The Borderlands of Life

Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza, raises many questions and thoughts in the reader. She discusses her life as being an outcast, as Chicano, a woman, and a lesbian. Anzaldúa combines rascism, sexism, homophobia, and issues concerning illegal immigrants throughout her story. She discusses psychological and spiritual borders alongside the physical borders that separate America from Mexico, the tejas-Mexican border. This is the border where, according to the author, people of all different backgrounds, races, and social classes “shrinks into intimacy.” An obvious connection seen in the beginning of Anzaldúa’s writing is with Las Casas’ An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies. The evidence for such a connection is seen with the author’s fact of how America was colonized and how the land’s first inhabitants were forced out or brutally murdered or lynched. She defines “legitimate inhabitants” as those “in power, the whites” and “the Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority” which led the way for the total control of the land and the “stripping of Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it” (29). Anzaldúa, much like Las Casas, includes numbers of murders to strengthen feelings of horror or concern for the awful treatment of her people.

I also connected this reading with Freud due to the strong feelings of difference between men and women, mainly women being seen as servile to men in Anzaldúa’s culture. There is also the bias present in her writing because she is seeing everything from a women’s viewpoint and from someone who has grown up with an inner resentment towards the cultures and/or people who have been seen as more powerful throughout her life. The bias can be connected with Freud because in Freud’s writing, he is writing from his own viewpoint as well, which could be seen as the absolute opposite perspective compared to Anzaldúa. This reading can fit in with the Self and Others unit because there is the constant comparison between self and others in every crevasse of this book, especially concerning Anzaldúa’s awareness of her own differences. Anzaldúa discusses The Coatlicue State, which “depicts the contradictory,” and which touches on the unconscious and on resistance (another connection with Freud). It describe the constant fear of, yet inevitability of, alienation. It is the wanting to fit in but being aware of the impossibility of the desire. Although Anzaldúa does preach of finding that oneness inside herself, there is too much evidence throughout her writing of a state of instability. One of her poems, entitled, En mi corazón se incuba (166), she speaks in Spanish of sadness invading her, strokes of loneliness that consume her, being immersed in fear, hiding pain, unconfessed dreams, and secret love. In my opinion, after translating the poem, I felt as though Anzaldúa will forever feel a sort of disconnect with her culture. She seems to almost boast of making “the choice to be queer” and the “ultimate rebellion against her native culture is through her sexual behavior,” but she cannot hide her obvious loneliness in her poems. Everyone, including Anzaldúa, seeks that special connection or mutual understanding with another.  I believe homophobia really is the “fear of going home,” not being accepted, being alone, or even being abandoned by a family or a culture that does not approve. I also believe that Anzaldúa wrote her story to allow herself an outlet of emotional struggle that herself and others in the same positions have had to live through and battle with each and every day of his or her life.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot, especially the massive amount of Spanish writing Anzaldúa included. I am a Spanish minor so it was great to read something with so many cultural aspects.  

(Last note: It almost seems unfair that immigrants have gotten such bad treatment, illegal or not, in this country. America is known as the “melting pot” because of the obvious fact that the population is so diverse and each person has ancestry from all over the world. So really, what is an American? I believe it is not easy, if possible, to find an American that traces his or her history back so far as to only be related to people strictly from America. Wouldn’t we all be considered immigrants in such sense, with families and ancestors from various other countries? Therefore, wouldn’t that make Native Americans the only true Americans? ….just some of my rambling thoughts on this topic).