I decided to go with the first section of the text. To go over the first section briefly, Anzaldua talks about a time when she goes to the dentist. While being there, the dentist made the remark that her tongue is stubborn. She turns this into a comparison of how people also want to suppress her language. She then talks about her experience in school. She was once caught speaking Spanish and got punished for it. When she tried correcting her teacher about the pronunciation of her name she was told to not “talk back”. She also faced this at the hands of her mother. Her mother was distraught that her daughter was speaking English like a “Mexican”. In school she was given two speech classes which she claimed were to get rid of her accent. In the end of the section, Anzaldua leaves with the remark that you can’t tame a tongue, you can only cut it.

There are many things to go over here. For example, starting off with the flashback to her in the dentist. Why did she do this? I believe she did this because she wanted to give the reader a literal example of someone trying to suppress her tongue before the examples of where people figuratively suppress her tongue. Although there is a difference of literal and figurative, I think a similarity lies within both examples. One similarity is that her tongue and language are both unpleasant to the people around her. She was able to tell that the dentist was beginning to become frustrated with her tongue, she also remarked that it did not smell good. Her language was unpleasant for her teachers, which is proven by the times she got it with a ruler for speaking Spanish, and when she is told to not “talk back” and that if she didn’t like it she should go “back to Mexico where she belongs”. I wonder why they find it so unpleasant, but we can use her getting hit with rulers as an indicator that this probably happened a while ago when discrimination was more prominent.

Another thing that stuck out to me was the phrase, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out”. To me, this is confusing. Maybe it’s a perspective discrepancy. I don’t see why you can’t “tame” your toungue by just speaking English in certain settings. However, Anzaldua could make the argument that you may have cut off your language for a brief moment. The situation does become different when we talk about accents. Im not exactly sure how you would tame an accent, so I can agree, but I don’t know how cutting a language would help.