Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands (1-91)
Reading assignment for Friday, March 9. Your reply (under Comments) is due before class. Remember, you don’t need to answer all or even any of the questions, but your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.
Based on your reading of Borderlands and your study of Chicana feminism in this class, how would you define and construct a mestiza consciousness? What are the advantages of such a construction? What are the pitfalls?
How would you connect the theory in Borderlands to the presentation on Wednesday? How is Anzaldúa constructing the idea of the Chicana feminist self?
“To be close to another Chicana is like looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what we’ll see there,” (page 80). This passage reminds me of the artwork “Las Tres Marias” that the grad students presented to us on Wednesday because of the commonality of the mirror image that both share. But looking closer I feel that they both fit into the discourse of the Chicana consciousness. In the quote, we see that the Chicana does not escape her reflection even if she can’t really see it because she can see it in her interactions with others. This awareness of who she sees then becomes part of her consciousness. In the same way, the artwork also gives the seer a consciousness of who she is by exploring who she sees in contrast to the other two images. In that way both the quote and art work provide the awareness needed to create a consciousness.
The quote from borderlands in chapter that says ” I had to leave home so I could find myself… under the personality that had been imposed on me”(p.16), I think ties together the presentation by the grad students and borderlands. The quote explains the point of Chicana feminism, which is for the Chicana women who have been ignored and over looked, to have their voice heard. In order for these women to have their voice heard, they must shed the sterotypes that are placed on them by society to just be homecareres that don’t voice their opions and beliefs. Once this false expectation of the women is shed, they can actually start trying to find out who they are.
Gloria Anzaldua discusses her personal experiences within her family about being the first one to have left home. Like the pachuca, she was thought of as rebellious for going “against” the traditions of past generations–for establishing her own way of life in other words. Other family members would later ask her, “como te gusta la mala vida?” “how do you like this lousy life?” In other words, they would automatically assume that they understood her life because it was different than what they were used to. They assumed that she was living an unsatisfactory life compared to that which she could have been living, had she stayed home. Again this reminds me of the way the pachucas were misunderstood, thus the easiest way for others to see them was to assume that they lived lesser lives if they did not follow more common ones. Anzaldua states that she was also labeled as “lazy” for refusing to do the chores that other girls her age did, like iron the clothes of her brothers or clean. The pachucas were known for having expensive suits and working hard to obtain them, and yet they were called lazy for spending their hard earned money on such things as a zoot suit.
Anzaldua’s and the pachucas’ struggles represent the continuing struggles of the chicana and the mestiza, in other words, the woman of color who carries multiple languages, races, and cultures within her. As Anzaldua puts it, “la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, and inner war.” It is hard for her to be comfortable in her own skin because she cannot be herself within her own country, community, or even her own home.
If there was ever a style that represented the implications of borderlands, it was the pachuca style. When I think of borderlands, I think of a space encapsulating two worlds at odds that being to mesh. This is much like the pachucas. Their style was very much a mixing of masculine and feminine, of traditional machismo style with inklings of a new Chicana feminism. The physical borderlands of Mexico and America are filled with people are sometimes stuck between knowing they can’t live in one place for their own safety and benefit, but the other isn’t going to be quite easy either. That is like the pachucas, who felt they could no longer inhabit the virgin/whore dichotomy and traditional female roles of their mothers, but who realized also that the presence of their new self-presentations would not exist without tension.