August 17, 2026

Keep Your Serpent's Tongue

I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue—my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

Gloria Anzaldúa wrote these words in "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," an essay in Borderlands/La Frontera, published in 1987. She grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where teachers punished her for speaking Spanish and relatives told her a proper woman kept quiet. This line is her refusal of that shame, a declaration that she would hold Indian, Spanish, white, queer, and female all at once instead of cutting herself down to something more acceptable. Her insistence on wholeness over assimilation still models what integrity looks like when the pressure to soften yourself never really goes away.