Paola Andino

For them Spanish is part of their identity. They are not going to give up. They can still write what they write using English or Spanish. Luis Valdes in “Zoot Suit”, is portraying the manners and ways of a particular group of people. Guillermo Peña has a similarity with Luis Valdes in the portraying of language. In contrast with Guillermo Peña and Luis Valdes, Gloria Anzaldúa has an individual/singular type of voice based on her experiences. However, Peña represents the masses of people.

Luis Valdes has a sense of experience about the Pachuco culture, he emphasizes the use of language. In Zoot Suit, Luis Valdez weaves a story involving the real-life events of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial—when a group of young Mexican-Americans were wrongfully charged with murder—and the Zoot Suit Riots. s a fast-moving, didactic play in a variety of styles that protests Chicanos’ treatment in America. Based on incidents that occurred when Pachuco gangs stirred hostility in Los Angeles during World War II, but concerned with the 1970’s as well, the play lashes society for abusing its own children. For poor, dark-skinned Mexican-Americans, injustice has become a way of life. Products of slums and victims of discrimination, Chicanos seek escape wherever they can find it—in music, dancing, drinking, and extravagant display of costume. Even Lt. Edwards, a Los Angeles policeman, discerns the root of their problem. “Slums breed crime, fellas,” he announces to an assembled group of reporters, waiting eagerly to chronicle the latest Chicano excesses for a bigoted readership. “That’s your story.” The idea that depressed surroundings produce angry, scared people, that vice and crime can be extirpated only if the environment that breeds them is abolished is hardly a new or radical notion: Benjamin Franklin taught it more than two hundred years earlier in Philadelphia.

Gloria Anzaldúa has an internal conflict as a chicana. Through out the whole reading “Wild Tongue” she uses metaphors and personal experiences to show how the English language is ridding the World of smaller languages. Also, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, by Gloria Anzaldua, is a very expressive story about a Mexican American women’s struggle to preserve her culture. Her main fight revolves around a struggle to keep a form of Spanish, called “Chicano Spanish”, a live. In the short story she says, " for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish, or standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language?"(page 55). She is stating that despite what the societies both Mexican and American want her to do she will not concede defeat.

Guillermo Tomas Peña is a chicano writer. From his reading “Tech-illa Sunrise” the reader can ask himself two questions: what does it mean to be Mexican in the U.S? What does it mean to be recognized, to

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