Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Introduction

Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana writer from the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, published the book in 1987 with the feminist press Aunt Lute in San Francisco. Its first half mixes autobiography, history, myth and theory; the second consists of poems. The text moves between English, Spanish, Tex-Mex and Nahuatl, often without translation, and so enacts the life on the border it describes. Anzaldúa calls the US–Mexican border “una herida abierta”, an open wound, and develops the idea of a “mestiza consciousness”: a tolerance for contradiction and ambiguity that grows from living between cultures, sexualities and languages. The book became a key text of Chicana, queer and border studies.

Connections

Builds on

• The Cosmic Race1925 · José Vasconcelos

Taken up in

• Local Histories/Global Designs2000 · Walter Mignolo