The Analysis of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera

Year 2021, Volume: 22 Issue: 49, 221 - 231, 31.12.2021

Gamze Ar

Abstract

The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas- U.S Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, 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. I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican and the Anglo. (Anzaldúa, 1987, preface)
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) manifests the life of the author herself. She expresses her personal experiences and she also tells the history of Chicano Movement. It plays a critical role in the maintenance of presenting the ethnic and identity problems because the writer Anzaldúa, like many Mexican Americans, suffers from otherness on the border. This feeling creates some themes, in the book, such as belongingness, otherness, the concept of home, becoming rather than being, ethnic mosaic, sexist discourses and consciousness. The background of Gloria Anzaldúa’s psychological mood and the concept of border in her mind are two significant elements for understanding and looking with the critical eye. Anzaldúa is suffering from being an identity, and she is continuously on the path and she is in the manner of becoming rather than being. She is living the in-betweenness in the book Borderlands. Anzaldúa came from the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas in 1942, and her heritage was based on the mixture of Mexican and American cultures as she “grew up between two cultures.” (from the preface of Borderlands) Because of this dilemma she was seen as alien and she also felt like a stranger in the question of existence. In which space did she belong to? Was she Mexican or American in terms of ethnicity? Why did Anzaldúa use shifting coded language in Borderlands? From which perspectives is this book considered as a diasporic study? How did she deal with identity, gender and ethnicity in the book? This paper attempts to show that Gloria Anzaldúa has a hybrid identity, and Borderlands will be examined in terms of these aspects in a detailed way.

Keywords

borderland, gloria anzaldua, mexican american

Thanks

I have sincerely many thanks for my PhD Professor Murat Erdem at Ege University because I have a critical eye for analyzing Mexican-American relations.

References

• Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. (1987). Aunt Lute Book Company, San Francisco.
• Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
• Blea, Irene I. (1997). U.S. Chicanas and Latinas within a global context: women of color at the Fourth Women’s Conference. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.
• Encyclopædia Britannica, Mexican-American War. (November 10, 2020). Retrieved from December 12, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/event/Mexican-American-War
• Kearney, M. (1995). The local and the global: The anthropology of globalization and transnationalism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 547–565.
• Peck, S. (2020). Transnational social capital: The socio-spatialities of civil society. Global Networks, 20(1), 126–149.
• Pryzgoda, Jayde. Joan C. Chrisler. (2000). “Definitions of Gender and Sex: The Subtleties of Meaning.” Sex Roles, Vol. 43, Nos. 7/8.
• Reyes, Raul A. “Our Lady of Guadalupe Is a Powerful Symbol of Mexican Identity.” NBC news. Retrieved from Dec. 12, 2016. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/our-lady-guadalupe-powerful-symbol-mexican-identity-n694216
• Santos, Diego Junior da Silva and Nathália Barbosa Palomares, and David Normando, and Cátia Cardoso Abdo Quintão. (2010). “Race versus ethnicity: Differing for better application.” Dental Press J Orthod 121, May-June;15(3):121-4.
• Savi, Melina Pereira. (2015). “How Borders Come to Matter? The Physicality of the Border in Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Anu. Lit., Florianópolis, v. 20, n. 2.