Borderlands La Frontera

“The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages against the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.”

Anzaldúa’s image of the borderland as an open wound where Mexico is rubbed raw against the United States provides a visceral image of the setting of Borderlands. This image alludes to the material realities of border culture and the physical harm done to Mexican people who attempt to cross the border. In describing a “third country,” Anzaldúa denies the binary opposition of the so-called first and third worlds, imagining another space borne from their intersection.

“Fear of going home. And of not being taken in. We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged.”

In Chapter 2, Anzaldúa explicitly addresses her queerness, acknowledging how being a lesbian Chicana creates a unique experience of alienation. The culture that so defines her is also the very thing that shuns her for being different.

“Snakes, viboras: since that day I’ve sought and shunned them. Always when they cross my path, fear and elation flood my body. I know things older than Freud, older than gender. She—that’s how I think of la Vibora, Snake Woman. Like the ancient Olmecs, I know Earth is a coiled serpent. Forty years it’s taken me to enter into the Serpent, to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul.”

Snakes are an important symbol for Anzaldúa. This quote comes just after she describes her first, intense encounter with a snake as a young child working in the fields with her mother. For Anzaldúa, the snake represents fear that must be entered into in order to emerge on the other side of it. She describes this as a lifelong process to reconcile the animal and human worlds, eroding the false Western dichotomy that separates not only humanity from nature but also races, cultures, genders, etc. from one another.

“Today, la Virgen de Guadalupe is the single most potent religious, political and cultural image of the Chicano/Mexicano. She, like my race, is a synthesis of the old world and the new, of the religion and culture of two races in our psyche, the conquerors and the conquered.”

Anzaldúa situates the Virgen de Guadalupe in contemporary Mexico after providing a detailed history of the erasure of her Indigenous origins and her desexualization by Catholic religious institutions. Guadalupe is a contradiction. She is the product of Indigenous and Spanish religious traditions, just as the Chicano people are the mestizaje: the product of both Indigenous and Spanish ancestry.

“Institutionalized religion fears trafficking with the spirit world and stigmatizes witchcraft. It has strict taboos against this kind of inner knowledge. It fears what Jung calls the Shadow, the unsavory aspects of ourselves. But even more it fears the supra-human, the god in ourselves.”

Continuing her critique of organized religion, Anzaldúa elucidates the reasons behind the Catholic Church’s suppression of witchcraft. She implies that the darkness attributed to intuitive knowledge is actually a source of great power and divinity and that it is that which institutions fear. Part of Anzaldúa’s call for a new mestiza consciousness, emerging later in the book, encourages this dark intuitive force to be accepted and activated.

“La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface.”

Here, Anzaldúa creates a theory of knowledge outside traditional structures. This “faculty” is the ability to see behind the superficial. After this quote, Anzaldúa goes on to explain that queer people, women, and people of color are especially attuned to this sense, as they are consistently on high alert in their daily lives, fearing for their safety. It is in fact this fear that gives them the superpower of heightened attention. As Anzaldúa elucidates again and again in the text, out of negative experiences, power can emerge.

“Soy nopal de castilla like the spineless and therefore defenseless cactus that Mamagrande Ramona grew in back of her shed. I have no protection. So I cultivate needles, nettles, razor-sharp spikes to protect myself from others.”

Anzaldúa compares herself to the prickly pear cactus. Vulnerable to injury, she instead cultivates various mental defense mechanisms to shield herself from the outside world and from her inner self. She explains these self-preservation techniques as personal struggles but also as the broader Chicano struggle to work against “terrori[zing] [them]selves.”

“We need Coatlicue to slow us up so that the psyche can assimilate previous experiences and process the changes. If we don’t take the time, she’ll lay us low with an illness, forcing us to ‘rest.’ Come, little green snake. Let the wound caused by the serpent be cured by the serpent.”

Here, Anzaldúa describes the Coatlicue state as an inevitable necessity, something that will come and infiltrate Anzaldúa whether or not she allows it to. It physically stalls her, forcing her to reckon with her interior psychic state and to temporarily come out of her habitual patterns. This painful process is part of the new mestiza consciousness, allowing the goddess within to wound her in order to experience the healing and insight that follows.

“But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally. Change, evolución, enriquecimiento de palabras nuevas por invención o adopción have created variants of Chicano Spanish, un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language.”

This quote embodies Chicano Spanish while at the same time describing it. Switching seamlessly between English and Spanish, it ebbs and flows between the two languages to create “un nuevo lenguaje.” Anzaldúa links the evolution of this border tongue to nature, highlighting the close relationship between borderland and language. The idea of a “living language” is also central to Anzaldúa’s arguments about Language as Identity and Performance.

“Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestizaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos buérfanos—we speak an orphan tongue.

In this quote, Anzaldúa directly addresses the English-speaking reader, positioning herself and Chicano people as “foul-mouthed” speakers of a “deficient” Spanish. Her tone is defiant and proud, making reference to the Christian image of crucifixion to link this linguistic subjugation to the persecution of Indigenous Mexicans by Spanish colonizers and their religious institutions.

“Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.”

Here, Anzaldúa explicitly links language and ethnicity, positioning language as a defining feature of the existential self. While this is an idea she alludes to throughout the text, here she explicitly states that Chicano language is Chicano identity. As white culture attempts to silence Spanish speakers in the United States, this notion of language as identity is even more important.

“Deep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul—not one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders.”

After having provided the historical evidence for the arbitrary division of the Mexican people by the US-Mexico border, Anzaldúa reminds the reader that to be Mexican is part of one’s inner self; it is not an externally defined political identity. She compares this identity to the eagle and serpent, animals historically associated with Indigenous Mexican deities, who cross borders with ease, just as the Chicano people do.

“My ‘stories’ are acts encapsulated in time, ‘enacted’ every time they are spoken aloud or read silently. I like to think of them as performances and not as inert and ‘dead’ objects (as the aesthetics of Western culture thinks of art works). Instead, the work has an identity; it is a ‘who’ or a ‘what’ and contains the presences of persons, that is, incarnations of gods or ancestors or natural and cosmic powers.”

Anzaldúa brings a performance studies lens to Borderlands / La Frontera, describing her writing as performed or enacted rather than a static, unenlivened text. She describes the beings present in her work—Mexican goddesses she invoked in earlier chapters.

“White America has only attended to the body of the earth in order to exploit it, never to succor it or to be nurtured in it. Instead of surreptitiously ripping off the vital energy of people of color and putting it to commercial use, whites could allow themselves to share and exchange and learn from us in a respectful way.”

Anzaldúa often takes a confrontational tone toward white Americans, calling white culture out for its abusive relationship to the land and the ways it capitalizes on people of color, including Chicano people. Here she calls out corporate abuses, proposing an alternative to these oppressive practices.

“Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.”

After dealing with the borderland as a literal space of cross-pollination and multiplicity, Anzaldúa applies the framework of the borderland to artistic practice. The borderland becomes a thought structure, a psychic space that is liminal and uncomfortable and yet (contradictorily) a source of inspiration and creative action. She implies that she herself goes into this borderland while writing.

“The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended.”

Much of Borderlands / La Frontera implies a deconstructive approach to reality, just as the borderland becomes a third space out of the intersection of two binary spaces (the US and Mexico). She denies the Cartesian split of mind and body and the subject-object relationship, suggesting that these are partially responsible for women’s oppression (as “bodies” and “objects”). Anzaldúa anticipates later developments in queer theory and gender studies that have imagined theories of gender outside the binary.

“As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet.”

This quote could be described as the thesis of Borderlands / La Frontera, as it highlights Anzaldúa’s intersectional approach to thought. Rather than seeing the limits of her identities, she sees their utopian potential. Through the world’s denial of her existence, she claims a new kind of existence.

“Growth, death, decay, birth. The soil prepared again and again, impregnated, worked on. A constant changing of forms, renacimientos de la tierra madre.

This land was Mexican once

was Indian always

and is.

And will be again.”

Anzaldúa ends Part 1 of Borderlands/La Frontera with the growth and death cycle of nature. The final lines initially appeared in Anzaldúa’s opening poem from Chapter 1. The fact that Anzaldúa ends as she begins reiterates the idea of life cycles and represents the resilience of the Chicano people to stay attached to the borderland despite its ongoing evolution.

“If I ever hear that you got illegals on your land

even a single one, I’m going to come here

in broad daylight and have you

hung by your balls.

He walks slowly to his desk.

Knees shaking, I count every bill

taking my time.”

The second half of Borderlands / La Frontera features Anzaldúa’s poems. “El sonavabitche” stands out a as a redemptive tale of taking back money owed to Chicano workers. The word “sonavabitche” is a prime example of the “Tex-Mex language,” in that it appropriates an English colloquialism and applies a Spanish accent and spelling to it.

“Some even had land grants

and appealed to the courts.

It was a laughing stock

them not even knowing English.”

“We Call Them Greasers” is written from the perspective of a white man who pushes Chicano people off of their land in what is likely southern Texas, using intimidation tactics and fear-mongering. Language again becomes central to this conflict, with the supposed supremacy of English used as evidence for the illegitimacy of the Chicano people’s claim to their land.

 “She never wanted to be flesh she told me

until she met me.

At first it was hard to stay

on the border between

the physical world

and hers.

It was only there at the interface

that we could see each other.”

“Interface” is one of Anzaldúa’s most surreal poems, describing the love affair between a “noumenal” woman—one who can’t be apprehended by human perception—named Leyla and an in-the-flesh human woman who narrates. The two meet at the interface, which is the common boundary between two systems; it is a borderland that provides the landscape for their love affair. The poem echoes the relationships between goddess and human that Anzaldúa delves into in her earlier prose.

“We are the holy relics,

the scattered bones of a saint,

the best loved bones of Spain.

We seek each other.”

Anzaldúa explicitly addresses the remnants in Catholic Spain in this poem, especially with the repeated stanza quoted above. This stanza acts as a kind of chorus for the poem, speaking for the relics of Saint Theresa who were cut up and divvied around the world, separated from each other. Like Coatlalopueh, she was severed by the people she served, mutilated so that now her relics seek reunification.

“I am the only round face,

Indian-beaked, off-colored

in the faculty lineup, the workshop, the panel

and reckless enough to take you on.”

In “that dark shining thing,” Anzaldúa addresses the complicated experience of being a white-passing woman of color in academic settings, so often asked to speak to her experience and to enlighten the other academics in the room. She relays the challenges of trying to see her own “numinous thing” while also encouraging others to find theirs, to look inside themselves to find their own Shadow-Beasts.