Gloria Anzalúda’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza was one of the books that I briefly spoke about during my presentation in class this past Monday. I’ve been thinking about what I said about the book and I’m going to admit that I didn’t do it much justice. I may have mentioned that everyone quotes it and that it is such a foundational book for Chicana feminism, but I think I gave a watered down interpretation and I’d like to expand and say what the book means to me. So maybe, let’s call this a book review, but one that much more centered around my own personal experiences and how it’s helped me on my coming of age.
To start with, I think that the book is absolutely brilliant. Anzaldúa is able to beautifully articulate what it means to be a Chicana/o or a mestiza/o, to be a person that comes from different cultural backgrounds, how any of those cultures push and pull you in either direction, what it is like being a woman of color, and what it means to live on the borderlands, both physically and metaphorically. Her writing is fluid- going from prose to poetry, from English to Spanish. It’s slightly like theory, but then there is a spiritual side to it. She is able to pack in so much reality into 200 or so pages. If I had half the brain that Anzalúda had I’d be happy.
The part of the book that really stands out to me is the the chapter entitled “La conciencia de la Mestiza, Towards a New Consciousness,” and more specifically the poem “Una lucha de fronteras.” Which reads as follow:
Because I, a mestiza,
contiunally walk out of one culture
and into another,
because I am in all cultures at the same time,
alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,
me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.
Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan
simultáneamente.
This chapter and this poem specifically speak quite a bit to me. I grew up in a household that had two ethnic backgrounds. Growing up this didn’t really phase me. Both cultures complemented each other very well. My grandma spoke to my sisters and me in Spanish, my mother and her spoke to each other in this broken Spanglish, it was only when there was some good type of chisme did they speak full on Spanish. My father fit in well, speaking his made up Spanish and using words he caught on to here and there. During the Holidays we’d celebrate Thanksgiving in a pretty traditional way with turkey and rhubarb pies, a recipe that came from my dad’s family. During the Christmas season it’s all about las Posadas, tamales, mole, loud relatives. As a kid I figured this is what everyone’s family was like.
It wasn’t until those standardized tests we had to take that made you fill in one bubble for your racial/ethnic background. Here I was faced with the really daunting task of claiming one identity and leaving the other behind. Those forms bothered me all the way up into high school, where I can vividly remember a teacher of mine making a joke about the “other” option that they always put, which I had usually filled in. I went to a predominantly white Catholic high school and all of the rest of my classmates laughed along with the teacher. I missed the joke and they missed the fact that those questions aren’t as trivial as they seem.
It wasn’t until my first Chicana/o Studies class that I first picked up this book by Anzaldúa and read this chapter and FINALLY found the vocabulary to talk about these issues. Anzaldúa isn’t speaking exactly to my situation, but I think I can understand where she is coming from and I can interpret it in my own way. I still have loads of issues with being mixed, with compromising between one and the other, I could go on, but I think reading this work by Anzaldúa helped me in my own coming-of-age. I still think it’s an on-going process, but it’s great to see others that deal with the same types of struggles.
And I’ll end with a quote from one of my other favorite half-breeds, Frida Kahlo, who sort of wraps this all up for me. She said,
“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.”