crucial to understanding Anzaldúa’s defense of Chicano Spanish: the dialect is not some new Borderlands phenomenon but has been distinct and followed a unique evolutionary path for hundreds of years. Its speakers have not arbitrarily chosen to reject standardized Spanish. Rather, unlike virtually every other Spanish-speaking people in the world, Chicanos have never actually had standard Spanish imposed on them by the state and education system, and so they have managed to preserve unique features that were suppressed everywhere else.
Themes
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Linguistic Terrorism. Anzaldúa calls Chicano Spanish an “orphan tongue.” Chicana women often internalize the belief that their language is illegitimate and inferior. They often fear speaking it with each other because of their shame; when they meet Latinas who grew up in Spanish-speaking countries, they often switch to English. But they also fight “to out-Chicano each other,” even though there are diverse Chicano experiences and dialects.
Anzaldúa calls Chicano Spanish an “orphan tongue” because it has been cut off from its relatives—other Spanish dialects—for almost 200 years, ever since the southwest entered American hands in the mid-1800s and English became the official language of government and education. It has no special political, educational, or artistic and literary institutions to protect it—or, at least, it didn’t when Anzaldúa was writing. Now, thanks in large part to her, the situation has changed.
Themes
Anzaldúa’s linguistic and ethnic identities go hand in hand: she cannot take pride in one until she takes pride in the other, too. In turn, the world has not truly accepted her as legitimate until it allows her to speak in her own dialect without having to translate to accommodate others. Lastly, writing in her authentic voice is also a way to “overcome the tradition of silence” that has so long limited Chicana women.
Anzaldúa presents this essay’s thesis, which is also a manifesto defending the linguistic strategy she employs throughout her life and work. She writes in her own unique, unruly, and sometimes inaccessible Chicano Spanish precisely because her people cannot be measured by the dominant culture’s standards—and in order to help them develop their own.
Themes
“Vistas,” corridos, y comida: My Native Tongue. Anzaldúa felt “pure joy” when she first discovered bilingual Chicano fiction and poetry, but throughout her career, colleagues and advisors have treated Chicano literature as an unserious subject and even questioned whether it counts as American. As a child she also felt a strong affinity for norteño music, which mixes Mexican folk forms with features borrowed from Texas’s German immigrants, including polka rhythms and the accordion. Corridos, songs about the Borderlands and its history, are the “chief cultural mythmakers” for Tejanos. Anzaldúa also describes the sounds and smells of her childhood—woodsmoke, cow manure, a hunting rifle shot, and of course dishes like menudo, fajitas, and tamales.
Anzaldúa dedicated a lifetime to making Chicano culture, language, and literature into legitimate objects of study through her teaching and scholarship. But this crucial detail is easy to miss, since she does not write about her career anywhere else in the book. (Her hard work has paid off, considering that, largely due to her work, universities across the US—and particularly in the southwest—now have Chicano Studies departments.) Her commentary on corridos shows that Chicano identity is not just about elements of Mexican culture that have persisted in the US since the conquest of the southwest: it’s also about the particular cultural influences that have shaped that region since. In Tejanos’ case, this includes German culture. Yet it’s noteworthy that Texans of German ancestry were able to integrate into the mainstream white culture, and so are no longer considered foreign or un-American in the same way as Tejanos, who have been there for much longer.
Themes
Si le preguntas a mi mamá, “¿Qué eres?” Chicanos generally call themselves “mexicanos,” but they use this word to refer to race and culture, not nationality. They sometimes use other words—like “Spanish” and “Latin American” to emphasize a shared linguistic identity, or “Mexican-American” to emphasize their belonging in the US. But these other terms don’t capture Chicanos’ indigenous heritage, or the way they blend Mexican and Anglo cultures. Chicano (or “Raza”) identity started to consolidate throughout the Southwest in the 1960s, but many Chicanos still struggle to accept all the different aspects of their culture. Anglo society still treats them as outsiders, but they refuse to give up their language and culture.
Anzaldúa emphasizes that Chicano identity is not singular or uniform. Rather, they identify with different groups depending on context and circumstance. This isn’t unique to Chicanos—for instance, white Americans also sometimes identify with the US (or a particular region of it), sometimes with their ethnic origins, sometimes with their Anglophone counterparts around the world, and so on. For Anzaldúa, taking Chicanos seriously as a group of course means embracing this border-crossing complexity—even if it may seem confusing or overwhelming to people outside the community. Lastly, readers should remember that Anzaldúa published this book in the 1980s, and the US’s Chicana/o and Latina/o populations have grown substantially and found a much stronger political voice in recent decades.
Themes
