How to tame a wild tongue...

The readying “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua it was a little difficult for me to read, there was a lot of Mexican sayings, most of them were in Spanish, but even if I speak Spanish sometimes it was hard for me to understand some of the sayings. For instance “Ahogadas, escupimos al oscuro. Peleando con nuestra propia sombra el silencio nos sepulta” (103). After Anzaldua writes the saying and then in the paragraph that follows the saying explains a little how that saying relates to her or her life. It took me a while to figure out the meaning of this saying. At first I was readying over and over those same lines, but I just could not understand, then I just when ahead and start readying the paragraph. I finished the whole story and then I came back to read that same saying. Then I read the following paragraph again then that was when my bulb turned on. When I saw the subtitle that said “The Tradition Of Silence”(103) gave me the entire understanding of the saying. There, in the saying she’s talking about the women, that when they can’t take it anymore, that they feel that that’s all they can take and that they need to explode, that’s when they feel ahogadas which means drowned and escupimos al oscuro means we spit to the dark, which is referring that they just say what they have all inside without realizing to how they are saying it or who is around them.  Peleando con nuestra propia sombra el silencio nos sepulta is fighting with our own shadow the silence bury us, meaning that if they stay quiet and they just keep it to themselves then that of course we know that little by little would start making a negative impact in their lives. Although some saying I could not understand nor interpret them the story gave me an understanding of the point Anzaldua wanted to get across. There was many things in the story that I didn’t understood at once, so it required me to go for a second read. One of the things that required me to go and read it again was that Chicanos speak many languages “and the languages we speak are:  1. Standard English, 2. Working class and slang English, 3. Standard Mexican Spanish, 5. North Mexican Spanish dialect, 6. Chicano Spanish…,  7. Tex-Mex, 8. Pachuco(called calo)” (105).this really attracted me the first time I read it, although I did not clearly understood what was really saying or all those tipes of languages Anzaldua was talking about but in some way I knew it was true and therefore important. As I was reading through it the second time, it made think that all those languages as she calls it are true. This reading made me realize many things that I as a Mexican American are part of my identity and who I am. And me, like many others, I think we can relate somewhat to Anzaldua story.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

The Gender Roles In My Family...

My family is composed by five daughters, so in the house the dominant gender is us, the girls. Of course since little girls we were always taught that since we were girls we had to be more quiet, but my dad always said that just because we are girls that doesn’t mean that we cannot express our minds. In fact, he always encouraged us to speak up our minds and to not be looked down by anyone just because we’re girls. Of course I was always hearing things like “get down of that tree, you’re not  a boy”  or “only boys do that, girls don’t” or “if you were a boy, it would be a different thing”. All this things that I would hear from the elders, sometimes made me wish to be a boy. One time my dad told me that when my mom was pregnant of me everyone wish for me to be a boy, since my parents had had two little girls now they wanted a boy, a boy to take over my dad in the future when he grow older. When I was little I always wondered: what can guys do that we girls can’t? As I grew up, I saw that we were treated in some way different that guys. Even if in my family always were trying to educate my cousins and all of us the same, they could not help making some exceptions. When my cousins, the guys, wanted to go somewhere they would always give them permission to go, but when us the girls ask for permission to go, they were always denied permission. They would say that we cannot go alone, that we needed someone else to go with us. To me that was really unfair, that was one of the reasons why I didn’t like family reunions or vacations with my mom’s or dad’s family. Since my parents only had girls, they always treated us equally and they would always tell us to do what we wanted to do, that gender did not had to be a barrier for us, that we always had to follow our dreams. All this differences on gender helped on shaping my identity. Now I know there is some differences, guys can be a little stronger and therefore can do some things that girls can’t, but us girls, can also do thighs that guys can’t and that is where we complement. We all need from everyone, so there is no reason why we have to be treated differently. I believe that we can all do whatever we want only if we try. We just have to believe in ourselves and go for whatever we want to go for and we will get it with faith and support from the ones that are always there by our side, like our parents.

Revised...

While analyzing scene one, the first part of the story, it introduces a man about thirty five years of age standing on a bridge in northern Alabama. He had his hands behind him tied. He was standing in that bridge about to be hung. Everything was ready for the lynching they were only waiting for “a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties” (p 32).  His face was not cover nor his eyes not were bandaged, so he was clearly aware and could see what was happening around him, so he closed his eyes in order to focus and “fix his last thoughts on his wife and children” (p 32). Now, Farquhar was thinking of his family. Something that before he might have not thought about, like if something happened to him what was his wife and children were going to do without him. Having his thoughts on his family, a really loud noise on the background  distracted him from his thoughts, he wondered what it was, the sound was similar to a blacksmith’s hammer hitting on to the anvil. Every time he heard that noise he was became more and more impatience and he did not know why. The silence grew longer which this allowed the noise to be heard more clearly and louder to his ears. The noise was hurting his ears already of how loud it was, but in reality what he was really hearing “was the ticking of his watch” (p 33). That noise that the book says was the ticking of his watch was because he didn’t have any more time left. He was living his last moments and he was running out of time. He opened his eyes and faced the reality; he was still in the bridge waiting for the signal to be hung. Bierce gives a lot of details that leaves a clear picture of the scene, and I think this is very important so we, all the readers, could understand the thoughts of Farquhar and what happens in the next scenes. I think this scene is very important for the whole story because it is where the author sets the story. He has to plot the scenario in a really good way, so the readers can have a better understanding of the story and how it develops.

“Open Letter”

The “Open letter to President McKinley” written by the colored people of Massachusetts describes how the colored people were being treated in the united states, mainly in the south. And now they, the color people, were approaching to the president since the states and everywhere throughout the south their rights as citizens were being denied. Through this letter they were letting him know once again clarifying that he did not ignored this “you have seen our sufferings, witnessed from your high place our awful wrongs and miseries” and yet, he had done nothing about it. Now they were asking for the execution of all their rights guaranteed to them by the constitution and laws of the union, the “protection, security in our life, our liberty, and in the pursue of our individual and social happiness under a government” (p 45). They also described how they were suffering and all the ways they were suffering. They were saying that it wasn’t their fault that more than two hundred years of involuntary  servitude which produced ignorance, poverty, and degradation, and just because of the color of their skin didn’t deserve any rights, if they were as much as humans as the whites, and therefore as much as citizens. The letter also says that how they can call themselves Christians, having all that hate and acting with so much violence against the color people; indeed they were all equal, that they were all God’s children from whom Jesus died. They bring to their minds various recent cases where they rights of the blacks were denied “events in Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, and Louisiana, as well as in Georgia and the Carolinas, indeed throughout the south” (p 50). An example of these atrocities was a crime committed in Georgia where a negro charged with murder assault was taken quiet from his captors and “burned to death with indescribable and hellish cruelty in the presence of cheering thousands of the so- called best people of Georgia, men, women and children who had gone forth on the Christian Sabbath to the burning of a human being as to a country festival and holyday of innocent enjoyment and amusement” (p 49).    Having put all those examples of the oppression they were living, then they go ahead and bring up the Cuban revolution. They stated that how can he and the congress had helped Cuba by helping them with their independence from Spain and  acknowledging that they had the rights to be free, and how and why couldn’t they  help the Negros in their own country to practice their rights. They also emphasized that if he had the will to impose the rights to the freedmen then he had a way to do so. They wrote “where there is will with the constitutional lawyers and rulers there is always a way, and where there is no will, there is no way” (p 47). By saying this, they laid all the responsibility, and final hopes on him.