Borderlands

Today in class, we began Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. This is going to be a challenging text, but a worthwhile one I feel. So, we’ll read the bulk of Borderlands in class. I think the preface does a nice job of establishing a context for her work, especially when she says:

“I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo…I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others, all my life. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions” (19).

We are quickly introduced to the tension that exists at the border, the “constant state of transition” (25) and the folks that live in a “vague and undetermined place”—the borderland, a liminal space home to “the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead” (25). It is here, “this thin edge of barbwire” (25), that Anzaldúa is looking for identity. This is a story about being caught in between. In between cultures and in between countries. In between language. In between male and female, in between sexuality. These are the ‘borders’—some concrete, some ethereal—that we are investigating and the consequences of crossing these borders.

I’m reminded of a poem, “Sonrisas” by Pat Mora. Might be something a few of you could blog about. And the song “Cortez, the Killer” by Neil Young. Also another piece to blog about. Of course there are plenty of political cartoons from the early 1900’s (during the zenith of immigration and America’s industrial revolution) that comment on overlapping cultures and things like assimilation and language. After all, if you’re living in America, you should speak English, right? Or, is the argument surrounding language more complex than that statement would indicate? What do you think?