Borderlands: Angry Chicanas, Angry Gringos

Our Borderlands discussions are heating up. Good. I chose this text because it is challenging. And it contains some controversial ideas and opinions. But I know the dynamic of both honors classes is one where we can intelligently discuss and analyze the text, even if we all have varying opinions, which we do.

In second period, Meghana mad a valid point, saying that complaining, finger pointing and blaming don’t solve today’s tensions between the US and Mexico. Simply rehashing (or in many people’s cases, introducing) old injustices doesn’t provide us with any tangible solutions to current problems. I definitely agree. Of course, my argument is that understanding history—from as many angles as possible—is necessary if we are to create a community that respects one another. And that’s the key word: respect. I think by listening to Anzuldúa’s anger (and she is very angry at times) is important because it can enable us to empathize with strangers.

Howard Zinn, in his critically acclaimed A People’s History of the United States: 1942-Present, tackles some of the same issues when it comes to his preference of telling history from the ‘other side,’ “the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves…the postwar American empire as seen by the peons in Latin America…and so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can ‘see’ history from the standpoint of others” (10). It’s what Atticus told Scout to do in To Kill a Mockingbird. That sometimes “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (30). And for me, that’s just what history (a more complete history than an American History textbook would offer) allows us to do. It isn’t about having a pity party. It’s about understanding fellow human beings. Zinn goes on to address Meghana’s point:

“My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has only consisted of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims…

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: ‘The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.’

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if brief flashes, people showed the ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than its solid centuries of warfare” (10-11).

Hopefully Atticus Finch and Howard Zinn help crystallize some of the reasons why I think Borderlands is an important text.