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.
