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Authors
Gloria Anzaldúa (b. 1942)
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Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) includes memoir, historical analysis, and narrative poetry. Anzaldúa has also written several novels: La Prieta (“The Dark One”) (1997), and (for children) Prietita Has a Friend—Prietita Tiene un Amigo (1991), Friends from the Other Side— Amigos del Otra Lado (1993), and Prietita and the Ghost Woman—Prietita y La Llorona (1996). She is the editor of Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Coras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (1990), and (with Cherríe Moraga) coedited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981). In 2002 she coedited, with Analouise Keating, This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Anzaldúa’s work is studied by Deborah L. Madsen in Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature (2000). Sonia Sandivár-Hull in Feminism on the Border: Chicana Politics and Literature (2000), Paula M. L. Moya in Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (2002), and Catrióna Rueda Esquibel in With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians (2006).
To write about cultures and identities in conflict, Anzaldúa mixes English with Spanish. The “clash of voices,” she says, “results in mental and emotional states of perplexity.” For English-only readers, this encounter is intended to be difficult, for Anzaldúa insists that her works be printed without footnotes, annotations, or other helps with the Spanish. To find the pleasure and the challenge of her texts, therefore, we may need to make a special effort to accept uncertainty, to live with contingency, rather than coerce answers and simple perspectives out of an unfinished journey toward wholeness.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
1. In her prose meditations on “machismo,” Anzaldúa, as a woman, comments on the cultural dilemmas of Mexican American men in a “Gringo” world. Where are the surprises in this description? What chances are taken in offering this portrait? Who is the intended audience?
2. In her poem “El sonavabitche,” Anzaldúa seems more sparing in her use of Spanish than she does in “La conciencia de la mestiza.” How do you account for the difference in rhetorical strategy?
3. Compare the structure of Anzaldúa’s essays to Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas” or Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” in Volume C of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Describe the differences in exposition and development, and comment on the appropriateness of each author’s experiment with the traditions and conventions of expository prose.
