‘La frontera: la nueva mestiza’ by Gloria Anzaldúa

The book by Gloria Anzaldúa entitled “Bortherlands, La Frontera: La Nueva Mestiza” written in 1987 is divided into two parts. The first part, entitled “Crossing Borders”, consists of seven chapters, is written mainly in prose and intersperses the author’s own memoirs and critical theory with poetry and quotations from other thinkers, poets and singers. The author also switches between Spanish, English, and different dialects, and between more informal and academic forms of writing. The second part consists of 6 chapters under the title “Ehécatl, The Wind” and is entirely poetry, which won’t be talked about this time.

Gloria Anzaldúa was a scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, whose work has contributed to the definition of feminism, as well as in the cultural area of Chicana/o theory. One of her most important contributions was the introduction of the term mestizaje to the American public, meaning the state’s conception of being ‘beyond’, which she develops extensively in this book. With this book, the author produces a new critical discourse that avoids essentialisms and aims, on the contrary, to celebrate the multiple identities in which border subjects recognize themselves and which shape the consciousness of the so-called “Nueva Mestiza”. This new subject that the author creates is presented as a diverse, marginalized actor of indigenous heritage. She is also a black, lesbian and border-dweller woman, whose identity is constructed on the basis of her struggles and her racial origin, and whose recognition problematizes the heteronormative, patriarchal and exclusionary universality with which the Chicano collective and movement had conceived their discourse of ethnic identity.

During the first part of this book, we observe that the author focuses on the elaboration of this new subject through more theoretical and more personal parts. In the first chapter, the US-Mexico border is presented historically, through the presence of indigenous peoples and Spaniards, and the irony of Chicano immigrants being designated as illegal by a state that is occupying land illegally. In the following chapters, Anzaldúa relates stories from her own life, discussing how she was banished from her home because of her lesbianism and is still afraid to return, thus introducing an idea of a transnational and not always ideal home. She therefore presents her return home as liberation that will require not only the destruction of the occupying white culture, but also the transformation of the patriarchal Mexican and indigenous culture that made her an outcast. The fifth chapter looks at the role of language in an innovative way. Anzaldúa establishes that she speaks eight languages: apart from conventional English and Spanish, also combinations of the two and regional dialects of both. She specifies that her own person is her language and discusses how her access to language has been violated, both in institutional settings (schools that force students to speak English) and in informal conversations in which she needs to strategically decide which language to speak in order to speak, be understood and taken seriously. In chapter six Anzaldúa analyses the roles of art in Western and indigenous cultures, arguing that Western people separate art from everyday life, while indigenous peoples link art with spirituality and incorporate both into their daily lives. In the last chapter of the first part of the book, Anzaldúa articulates his general argument for a new mestizo consciousness, putting the finishing touches to his new subject. She emphasizes the importance of tolerating ambiguity and touches on some crucial dynamics: the role of white people within the racial liberation movement, for example.

I consider this book essential to understand the construction of identities and the challenge of moving in multiple worlds. Even though the book does not follow a temporal line and the line of writing is not very easy as it intersperses different languages, the author manages to explain to the reader the difficulties of constructing an identity in another culture, and the feeling of marginality, as well as the passion for her native culture. Personally, I find one of the most interesting ideas in this work to be the one about the border, as a place of passing (racial, sexual, class) for individuals, and what it means to constantly exist in that space, without a homeland to move toward or away from.