paired with “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”

This activity works best as a short writing assignment done outside of class, though doing some initial research together can be helpful.

Introduction

ET & JS: Gloria Anzaldúa uses a number of footnotes to trace parts of her thought journey. Some of these are a bit surprising since you don’t anticipate the connection between the Ray Gwyn Smith quote Anzaldúa includes – “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” – and The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology. My co-authors and I saw a few ways we could take this idea of branching and associating ideas to our writing that might surprise our readers.

While footnotes indexically trace punctuated moments in the body of the main text, we could also view this list as a text in and of itself, revealing layers that resonate in different ways when read apart from the body. These citations do, after all, reflect a reading and thinking journey taken by the writer and suggest other pathways that grow and splinter through writing. As much as a text reflects its author, it also carries innumerable influences and connections that we glimpse in different ways, often depending on our mode of attention. The footnotes and references are one way of marking these resonances.

Beyond coming to see Anzaldúa’s poetry through what she reads and connects, we as readers can also document the path of our own thinking by contributing footnotes that show a bit about where Anzaldúa’s writing brought our minds. This offers a great introduction to exploratory research that privileges curiosity and invites students to travel down side roads or take detours from “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” while also being grounded in that text. Perhaps they want to dig into depth about one term, person, or place that intrigues them. Maybe the reading provoked an associated thought that a student might want to connect to Anzaldúa’s thinking. Students might have another perspective or point of reference that they want to bring to exploring an idea Anzaldúa sees differently. In the end, the idea of multiplying pathways of connected thinking will help students see the richness of complicating rather than essentializing a place and its people.

Guide

Close Read: Attunement

Read the list of footnotes and references from “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” — you may want to read to yourself and annotate as you go, or have someone read aloud, or even take turns reading aloud. As you go through, listen for words or phrases that catch your attention. Don’t worry too much about why at this point, but just listen to this list as if it were a poem. If annotating by yourself, circle the words and phrases all the way through. If working in a group or as a whole class, focus your individual attention on one moment.

Then, look back at all the moments you’ve isolated. If working in a group, take turns reading just the words/phrases and listen as they are re-assembled in a “found poem.”

• What do you hear when you reassemble these words and phrases?
• What ideas emerge across the repetitions you hear?
• Can you tune in to deeper themes or issues listening just to these threads?

Research and Write: Adding My Own Footnote

Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” has many potentially interesting paths to follow. This assignment asks you to choose one tidbit from Anzaldúa’s passage that sparked your interest and provoked a genuine question which you can answer in a researched footnote.

You can frame your question any way you like, but it has to be an honest question that you actually care about. If a question doesn’t immediately come to you, it might help to think about a few common categories of questions to jog the brain:

• Origin questions: Sometimes people are curious about when and where something started.
• Motivation questions: Sometimes people want to know the context around why someone did what they did.
• Background information: Sometimes people want to understand what else is going on around an event that might help explain it.
• Reaction questions: Sometimes people are curious about what people think about an idea or event to see how it landed with an audience or community.
• Informational questions: Sometimes we are just unfamiliar with something and we’re worried that other readers are too and would benefit from a good explanation of a complicated or niche idea.
• Rebuttal questions: Sometimes we are skeptical of what we’ve read or think otherwise, so we question an author’s thinking and share another position.
• Connection questions: Sometimes we notice a relationship between what we read and other things we’ve read or noticed in our life experiences, and we wonder how those ideas might link to one another.

At the end of your footnote, include the MLA references for all the sources you used to answer your questions. Put any sources that you summarized, paraphrased, or quoted in a “Works Cited” list and any you read but didn’t directly use in a “Works Consulted” page. Aim for at least five in each.

• References from library database materials are available by clicking the “Cite” button.
• For sources you found on the broader internet, I suggest using Scribbr https://www.scribbr.com/citation/generator/mla/.