Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed by Saraciea J. Fennell (ed.) is tough for me to grade. As many of the other reviewers have mentioned in the past, anthologies can be a struggle to evaluate because invariably some stories are going to resonate more than others.
But also I struggled because, despite being Latina, I did not feel like the target audience for this book. The primary aim of this anthology of essays is breaking down the falsehood that the existence of Latinx people is a monolith—in other words, that all Latinx people are the same. The fiction is that we have the same values and lived experiences, or that we even agree that Latinx is how we should refer to ourselves (or that there is even an “ourselves”)!
It’s not that I know everything or have never somehow participated in (or accepted) the marginalization of myself or others; I just have spent a fair bit of time thinking about Latinidad in the context of me and that self-education left me feeling underserved by many of the stories in the anthology.
In a lot of ways Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed functions as an 101 Introduction to Latinidad class. It talks of the existence of Afro-Latinos, of Latinos who can’t speak Spanish, of code switching towards and away from legibility as Latinx to blend with classmates and communities, of lost histories, of indigeneity, of colorism, of accepting naked racism from loved ones and then shaking free of such carelessly violent interactions. But overwhelmingly, I felt that the contributors to this anthology wrote in a voice that speaks not to other people who have experienced such things, but to an audience who has never considered how complex Latindad could be. It reads like an education of an audience they don’t quite trust, a sometimes timid recitation of personal truths because they are unsure of how they will be received.
Since I’ve lived in places where residents thoughtlessly referred to all Latinx people as “Mexicans” despite the fact that just about everyone in that city was actually from Central America, I know that there are folks that still have a whole lot of learning to do. But I’m still disappointed that in some ways, this book marginalizes the community that it is attempting to speak for by not actually talking to them.
Out of the 15 contributors, there were four essays that I’ve happily read over and over again.
“Eres un Pocho” by Mark Oshiro is about the author’s experience as a queer transracial adoptee. The essay follows the author through his entire life, trying to comprehend why the many facets of his burgeoning understanding of his identity were so threatening to those around him. It is a sweet, sad journey to self love complicated by the racism and homophobia exhibited not only by his community, but also by adoptive and found family.
It’s also a complex narrative that does my favorite thing, which is refuse to awkwardly break up the narrative to define words that are not in English. “Eres un pocho” is a phrase that appears over and over again in the text, but rather than the author stopping to pop up and conduct a personal Google Spanish to English translation for the audience, he instead uses “eres un pocho” as a way sign, guiding the reader along the path of his life. That approach is far more effective and affecting than deciding the audience doesn’t care to or can’t be trusted to do the work themselves to figure out what the author is trying to communicate.
“Caution Song” by Natasha Diaz is an unflinching and unforgiving poem about what it’s like to be randomly interrogated by a stranger about your heritage. It sang to my soul. Honestly, I’m just going to give you the last three stanzas because you need its magic as much as I did.
I’ve heard it before,
that you probably mean no harm
when you challenge me to speak in a language
I only know in lullabies and your curiosity
Is an opportunity for growth I should nurture–
I would say that I have no interest in gardening
But this party has gone on long enough now
for me to open my mouth to sing
with the sirens, then wipe the blood from my lips
as you run down the stairs.Had you heeded my caution song,
you would have known
that I filed my teeth before I left the house,
and saved yourself a swollen mouth.Because if you call me spicy,
you should expect me to bite your tongue.
So “#Julian4Spiderman” by Julian Randall made me cry. Tons. All over the place. Am I crying now? Probably.
I’ve read a lot of good stuff about Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse because I love little Miles Morales with my whole heart and I know what it means to Afro-Latino babies with fros to see a superhero that looks like them.
See? I’m crying again.
But “#Julian4Spiderman” winds beautifully across time, sharing the author’s own experience as an Afro-Latino kid before he knew that was a word he could use to describe himself. He talks about the parallels between his own life and Miles Morales’ in Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse with incomparable beauty and sadness:
The moment Miles Morales becomes Spider-Man is more than the end to a hero’s journey. It is more than representation. Each time I watch it, I am gifted back to myself: Spider-Man in a hoodie and Jordans, Spider-Man in the city where my parents fell in love, Spider-Man in the place where none of us died—where one universe split from another and yet we wear mostly the same mask, mostly the same face.
The voices that follow him as he swings into his new life, into full command of his powers, are the voices of my family. Representation matters, but this is more than that. It is one thing to have spent too much of my life begging to be seen, relying on cowardly love and finding it beneath my own tongue when I describe myself as “half-Latinx, half Black.” It is another thing entirely to finally imagine myself, mid-leap, all the noise of a city below me and expect, finally, to live.
Basically, after reading “#Julian4Spiderman” you are going to think that it’s time to watch Into the Spider-verse again. And then we can cry together!
I cannot say I liked “Invisible” by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. It’s too filled with a pain I’d rather not surround myself with because of its familiarity. The truth of it was so traumatizing. It’s the essay I’ve thought the most about and in some ways feel like I can’t escape. “Invisible” is a brutal recitation of the violence of racism as visited upon the author by her in-laws. It was tough to read that diary of abuse and sad to watch her take such a long journey to understand that she didn’t have to accept that treatment. It’s a cruel and casually violent story that I don’t so much want to recommend as I want to perform an exorcism on it. Unfortunately, though, it reflects our reality in the harshest, most unforgiving light.
What I think many of the other essays lacked was an unapologetic approach to a multifaceted and intersectional framework of Latinidad. “#Julian4Spiderman” not only spoke of masculinity, anti-Blackness within the Latinx community, and Afro-Latino identity, but of mental health issues and father-son relationships. The essay was not content to exist on one axis of Latinidad, but instead embraced the complexity of reality.
Some of the other essays left me yearning for a more holistic and integrated description of self, of Latinidad by the authors. I wonder what pressures the authors might have faced when they looked inward to tell a story of how they saw themselves and their Latinidad? And sure, my desire for essays and stories that start from a place of embracing intersectionality and the messiness of identity is without a doubt about my own biases and lived experiences. It’s also because I know the internal and external pressure to simplify personal stories to ease consumption, to make oneself smaller, to be less of a challenge and more easily understood. It’s not always a conscious choice, but it is self-harming, however unintentional it might be.
The essays that were the least impactful for me were the ones where the obvious was stated, trusting readers to not even know the literal Disney version of Latinidad. One author felt it necessary to make sure the reader knew Día de Los Muertos was translated to the Day of the Dead like we haven’t watched Coco or the Book of the Dead. More than one author pointed out that plátanos were universally beloved throughout Latin America (and beyond!). Some moving personal essays were waylaid by the palpable lack of trust in the audience. At one point, an author broke away from their narrative to note that Haiti and the Dominican Republic are on the same island, like the audience couldn’t be assumed to know some basic facts about geography.
I can’t help but be frustrated by the didactic approach of those essays. I was hoping for more profundity than can be found on a spinning globe and left knowing that I couldn’t possibly be the person to whom many of these authors were talking to.
While I did not feel like I was the audience for all the essays in this book, it is important to acknowledge that media by Latinx people does often fail to acknowledge the full breadth of possibilities of Latinidad. As much as it feels like the target audience for was White people, the necessity of its existence is just as much a rebuke against Latinx people, especially creators, who have been forced to (or just…do) flatten out what it means to be Latinx to ease the consumption of our stories. It is unfortunate that in trying to occupy a space that pointed to the complexity of Latinidad, some authors felt that the cultural translation required a similar simplification by avoiding an intersectional appreciation of Latinidad.
So while I struggled to enjoy each and every essay, I am always grateful for the amount of work and emotional labor that was put into writing that argues for the essential humanity of Latinx communities. I know it is not easy. I hope one day we can stop contorting ourselves for a White audience to tell easily consumable “I exist” stories. May we all graduate to 300-level classes on Latinidad. There are beautiful stories to tell whether or not mainstream White audiences are ready.
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Thanks!
Dear Maya, I feel like your eloquent and poignant review should have been an essay in the book. Many kudos to you, and thank your for your insights. It is obviously not Latinx people’s job to educate White folks like me, but I am always glad and grateful when they take the time and energy to do. I wish the anthology could have been more what you had (rightly so) hoped for.
Maya, thank you for your thoughtful review that helped me as a White person see your perspective. I will say that despite your reservations on the volume, I did immediately put it on hold for my 14yo. I am wondering if part of the annoying explaining by some of the volume has as much to do with the target age of the reader as it does to their Whiteness. My teen is quite well-read but I don’t know that she would have known that Haiti and DR shared an island until I mentioned it to her the other week.
Your review points out how even this book giving voice to Latinx writers centers Whiteness. Maybe books like this one can remain but then publishers can start doing more to encourage Latinx writers to write for their own audience so that Latinx teens can also see their untranslated experience on the page.
OMG I went to college with Julian! He has always been absolutely brilliant. Not related to anything else but I was so happy to see his book being reviewed on my favourite site. Thank you for the wonderfully thoughtful review Maya.
Fellow Latina, and yep, I’d probably have similar mixed feelings.