Essay about Anzaldúa’s Genre Borderlands

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

In his essay Bajadas, Francisco Cantu explores the physical and emotional landscapes that shift during his time as a United States border control agent. He candidly writes about his experiences, using imagery to describe the physical landscape of New Mexico in a way that mirrors his own emotional landscape and answers the question that he grapples with most. Cantu writes, “There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this? I wonder sometimes how I might explain certain things…” (7). This important question is what drives Bajadas; it is what compels Cantu to write so vulnerably. Through a journal-like structure, Cantu details what his job requires of him and the way he treats

Throughout Anzaldúa’s nonfiction/ autobiography, she chooses to incorporate the use of code switching, personification, and synecdoche in order to escalate and show her audience how she found her identity from her language and connect it to show others the same as she found

Norma Elia Cantu’s novel “Canícula: Imágenes de una Niñez Fronteriza” (“Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera”), which chronicles of the forthcoming of age of a chicana on the U.S.- Mexico border in the town of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo in the 1940s-60s. Norma Elia Cantú brings together narrative and the images from the family album to tell the story of her family. It blends authentic snapshots with recreated memoirs from 1880 to 1950 in the town between Monterrey, Mexico, and San Antonio, Texas. Narratives present ethnographic information concerning the nationally distributed mass media in the border region. Also they study controversial discourse that challenges the manner in which the border and its populations have been

In Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, she uses her own personal experiences growing up and living near the border that separates the United States and Mexico. Anzaldua makes us reexamine the purpose of a border and the negative effects that come with it. Since she lives close to the border, she cannot completely identity herself as an American nor would she be able to call herself Mexican. As a Chicana, she did not know where she belonged in society. The two cultures she lived under put her in this constant state of transition. The struggles she faces strongly resembles the ones that Piri Thomas faces in his novel Down These Mean Streets. Despite the fact that Thomas was actually of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, many people failed to recognize him as such and saw him as an African-American.

The beginning of this area in Gloria Anzaldúa’s composition is about the Coatlicue State. She depicts Coatlicue as the Aztec goddess of life and death. Coatlicue conflicts with herself in having the ability to take away life and give it. Anzaldúa reprocesses the goddess’s picture to regard her personal identity battle: being a woman who is also Latina. Her conflict makes me contemplate my inner struggle amongst myself. My entire life I was raised in an upper-class community with no true insight of how lower classes lived. I became a little more aware of how lower classes lived in high school but it was not until I went to college that I was able to experience being part of their class. It is funny how I was raised one way my whole life but as I began to experience a different manner of living, it was weird to go back to the habits I grew up with even though I know them more than my new ones. Like Anzaldúa, I feel odd sometimes when I go back to the city I grew up in. I know that my comparison is different, but Anzaldúa’s words about duality make me think of the oddness I experience when I am in my hometown with my birth class.

As a reader who lacks knowledge of any Spanish vocabulary, coming into contact with passages written in Spanish is confusing and uncomfortable. Without a Spanish tongue, it is quite difficult to process and truly understand Anzaldúa’s message, as this foreign tongue presents large stumbling blocks within the essay that direct my focus away from the purpose of the piece. Sentences containing long chains of Spanish words, such as “Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca,” and, “In the meantime, tenémos que hacer la lucha,” leave me hog-tied and unable to properly read and understand the text as I find myself lost in the foreign string of Spanish terms. However, when the English translation is presented along with the foreign terms, the passage flows smoothly since I’m able to understand the words and their proper meaning relative to the context of the text.

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

Anzaldua identifies as a part of an emerging new mestiza consciousness and community, which strives to move beyond simple dualistic thinking and endeavors to “act and not react” This important contradiction lies at the heart of Anzaldua’s analysis. “From this racial, ideological, cultural, and biological cross-pollicization, an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making — a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands.” (Anzaldua, 1987, 420). Anzaldua’s proposition of the new consciousness mediates social relations, revolutionary social change, and its wider relevance to feminist theory through discussions of the Borderlands and its implications for ‘identity.’

Whenever I am asked to describe where I grew up, I always find this difficult for me to answer. Simply because, I have lived in five different locations, spanning three different continents, all before the age of seventeen. As a result of growing up in a military-oriented lifestyle, the concept of constantly moving around was nothing new to me. Rather than view it as a shortcoming, I grew fond of the idea of moving to somewhere new—to a location where I have yet to explore and integrate myself into. Thus, due to my exposure to a multitude of cultures and individuals from all walks of life, this has affected how I move through the world’s space. In this paper, I will be discussing how the following concepts of my subject position: my ethnicity, culture, and identity as child of a retired U.S. Airman reflect Gloria Anzaldúa’s discussion of la mestiza.

As Sanchez notes, “The plunder of the Southwest is allegorized … in the Yankees’ appropriation of the Mexican girl’s gold and jewels” (xxii), which is symbolically expanded exponentially to “create new millionaires back on the East coast” (xxiii). A Latina author writing this type of veiled social criticism of U.S. policy and political prerogatives is, like her subtle interweaving of feminist themes, quite progressive and unparalleled for her

Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents demonstrates the distinct experiences Dominican men and women face entering a foreign country by challenging their respective ideas of themselves. Numerous times during the novel, Alvarez displays the cultural differences the García family have to adjust to after moving from their home country of the Dominican Republic to the United States. They’ve endured sexual harassment, mental breakdowns and a loss of culture due to their immigration to America. These experiences have effectively altered their lives forever, transforming them into new “selves” that may have never came into fruition had they stayed home in Dominican Republic. Throughout their journeys, the Garcías had started their lives with the potential to become one self -- but encounter experiences in the surrounding culture -- that ultimately change them. As a result, they lose their much of their Dominican heritage trying to assimilate to American culture, but never become truly successful in doing so. Alvarez shows these immigrants, who travel to the United States, are neither American or non-American but borderline in between. They exhibit characteristics of both cultures, and thus, belong in a culture of “selves” that places them directly in the middle.

With immigration a hot topic in modern media, novels like T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain are helpful texts for discussion. The Tortilla Curtain is a satiric approach to addressing the “immigration problem” of the United States, as well as addressing the racism and xenophobia perpetuated by white Americans living close to the border with Mexico. The novel revolves around two contrasting couples: white liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, who lead cushy lives of ignorance and luxury in the Arroyo Blanco Estates, and Mexican immigrants Cándido and América Rincón, who live in the actual canyon of Topanga Canyon and struggle to even put food on the table. As the story progresses and the parallels between these two couples’ lives become clear,

Probably, one of the most frequently cited de nitions of “borderlands” in this new histori- cal school of thought comes from Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 book, Border- lands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, in which she describes these zones as something more than xed areas on maps: they are places where “people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (preface, unnumbered page). Borderlands, in this view, are home to con icting, divergent cultures, as well as people for whom multiple cul- tures could potentially lend order and meaning to the

Anzaldúa writes in her poem that “to live in the borderlands means to put chile in the borscht, eat whole-wheat tortillas, speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent: be stopped by la migra [immigration officials] at the border checkpoints”; Anzaldúa utilizes food as symbolism for the mixing of cultures into one’s identity. Whole-wheat tortillas, chile, and Borscht are all foods that come from different places and cultures, however in the borderlands, these varied foods are consumed together, just as those cultures that have create developed specific identities in the borderlands for generations have merged into an entirely new culture. Gloria Anzaldúa, for instance, says, “Cuando vives en la frontera [when you live in the borderlands], people walk