Please check out Roberto Rodriguez & Patrisia Gonzales’ informative site Column of the Americas by clicking on the image.
Revisiting Anzaldua’s Borderlands
Borderlands = La Frontera: The New Mestiza
by Gloria Anzaldua.
by Gloria Anzaldua.
San Francisco, CA : Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.
203 p.
This most influential book explores, performs, and exhibits the experience of living simultaneously in two places, cultures, languages, realities at once. Probing autobiographically into the mystical perceptions, strategic possibilities, sexual pleasures, and gender displacements of being a lesbian chicana or border person living and working in the anglo culture of the modern United States, Anzaldua brings assumptions about the rigidity of sex, gender, language, fiction, and identity into question. Mixing lyric and prose, myth and autobiography, spanish and english, past and present, Anzaldua crafts a collage which invites its reader to experience the clash of cultures, the uncertainty of position, and the wealth of alternative border people must contend with to live their lives. Because Borderlands undertakes an examination of a position which seems to undercut or defy most of the binaries–gender, race, class–of modern Western culture, its figure of the borderland was adopted by many feminist critics in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a way to bring such binaries into question and offer a site from which to begin to think a world differently organized.
Reviewed 30 April 1998 by Judith Roof.
See also:
Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990.
Anzaldúa, Gloria and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown: Persephone, 1981.
Anzaldúa, Gloria and A. Keating. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Anzaldúa Biography
When Gloria Anzaldúa described the United States and Mexico border as “una herida 
abierta” (an open wound), she spoke from her lived experience as a native border dweller. Born in the ranch settlement of Jesus Maria in south Texas, Anzaldúa grew up in the small town of Hargill, Texas, and later wrote and taught in Northern California. She received her B.A. from Pan American University and her M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. In her poetry, fiction, essays, and autobiography, she wrote eloquently of the indignities a Chicana lesbian feminist overcomes as she escapes the strictures of patriarchal Chicano traditions and confronts the injustices of dominant culture. She died on May 15, 2004 at her home in Santa Cruz, California from complications due to diabetes. She was within weeks of completing her dissertation and receiving her doctorate from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
(Adapted from Sonia Saldivar-Hull, “Gloria Anzaldua,” Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 5th Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
For more information see the University of Santa Barabara’s Race & Pedagogy Project.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Revise your styleguide: On usage of ‘La Raza’
Here’s an interesting post by writer Daniel Hernandez that raises a debate in semantics re: the terms “Chicano” and “La Raza”
His BLOG is Intersections:
A little Mexico detour, because I’m wondering: Do news media outlets refer to the NAACP as “The Colored People” or the AJC as “The Jewish Committee”? No, they don’t. Yet while covering this month’s NCLR conference in San Diego many outlets including the L.A. Times, Washington Post, and other generally reputable sources like RealClearPolitics felt it okay to refer to NCLR as “La Raza.” This means that the mainstream press has adopted the semantics tricks of the right-wing propaganda machine to conflate together two very different things: NCLR — the largest and most middle-of-the-road, big-money-backed, non-partisan Hispanic (their word) advocacy organization in the United States, and the codeword for reconquista hallucinations advocated only by an extremely small, extremely fringe, and extremely irrelevant batch of Chicano nationalists.
Doing this plays directly into the ignorant fears of paranoid immigrant-bashers. The double-standard is unacceptable. Because there are real dangers of coding and bigotry at play here: look at what just happened in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. Another hate-fueled illegal immigrant lynching. Listen to the story at Free Speech Radio News. A week later, still no arrests.
nericcio collage
cool online collage by cultural studies prof william a. nericcio
Here’s his book, and here’s his BLOG @ http://textmex.blogspot.com/
Bullitt
Bullitt is most-remembered for its central car chase scene through the streets of downtown San Francisco, one of the earliest and most influential car chase sequences in movie history.[1] The scene had Bullitt in a dark “Highland Green” 1968 Ford Mustang G.T.390 Fastback, chasing two hit-men in a “Tuxedo Black” 1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 Magnum. (In honor of the Mustang in the film, the Ford Motor Company produced a limited edition 2001 Ford Mustang GT “Bullitt Mustang,” which took styling cues from the ‘68 movie car and even mimicked its exhaust note).
The Clinic
Una serenata plays before she gets there
an accordion accompanies the words Yo no quiero nada
businessmen and young girls wait at bus stops
dayworkers pray and write letters in their heads at W. Martin, Salinas, and Frio St.
The Appraisal District and jail are death-rattles
in the steam of a July rain
and in a small cluttered office nearby
old fruit stinks up the corners
as an economist sniffs Good Will thongs
his cleaning woman wears a loose brassiere and shakes her head
At the doorway, a gringo with an eye patch says, spare a dime
still walking, she lies, I don’t have any cash on me
