Gloria Anzaldúa

Works

• 1987Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

  Prose and poetry in English and Spanish: life on the border as the birthplace of a new, plural mestiza consciousness.

Position

In Borderlands/La Frontera Anzaldúa writes in English, Spanish, Tex-Mex and Nahuatl about the US–Mexico border as an “open wound” where worlds collide. From her experience as a Chicana, lesbian and working-class woman caught between cultures, she develops a “new mestiza consciousness”: a tolerance for ambiguity that holds contradictions together instead of choosing one side. She takes up Vasconcelos’s cosmic race as a vision of inclusion rather than purity and draws on Aztec figures such as the goddess Coatlicue. Later she described nepantla, the Nahuatl word for the in-between, as a painful but creative state of transition. Her work shaped Chicana and queer theory and Mignolo’s border thinking.

Life & context

Gloria Anzaldúa was born in 1942 in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas to a Mexican-American family of farm and ranch workers. She studied at Pan American University and the University of Texas at Austin and taught at schools and universities. With Cherríe Moraga she edited This Bridge Called My Back (1981), an anthology of writing by women of colour that became a founding text of women-of-colour feminism. She died in 2004; her doctorate was awarded posthumously.

Further main works

• This Bridge Called My Back (co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, 1981)
• Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro (2015, posthumous)

Appears in

• Journey ‘Latin America and the Indigenous Americas’ · Stop 11 of 13