Language and identity , English composition 1 - Essay Example

In "Borderlands/La Frontera', Anzaldua portrays 'the border' as where multiple cultures, es, races, creeds, edge or confront each other. The border is both the space between cultures, classes, races, sexual orientations - the slash - and the place where they join and mix, where they are both sides of the slash and neither side of it. This marginalized space is a space of negations, a space between and disruptive of defined categories of any identity formations. Her reactions to this Multilanguage text range from anger at not being able to understand at the valuation of Spanish as an academic language.

Anzaldua's essay is concerned with naming - but not 'mapping' - the multiplicity of identity formations she occupies simultaneously and contradictorily. She agrees with the (post)structuralist view that language speaks us, and that the languages we speak define our identity, our cultural make-up, our ideologies, and our definition of self. "Language is a homeland", Anzaldua says (1999, p. 895). She asserts that 'ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity - I am my language" (p. 898). But those who occupy 'the border', those who have multiple and conflicting subject positions or identity categories - such as Chicana lesbian - are 'deslanguadas' [without language] according to Anzaldua: "Somos los del espanol deficiente" (p. 897). We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestizaje, the subject of your burla.

Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huerfanos - we speak an orphan tongue (p. 897). Anzaldua's own essay, in English and in Spanish - sometimes translated, sometimes not - embodies her answer to the problem of dominant and subordinated languages and identities. Her concept of 'mita y mita' - half and half (p. 890). Anzaldua sees her linguistic mixture, her 'lenguaje mestiza' as a mode of empowerment, rejecting both sides of a choice structured as a binary opposition.

In her text, as in her multiple identity positions, Anzaldua is constantly slipping in and out of two or more worlds and world-views, and she claims this slippage as a form of power: 'Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking (p. 890). For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift. I discovered that Anzaldua is deliberate in her choice of language for her text.

Anzaldua writers in the preface to Borderlands/La Frontera: "The switching of 'codes' in this book from English to Castillian Spanish to the North Maxican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl to a mixture of all of these reflects my language, a new language - the language of the Borderlands". I come to see that according to Anzaldua's view of the self there are necessary connections between myself, my body, my culture, and language(s) I speak. I was someone for whom language (had) implied freedom, while I nonetheless recognized that others have had language and literature used against them, to keep them in their place, to mystify, to bully, to make them feel powerless.

References:Anzaldua, Gloria. (1999) 'La Frontera Borderlands'. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press, pp. 890-900