Most people wonder what makes someone to be considered American. Is it the skin colour or the ability to speak English fluently? Or is it the fact that the ancestors of the subject person migrated to America a hundred years later than most? Two great women who happen to be descendants of immigrants share their stories of growing up in America. The first one is Gloria Anzaldua, who shared her story in the first chapter of her book Borderlands.
The story is titled “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” She describes her life as a young Spanish woman who is too Spanish for Americans and too American for Spanish (Anzaldúa 35). The second personality is Amy Tan, a daughter of Chinese immigrants who fled China in the 1940s. In her work, “Mother Tongue” ” she recalls growing up with a mother who could not speak the English language fluently (Tan 261). Regardless of the fact that these two personalities come from two different backgrounds, they both express their experiences in America regarding their language. Both convey the idea that the language we use in all aspects of life shapes us as individuals. This paper will discuss the meaning of literacy and why it is essential with regard to the works of Gloria Anzaldua and Amy Tan.
Literacy entails an individual being able to read and write. It includes the competence or knowledge in a specified area. When a person is at home, he or she tends to let his or her guard down and, therefore, speak carelessly, thus making the language used to sound different from the language the same person speaks while in an official setup. Tan uses an example of her walking down the street with her mother, and she uses a language different from the one she usually uses when they are at home. She also states that this is the same language she uses with her husband. She argues that the language has become their language of intimacy (Tan 261). The exposure she got to the educational systems helped her better her language, therefore developing the ability to communicate with other people who are outside the family loop.
Anzaldua has a similar opinion when it comes to the language people tend to use when they are with their families. She writes in her work that “My home tongues are the languages I speak with my brothers and sisters.” (Anzaldúa 35). These two women were able to train themselves on the two different sides of language to blend in perfectly with their surroundings. They could put on a mask in the outside world until they were home, where they could use the language they grew up with without fear of being judged.
The importance of literacy, as shown in the two essays by Tan and Anzaldua, is chiefly the ability to blend into the outside world. Every person, at one point, is supposed to get out into the outside world and be able to coexist with other people from different backgrounds. The ability to speak English fluently and without any accent makes a person able to communicate in the work environment. Effective literacy skills open doors to more educational and employment opportunities. People are, therefore, able to pull themselves and their families out of poverty and chronic underemployment. Consequently, it is necessary that every person learns new skills to keep up with the changes in his or her surrounding environment.
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: la frontera. Vol. 3. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, (1987) 33-45
Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue, by Amy Tan.” The World Is a Text: The Writing, Reading, and Thinking about Culture and Its Contexts (2005): 261.
