Anzaldúa Dual Identity

In Gloria Anzaldua 's ‘La Conciencia de la Mestiza,’ the concept of ‘mestiza’ is born out of an exclusionary attitude. However, Anzaldua speaks of the ‘new mestiza,’ which is a Chicana (Mexican-American/Anglo) embodied by the amalgamation of her native ancestors cultural elements, typically of Latin American, American Indian, European, or Pilipino descent. The ‘new mestiza,’ embraces ‘white exclusionary politics’

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Texas-born, lesbian, Latina, feminist, that wrote about many of her personal experiences and views of the diverse background she grew up in. Growing up a certain culture at home and being in a country with a different culture, brings along a lot of self-identifying issues. Gloria Anzaldúa uses various strategies and languages to write this powerful piece by code-switching, quoting others, diction, and rhetorical questions. Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” speaks about the social issues that Latinos face involving identity, language, and sexism.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. 2007. On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

Gloria Anzaldua’s short essay, Towards a New Consciousness, begins with the description of her mixed culture, a mestiza, and the conflicts she faces in being torn between being Mexican and Native American. Anzaldua expresses her struggle of her torn heritages by describing herself as being caught between two cultures and their values. Instead of being able to love and respect both cultures, Anzaldua feels as if we people feel the need to take up one side of our heritage and end up hating the other part. She paints an image as standing on an opposite side of a riverbank, yelling back and forth answers and questions showing that we eventually end up favoring one side and only getting pieces of the other

The flash collection Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-short stories from the United States and Latin America brings together Latino and Latin American authors who might otherwise remain separated by borders, recognition, nationality, age, gender, and even language. Some only write in English, others in Spanish and still others in Portuguese. The collection allows readers, whether they share a cultural consciousness with these authors or not, to travel to and intimately experience many diverse worlds. Worlds, or stories, that seem to be working to define the indefinable--what it means to be Latino or Latin American. And it seems that anytime we try to define a group of people, even when it is within the context of a literary collection, it becomes something political.

In the United States early history, Native Americans, Africans and Europeans were marginalized by White People, and categorized as the minorities because they were seen as the inferior race. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar, comprising a person's appearance, their social circle (how they lived), and their known non-White ancestry. History played a major part, as persons with known slave ancestors were assumed to be African (or, in later usage, black), regardless of whether they also had European ancestry. Most often these minorities face significant discrimination in various forms whether through voting, law policy, unequal pay, or even implicit racism, minorities of all kinds have been and still are being put down today. The book Between the World and Me is a letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fifteen-year-old son, Samori. He weaves his personal, historical, and intellectual development into his ruminations on how to live in a black body in America. Not only does Coates give his personal experience in how he experience in first hand discrimination, racism, marginalization but he also gives vivid images on how he lived multiple worlds and how those experiences changed him. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldua exposes her feelings about social and cultural difficulties that Mexican immigrants face when being raised in the United States. She establishes comparisons among English, Spanish and their variations on how

Anzaldúa recounts her experience growing up in a community where her Chicana culture wasn’t widely accepted. She would be punished for speaking the language her culture influenced to create a language, which corresponds to a way of life. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” the variety of languages helps her compare, contrast and define her argument of the distinguished languages concerning her Chicana identity.

The writer portrays a people too conscious to lose their culture. Hence, they establish ethnic organizations, business, cultural institutions that would meet their varied “social, cultural, economic and political needs” (Miguel 6). Supreme in these establishments’ values was to selfishly guard “Mixicanist identity” (Miguel 6) by encouraging dual identity that was “neither American nor Mexican but a synthesis of both” (Miguel 10). The title, Brown, Not White is perhaps a reflection of this consciousness. In a country that has spanned decades clinging to nothing else but color binarity of white versus black, Mexican Americans find it hard to identify with either of the two. The Mexican Americans feel aggrieved by the mistreatments they continually receive from the whites, identifying with the African Americans whom they considered inferior in the American pecking order is unfathomable. The emphasis on the title, Brown, Not White is, therefore, a reflection of the Mexican American’s struggle with the problem of identity in the face of the looming assimilation from the most dominant

Gloria Anzaldúa writes of a Utopic frame of mind, the borderlands created in and lived in by the new mestiza. She describes the preexisting natures of the Anglos, Mexicanos, and Chicanos as seen around the southwest U.S. / Mexican border, indicative of the nations at large. She also probes the borders of language, sexuality, psychology and spirituality. Anzaldúa presents this information in various identifiable ways including the autobiography, historical/informative essay, and poetry. What is unique to Anzaldúa is her ability to weave a ‘perfect’ kind of compromised state of mind that melds together the preexisting cultures while simultaneously formulating a fusion of genres that stretches previously

In the essay “‘blaxican’ and other reminded Americans” Richard Rodrigues states that “I am Chinese, and that is because I live in a Chinese city”. This evidence reveals that in America there are many kinds of cultures you don't need to be considered either black or white.

The Unites States is a true melting pot of ethnicities and cultures. For many members of minority groups a certain hybridity is readily adopted, but for others, cultural assimilation can be quite difficult. Chicana author, Sandra Cisneros described this phenomenon as “always straddling two countries… but not belonging to either culture” (Doyle. 54). African American author, Alice Walker shared Cisneros’ sentiment, but focused her attention on the assimilation of black cultures and subcultures within the United States. Cisneros and Walker make the same poignant statement about the strains of cultural assimilation, with reconciliation of split identities as the goal, in their respective works, 1991’s “Woman Hollering Creek,” and 1973’s “Everyday Use,” yet their unique ethnic perspectives allow them to make it in surprisingly different ways.

During the Mexican-American War the border moved, but the people didn’t. History has shown us that no matter how thick the border might be Latino Americans have a strong connection to their culture and roots; instead of assimilating, Mexicans live between two worlds. The film, Ballad of Gregorio Cortez gave us a perspective of two cultures; “Two cultures- the Anglo and the Mexican- lived side by side in state of tension and fear” . Cortez is running for his life as he heads north, while the Anglo believe that because of his Mexican ethnicity, he would travel south to Mexico. Throughout the film there were cultural tensions and misunderstandings; language plays an important part of someone’s identity, and for many Latino Americans Spanish is their first language. The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez also shows us that language plays an important role, and can cause confusion between two different groups. For example, Anglos refer to a male

Gloria Anzaldua is among the many feminist theorists that has moved into the realm of addressing post-modern identities. In Gloria Anzaldua’s articulation of the new mestiza consciousness, she makes the argument of identities as multiple, hybrid, and more specifically created as a result of the Borderlands. However, according to Anzaldua, and despite the difficulties engendered by her very existence, the mestiza is also a figure of enormous potential, as her multiplicity allows a new kind of consciousness to emerge. This mestiza consciousness moves beyond the binary relationships and dichotomies that characterize traditional modes of thought, and seeks to build bridges between all minority communities to achieve social and political change.

One of the most influential parts of Gloria Anzaldúa’s work is her concept of a mestiza consciousness and how it can be utilized to help us better understand and even accept the multiculturalism within our ethnic identity. Being a Mexican American or Chicana can be a complicated experience because of how the two worlds are divided in more ways than one. Not only is it challenging to find a sense of belonging when you’re divided by a physical and theoretical border, but it also takes a toll on the psyche to consistently adjust oneself in order to fit the scene. However, the mestiza consciousness is an inclusive and universal mindset that enables Chicanas to embrace all aspects of their identity, without having to sacrifice part of themselves in order to fit a concrete definition. Coinciding with Chicana feminism, the mestiza consciousness empowers women and enables them to celebrate their culture and

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua is full of personal narratives detailing the visible and invisible “ borderlands “ that exist within a race, gender, sexuality, and spirituality. Her essays and poems are based on her own personal experiences as a Chicana and lesbian activist. Through her writing, she challenges the true definition of the borderlands as more than a simple line that divides different cultures. It calls for those who are oppressors to change their attitudes and show support to those of the borderlands. By writing in both English and Spanish she expresses how one language would not be enough to describe her Chicana literature.