Anzaldua's Essay 'The Art Of The Contact Zone'

Have you ever thought about what happens when mixtures of opposing cultures come in conflict with imposing yet competing societal standards? What form will the culture take? How will the individual respond to the pressure of the cultures combining and changes? Cultures are the roots that allow a person to remain grounded and stable, providing a group identity while allowing them to flower into an individual. Anzaldua calls attention to the effects of language and language assimilation on a person’s identity and sense of self.
Anzaldua argues in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” that assimilation creates prejudice and goes on to suggest that prejudice has an effect on Chicano/a identities. She writes, “Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating. This voluntary Cultures are the roots that allow a person to remain grounded and stable, providing a group identity while allowing them to flower into an individual. But what happens when mixt (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity—we don’t identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don’t
To me, Pratt introduces autoethnography as a genre of resistance. Autoethnography presents a culture from the perspective of the culture as opposed to the traditional ethnographies where a member of a different culture (typically a dominant culture) immerses himself/herself in the studied culture to present a representation of that culture. Pratt’s essay explained fully what the contact zone was as she stated it was “ social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world