Aunt Lute celebrates the 25th anniversary of Gloria Anzaldúa‘s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza with weekly quotes about the enduring importance and beauty of this groundbreaking work. An influential work in women’s and Chicana/Latina studies—and in the lives of everyday people—Borderlands not only expressed Gloria’s perspectives as a queer mestiza, but offered a new, hybrid way of speaking and understanding for all outsiders.

Do you have a favorite quote about Borderlands? Share it with us!

This Week’s Quote:

 One of the 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century…

—Hungry Mind Review (Spring 1999)

Previous Weeks’ Quotes:

Gloria Anzaldúa…appropriates for herself the right to create her own vision of the context of her life. She draws some components of her historical narrative from official historiography, but unravels them, re-interprets them, re-signifies them, re-arranges them. She makes present some historical elements that are absent from official historiographies…She shifts between her personal histories and the larger histories of her peoples (which she defines in the plural). Her re-conceptualizations cannot be contained in any one genre. She inscribes them multiply, weaves them together: paragraphs publishable in academic journals, personal narratives, poetry, fiction, dream, sequences. Together they make for some intense theorizing.

- Transnational Borderlands: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Epistemologies of Resistance and Lesbians ‘Of Color’ in Paris
By Paola Baccheta

In Borderlands, Anzaldúa tenses racial, class, and sexuality differences to the limit by subjecting them to the category of being female, being poor, being Chicana, and being lesbian, living in English but thinking in Spanish. She unfolds being the female protagonist of all betrayals: of her Mexican culture because she writes in English, of the Anglo culture because she turns English in Spanglish, of women’s culture because she renounces maternity, of the patriarchal culture because she rejects both femininity and heterosexuality. Anzaldúa’s writing, body, and language are at the limits of any social and symbolic national/hegemonic system; her entire being falls within the periphery; her entire being is the product of lateralness.

- Un Rosario de Glorias: Güeras and Prietas at the Borders: The Lateral Narratives of Gloria Anzaldúa and Rosario Castellanos
By Marisa Belausteguigoitia

…Borderlands: The New Mestiza, knocked me on my proverbial hind-end and changed everything I thought I knew about social justice.

 Class, Race and Images of Wilma: Complicating “White Privilege”
Counter Punch December, 2011
Paul C. Gorksi

[She] explores in prose and poetry the murky, precarious existence of those living on the frontier between cultures and languages…she meditates on the conditions of Chicanos in Anglo culture, women in Hispanic culture, and lesbians in the straight world…a powerful document that belongs in all collections with emphasis on Hispanic American or feminist issues.

—Library Journal

Anzaldúa’s vision encompasses spiritual and experiential aspects of female power, as well as the day-to-day courage and struggle that has characterized Chicano survival.

—The San Francisco Chronicle

 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza es importante y crucial en mi formación académica ya que fue el primer texto que me autorizó a utilizar mi posicionalidad de mujer de frontera para interpretar no solamente los textos culturales y políticos que se manipulan en y desde la academia, sino también para rechazarlos o negociarlos.

—Guadalupe Cortina from “Andamos Huyendo, Gloria: Academia, Fronteras Y La Nueva Mestiza”

 

Anzaldúa dismantles both U.S. and Mexico’s national hegemonic identities and pushes us to see beyond the red-white-and-blue, the green-white-and-red, or both. By silencing the other othernesses that I mentioned before, Anzaldúa drives us to reflect on them and suddenly they begin to appear in our border geographies. We begin to see our landscapes filled with different faces, which are excluded most of the time from our discourses. We can then acknowledge the many indigenous groups belonging to this geographical area that arrived before our ancestors or we arrived.

—Maria Socorro Tabuenca-Cordoba, from “Twenty Years of Borderlands: A Reading from the Border”

 

I define myself as an Anzaldúan feminist and I position myself as a woman who is not interested in aculturarme—or in engaging an acculturation process. My position is Anzaldúan because it requires applying la facultad as a skill of being able to see surfaces, and being able to have the courage to engage all aspects of living within a culture that I cannot recognize, where I am not welcomed. Thus, inadecuadez—inadequacy as an Anzaldúan state of consciousness is a self-position from which I navigate what situate me as a foreigner. I make a decision to follow Anzaldúa’s invitation to have the courage to live outside societal norms that make me feel inadecuada and at the same time give me the freedom to “no darle cuentas a nadie” (Borderlands 43).

—Patricia Pedroza, from “The Agony of Inadequacy”

Anzaldúa is a self-proclaimed borderland being, a Chicana who lives close to the border between Mexico and Texas, who shares several cultures and uses a mixture of languages. With exceptional insight, she creates a mosaic of the marginal person: a person, like herself, who exists in a state of transition, of ambivalence, of conflict; someone who is infused with many cultures yet cannot claim a single one wholly for herself. Her journal is written in earth tones, like an Aztec design, tones that are both engaging and striking. Weaving prose with poetry, Mexican-Indian history with psychology, mythology with philosophy, the author pulls together the frazzled edges of Chicano culture and of her sense of self. Anzaldúa is a rebellious and willful talent who recognizes that life on the border, “life in the shadows,” is vital territory for both literature and civilization.

—Publishers Weekly

For students of color, and of Chicano background in particular, the concepts and history of Mexican identity contemplated with the vigor of Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands allows these students to break free of the hegemonic constraints that school systems have placed on them since the beginning of their education. These re-readings provide students with a space where they can safely contest hegemonic literatures, histories, and society.

—Margaret E. Cantú, from “Embracing Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as Multicultural Pedagogy”

My initial reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza came in the winter of 2001, and immediately I was fascinated by the complexity and originality of her theory of the borderlands. She surprised me at every turn of the text, in each new chapter, by taking her analysis of the emergence of a New Mestiza consciousness into unexpected and unexplored territories. Her method of inquiry has revealed to me new intellectual, psychological, and spiritual spaces that are in the process of being formed via new symbols, codes, and categories, and has brought me fresh understandings of the complex and heterogeneous worlds that are emerging around us.

— Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, from “Exploring Gloria Anzaldúa’s Methodology in Borderlands/La Frontera—The New Mestiza”

I refuse to let [Gloria] go—to relegate her wholly to some dead past. I still marvel at her ability to speak to so many people across racial, class, gender, and sexuality divisions. And at the very same time, I feel that there is a piece that is just for Chicanas—you know, eye to eye, entre la raza, entre las mujeres. I believe that her cultural production continues to exist within me. It is eternally new each time I encounter the irony and pain that comes with living in an oppressive society, and I need to use that experience to create theory as a framework that might be useful to activist projects, even if that only means providing a concrete example of how inequality functions and is maintained.

—Edén Torres, from “Wounds of Fire: Anzaldúa’s Cultural Production from Pain to Theory”

The emotional and intellectual impact of the book is disorienting and powerful…all languages are spoken, and survival depends on understanding all modes of thought. In the borderlands new creatures come into being. Anzaldúa celebrates this “new mestiza” in bold, experimental writing.

—The Village Voice

Anzaldúa’s pulsating weaving of innovative poetry with sparse informative prose brings us deep into the insider/outsider consciousness of the borderlands; that ancient and contemporary, crashing and blending world that divides and unites America.

—Women’s Review of Books