Gloria Anzaldua - Borderlands/La Frontera
Gloria Anzaldua - Borderlands/La Frontera
Gloria Anzaldua - Borderlands/La Frontera
Second Edition
"En el nombre de todas !as madres que han perdido sus hijos en la guerrau
frrst appeared .in IKON: Creativity and Change, Second Series,
No. 4, 1985.
First Edition Cover and Text Design: Pamela Wilson Design Studio
Second Edition Cover Re-Design: Kajun Design
First Edition Cover Art: Pamela Wilson (Ebecatl, The WJ.ild)
Second Edition Typesetting: Kathleen Wilkinson
Senior Editor: Joan Pinkvoss .
. Managing Editor: Shay Brawn
Production, Second Edition: Emma Bianchi, Corey Cohen:, Gina Gemello,
Shahara Godfrey, Golda Sargento, Pimpila Thanaporn
Production, First Edition: Cindy Cleary, Martha Davis, Debra DeBondt,
Rosana F~cescato, Amelia Gonzalez, Lorraine Grassano, Ambrosia Marvin,
Papusa Molina, Sukey Wilder, Kathleen Wilkinson
Printed in the U.S.A.
Library ofi.Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anzaldua, Gloria.
Borderlands: the new mestiza= La frontera/ Gloria AnzaldUa
introduction by Sonia Saldivar-Hull. --' 2nd ed.
p. 264 em.
English and Spanish.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-879960-57-5 (cloth). --ISBN 1-879960-56-7 (paper)
1. Mexican-American Border Region--Poetry. 2. Mexican-American
women--Poetry. 3. Mexican-American Border Region--Civilization.
I. Title.
IT. Title: Frontera.
.S,
PS3551.N95B6 1999
35Qf
99-22546
811' .54--dc21
.. A} 9S
CIP
240136
.Bb
19.9.9
Acknowledgments
,,
1
!.
.r
THIS BOOK
is dedicated a todos mexicano.s
on both sides of the border.
G.E.A.
, Contents
. Introduction by Sonia Salvidai-Hull, page 1
Preface to the First Edition by Gloria Anzaldua, page 19
ATRAVESANDO FRONTERAS I CROSSING BORDERS
. I
alma- ------------ : .
Lingui~tic Terrorism
El d{a de la Chicana
El retorno
Notes
UNAGITADO VIENTO I EHECATL, THEWIND
,I. Mas antes en los ranchos
White-wing Season, page 124
Cervicide, page 126
horse, page 128
Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella, page 130 .
Nopalitos, page 134
II. La Perdida
........ ~,
~
-~.
--
--
.-~----;-~----
'\.
......
by Sonia Saldivar.:.Hull
3
Introduction to the Second Edition
4
Introduction to the Second Edition
5
Introduc;:tion to the Second Edition
6
Introduction to the Second Edition
Armed with her feminist tools, Anzaldua's narrator is prepared to "enter the serpent," as she does in the following section,
to explore the legacy of indigenous forbears. In keeping with
this new feminism, the New Mestiza dramatically reclaims the
female cultural figures that were marked traitors to the community. The first betrayal-denying the Ihdian in the Chicanomakes the second one easier to accept without question: the
, scripting of Malinali Tenepat (Malintzin) (44) and la Llorona
. (the woman who weeps for her lost or murdered children) into
the whore of the virgen/whore dyad. 12
By rewriting the stories-of--Malinali 1 -la-Llorona--and -the---------Virgen de Guadalupe, Anzaldua is strategically reclaiming a
. ground for female historical presence. Her task here is to uncover the names and powers of the female deities whose identities
h~Yebeen s:ubmerged in Mexican memory of these three Mexican
. mothers. The New Mestiza.narrates the pre-Cartesian history of
tll.ese deities, and shows how they were devalued by both the
Azt_e~~-M~c::t pa,tri~<;:hs and by the Christian conquerors. In
presenting the origins of .the Guadalupe myth, Anzaldua offers
new names for our studies-names that we must labor to pronounce: Coatlicue, Cibuacoatl, Tonantsi, Coyolxaubqui.
Significantly, Anzaldua employs the language of the Spanish
colonizers when she narrates the invention of Guadalupe by the
Catholic Church. The well-known Juan Diego version of the
. Guadalupe story is told in poetic stanzas, a presentation that
underlines the bistoria's fictive character. The feminist revision,
written in prose, authorizes itself as legitimate history. Anzaldua's
narrative then returns to Aztlan and Aztec history before the con~ ..
questwith a critique that consciously ruptures the male Chicano ,..,
romanticization of a vag1,1e utopian indigenous past. The reader
enters a conversation between the New Mestiza scribe and those
unreconstructed Chicano nationalists who, even today, refuse to
accept the possibility that the Aztecs were but. one nation of
many and that they enslave9. surrounding tribes.
La L!orona is another part of the virgen/whore dyad the
New Mestiza reclaims, naming her the heir of Cibuacoatl, the
deity who presided over women in childbirth.' I do not believe it
a simple n:iistake that this powerful female figure is then trans-
formed into woman who murders children rather than one who
guides them into life. The centrality of la Llorona in Chicana oral
and written traditions emerges in literature ... written by other
7
Introduction to the Second Edition
r.
9
Introduction to the Second Edition
.
.
Anzaldua's languaging entangles Spanish, English and
Nahuatl (th~ first two with a strong 'literary' tradition kept
alive after the conquest; the third, which was and still is. an
oral way of languaging, was disrqpted during and. marginalized after the conquest), and her languaging invokes two
kinds ofwriting: the alphabetic.writing of the metropolitan
center and the pictographic writing of pre-Columbian.
Mexican (as well as Mesoamerican) civilizations.l6
Anzaldua thus stages her writing within the larger context of the
continent and its layered histories. When Anzaldua deploys multiple languages as part of her New Mestiza methodology, she
enunciates. bet writing as an act of self-creation within that context, a strategy she claims as a Nahuatl concept.
the finill prose ~ection, "La conciencia de la mestiza,"
Anzaldua brings together the work of the previous essays and
offers a wo~king defmition of 'a New. Mestiza Consciousness.
Above all it is a feminist consciousness, one that goes beyond filiation-the ties of "blood." She moves beyond psychological
examinations, leaping from "insec~rity and ind~cisiveness," (1 00)
traveling with "mental nepantilism," accepting her interstitial
material existence, to a life committed to social action. She risks
exposing the "work the soul performs" (1 0 1) as she attains a "differential consciousness," to use Chela Sandoval's .notion of this
other consciousness.17 Thrqughout the text; she labors to construct a new, activist subject who can re-inscribe Chicana History
into the record, re-legitimize Chicano multiple linguistic capacities, and trace the ethnic/racial origins of Mestiza mexicanotejanas. Paradoxically, it is only iJ?.. that qohte:xt that she can
claim that "as a. mestiza I have no COUfl:try . . . as a lesbian
I have no race," and that as a: feminist she is "cUltureless" (102).
In
10.
11
12
13
Introduction to the Second Edition
February 1999
Notes
1. Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad
and Its .Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press. Reprint, 1971. Rodolfo
Acuna, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. Second Edition, 1981,
Third Edition, 1988. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
2. See for example, Marta Cotera, "Among the Feminists: Racist
Classist Issues-1976" 213-20; andAnna.Nieto Gomez, "La Femenista~' 86-92
in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. Alma M.
Garda, NewYork: Routledge, 1997.
-eeL
14
Notes to the Introduction
creates art, such as an altar, she represents much more than herself, "they are
representations of Chicana culture" (113). While her defmition here targets
visual artistry, I believe that it could well describe the Borderlands genre as
well. ~n La Frontera / The Border: Art About the Mexico / United States
Border Experience, ed. Natasha Bonilla Martinez. San Diego: Centro
Cultural de la Raza, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993.
5. See Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, "Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/ La
Frontera: Cultural Studies, 'Difference,' .and the Non-Unitary Subject."
Cultural Critique, Fall1994, 5-28. My reading was greatly influenced by her
comprehensive study and by our numerous <!iscussions about Chicana feminism(s), mestizaje, and Borderlands.
6. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian's "On the Social Construction of
Whiteness within Selected Chicana/o Discourses" offers a.brilliant discussion
of the construction of Aztl:in by Chicano cultural nationalists and presents a
reading, of Borderlands. In Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and
Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1997, 107-64.
7. My interpretation of these early Chicana/o novels builds on Doris
Sommer's observations about Latin American historical fiction,
Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991.
8. Caballero: A Historical Novel, Jovita Gonzruez .and Eve Raleigh.
College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1996. This novel was originally written in the late 1930s but not "recovered" until recently. (There is
some question about the extent to which Eve Raleigh parti~ipated in the
actual writing of the text.)
9. Americo Paredes, George Washington Gomez. Houston: Art;e
PUblico Press, 1990. This is yet another novel of the 1930s that was not pu~~
lished until this decade.
10. For a discussion of the Seditionists and their manifesto, see
Americo Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero. Urbana: University of
Dlinois Press, 1976, 33. see also Ramon Saldivar's discussion of the
Seditionists and El Plan de San Diego in Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics'of
Difference. Madison: Uiuversity ofWisconsin Press, 1990, 2~31. For the text
of the Plan de San Diego see Literatura Chicana: Texto y Con_texto, ed.
Antonia Castaiieda Shuler, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, and David So~er.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982, 81-83.
11. Inderpal Grewal in "Autobiographic Subjects, Diasporic
Locations," makes a similar point: "Anzaldua's exploration of the 'borderland'
15
Notes to the Introduction
'
consciousness powerfully asserts itself as feminist . . . . [it] reveal[s] different modes of multiple positioning and practices around issues of feminists
and. feminism" 235-6. In Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and
Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan.
Minneapolis: University. of Minnesota Press, 1994, 231-54.
,
12. For a comprehensive analyses of Malintzin Tenepal see Norma
Alarcon's two essays: "Chicana's Feminist Literature: A Revision Through
Malintzin/ Or: Malin~zin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object," in This Bridge
Called My Back, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. New York:
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981, 182-90; and "Tra~dutora,
Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism," in Cultural Critique,
: Fall 1989, 57-87. For one of the first Chicana feminist examinations of
Malintzin, see Adelaida del Castillo, "Malintzin Tenepal: A Preliminary Look
Into a Ne'W Perspective" in Essays on La Mujer,_ ed. Rosaura Sanchez and
Rosa Martinez Cruz. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977.
13. "The Caribdo Cafe," in The Moths and Other Stories, Helena Maria
Viramontes. Houston: Arte P'iiblico Press, 1985, 61-75. "Tears on My Pillow,"
Helena Maria Viramontes in New Cb,icano/~ Writing. Ed. Charles Tatum.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 110-15. "Woman Hollering Creek,"
in .Woman Hollering Creek and Other Storie~ by Sandra Cisneros. New York:
Vintage Books, 1991, 43-56. For readings of Ia Llorona in the above stories
see my Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Pol#id and Literature.
14. My reaaing of this passage is informed by Norma Alarcon's bril
liant discussion, "Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of'The' Native Woman" in
Cultural Studies, 1:3 (October 1990), 248-56.
15. In "Chicana Feminism," Alarcon explains: "the name 'Chicana,' in
the present, is the name of resistance that enables cultural and political
.. ,.. points of departUre and thinking through the multiple migrations and dislocations ofwomenof'Mexicail' descent. The name Chicana, is not a name that
women (or men) are born to or with, as is ofte'n the case with ~Mexican,' but
rather it is consciously and critically assumed .. ." (250). In the short story
in the Woman Hollering Creek collection, "Little MiraCles, Kept Promises,"
Sandra Cisneros also evokes those multiple Chicana/Mestiza identities.
16. Walter Mignolo, "Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and
Cultural Landscapes: Languages, Languaging, 'a~d (Trans)nationalism," 19091. In Mod(!rn Language Quarterly, 57:2, June 199~. 182-96.
17. Ch~la Sandoval, "U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and
Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World." Genders
10 (Spring 1991): 1-24.
)-
.. Borderlands
La Frontera --
.:_- -------~-------
'
...
-- ----
..'Of~
..,.
!.
.Afravesando Fronteras
Crossing Borders
I .
------------ --;----
..... ,
1
The Homeland, Azthin
El otro Mexico,
El otro Mexico que aca hemos construido
el !spacio es to que ha sido
territorio nacional.
Este es el esfuerzo de todos nuestros hermanos
y latinoamericanos CJ.Ue han sabido
progressar:
-Los Tigres del Norte 1
uThe Aztecas del norte . . . compose the largest single tribe
or nation of Anishinabeg (Indians} found in the United States
today . . . . Some call themselves Chicanos and see themselves
as people whose true homeland is Aztliin [the, U.S. Southwest] ."2
25
The Homeland, Aztlan 1 El otro Mexico.
This is my home
this thin edge of
barbwire.
But the skin of the earth is seamless.
The sea, cannot be fenced,
. el mar does not stop at borders.
To show the white man what she thought of his
\ arrogance,
Yemaya blew that ~ire fence down.
This land was Mexican once,
was Indian always
and is.
And
be again.
will
26
The Homeland, Azth1n 1 El o,tro Mexico
27
28
29
The Homeland, Aztlan 1 El otro Mexico
In 1846, the U.S. incited Mexico to war. U.S. tro0ps invaded and occupied Mexico, forcing her to give up almost half of
. hef nation, what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado
and California. V
With the yictory of the U.S. forces over the Mexican in the
U.S.-Mexica~ War, los norteamericanos pushed the Te:x:as border
down 100 miles, from el rio N~eces to el rio Grande; South
Texas ceased to be part of the Mexicaq. state of 7Iamaulipas.
Separated from Mexico, the Native Mexicari-Texan no longer
looked toward Mexico as home; the Southwest became our
homeland once more. The border fence that divides the Mexican
.people was born on February 2, 1848 with the sigOlng of the
Treaty of, Guadalupe-Hidalgo. It left 100,000 Mexican citizens on
tliis side, annexed by conquest along with the)and. The land
established by the treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soo~
swindled .away from its owne.rs. The treaty was never honored
and restitution, to this day, has riever been made.
The justice and benevolence of God
will forbid that . . . Texas should again
become a howling wilderness ..
uod only by savages, or . . . benighted
by the ign9rance and superstition,
the anarchy and rapine of Mexican misrule.
The Anglo-American race are destined
to be forever the proprietors of
this land of promise. and fulfillment.
Their laws will govem it,
their learning will enlighten it,
"their enterprise will improve it.
Their flocks range its boundles's pastures,
for them its fertile lands will yield . . ..
luxuriant harvests . . ..
The wilderness ofTexas has been redeemed
by Anglo-American blood & enterprise.
-William H. Wharton9
/ The Gringo, loc!<ed into the fiction of white superiority,
seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans
of ~heir land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con' ~~
destierro y el exilio fuimos desufiados, destroncados, destripa-
30
The Homeland, Azthl.n 1 El otro
Me~ico
'
31
The Homeland, Aztlan 1 El otro Mexico
32
The Homeland, Aztlan 1 El.otro Mexico
33
fi<'.
34
The Hoii).eland, Aztlan 1 El otro Mextpo
35
- The Homeland, Aztl:in / El otro Mexico
----------------
....
----------
..,~
..,
2
Movimientos de rebeldia y
las culturas que traicionan
.
38
Movimientos de rebeldia y las culturas que traicionan
To this day I'm not sure .where I found the strength to leave
the source, the mother, disengage from my family, mi tierra, mi
gente; and all that picture stood for. I had to leave home so I
. could flnd myself, fln4 my own intrinsic nature buried under the
personality that had been imposed on me.
I was the flrst in six generations to leave the Valley, the only
one in my family to ever leave home. But I didn't leave all the
parts of me: I kept the ground of my owri being. On it I walked
away, taking with me the land, the Valley, Texas. Gane mi
camino y me !argue. Muy andariega mi hija. Because I left of
. my own accord me dicen, "iC6mo te gusta la mala vida?"
At a very early age I had a strong sense of who I was and
what I was about and what was fair.. I had a stubborn will. It
tried constantly ~o mobilize my soul under my own regime, to
live life on my own terms no matter how unsuitaqle to others
they were. Terca. Even as a child Iwould not obey. I was "lazy."
Instead of ironing my younger brothers' shirts or cleaning tht;:
cupboards, I would pass many hours studying, reading, painting, writing. Every bit of self-faith I'd painstakingly gathered
took a beating daily. Nothing in my culture approved of me.
Habia agarrado malos pasos. Something was "wrong" with me.
Estaba mas alta de !a tradici6n.
There is a rebel in me-the Shadow-Beast. It is a part of me
that refuses to take orders from outside authorities. It refuses to
take. orders from m.y conscious will,. it threatens the sovereignty
of my rulership. It is that part of me that hates constciints of any
,bd, even those self-imposed. At the least hint of limitations on
ky iline or space by others, it kicks out with both feet. Bolts.
\~
."":.
Cultural Tyranny
Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predeflned concepts that exist as unquestionable; unchaliengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture. Culture is made. by those in
power-:-men. Males make the rules and laws; women transmit
them. How many times have I heru:d mothers and mothers-inlaw tell their sons to beat. their wives for not obeying tb,em, for
b~ing hociconas (big mouths); for being callejeras (going to
visit and gossip with neighbors), for expecting their husbands to
,help with the rearing of children and the housework, for wanting to be something other than housewives?
39
Movhnt.entos de rebeld{a y las culturas que traicionan
c . - .
40
41
Movimientos de rebeldiay las cu/turas que traicion.an
42
Movimi(mtos de rebeld{a y las culturas que traicionan
and faculty into' a panic. The two lesbian students and we two
' lesbian instructors met with them to discuss their fears. One of
the students said, "I thought homophobia meant fear of going
home after a residency:"
And I thought, ho:w apt. Fear of going home .. And of not
being taken in. We're afraid of being abandoned by the mother,
the culture, la Raza~ for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged.
lyiost of us unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable aspect of the self our mother/culture/race will totally reject
us. To avoid rejection, some of us conform to the values of the
-- .. -cmture-;-push-theunacceptablepartsinto the shadows. Which
leaves only one fear-that ,we will .be found out and that the
Shadow-Beast will break out of its cage. Some of us take a_nother
route. We try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow-Beast,
stare at the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction we see
on its face, discern among its features the undershadow that the
reigning order of heterosexual males project on our Beast. Yet
still others of us take it another step: we try to waken the
Shadow-Beast inside us. Not many jilmp at the chance to con~
front the Shadow-Beast in the lili.tror without flinching at her lidless serpent eyes, her'cold cla~y moist hand dragging us underground, fangs bared and hissing. How does one put feathers on
this particular serpent? But a few of us have been lucky-on the
face of the Shadow-~east we have seen not lust but tenderness;
'
on its face we have uncovt;red the lie.
44
Movimientos de rebeldta y las culturas que traicionan
myths of the. tribe into which I was born. I can understand why
the more tinged with Anglo blood, the more adamantly my colored and colorless sisters gl<;>rify their colored culture's valuesto offs<:;t the extreme devaluation of it by the white culture. It's
a legitimate reaction. But I will not glorify those aspects of my
culture which have injured me and which have injured me in the
name of protecting me.
So, don't give me your tenets and your laws. Don't give me
your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three
cultures-white, Mexic.an, Indian. I want the freedom to carve
-and-chisel-my--own-{ace,-to-staunch-the -bleeding with ashes, to
fashion my own: gods out of my entrails. And if going home is
denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making
a new culture-una cultura mestiza--:-with my own lumber, my
own bricks and mortar and. my own feminist architecture.
45
-----
.
.
---- .. -----
-~
---
------.
-------------
3
Entering Into. the Serpent
48
Entering Into the Serpent
-.
49
Entering Into the 'serpent
50
<~'
51
Entering Into the Serpent
My brown virgin
my country virgin
you are our queen
Mexico is your land
and you its flag.
Rcinchera"16
52
Entering Into the Serpent
53
Entering Into
the Serpent
-Huitzilopocbtli
speaking to th~ Azteca-Mexica 18
Before the Aztecs became a militaristic, bureaucratic state
where male predatory warfare and conquest were based on patrilineal nobility, the principle of balanced opposition between the
sexes existed. 19 The people worshipped the iord and Lady of
54
Entering Into the Serpent
55
Entering Into the Serp.ent
56
Entering Into the Serpent
.10..,
,.
57
Entering Into the
Se~ent
The Presences
S.l;le appeared in white, garbed in white,
standing white, pure white.
-Bernardino de Sahagun30
I.
. 58
59
Entering Into the Serpent
'?'
..
60
En'tering Into the Serpent
Lafacultad
La jacultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the
meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the
surface. It is an instant "sensing," a quick perq:ption arriveCI at
without consc~ous reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediat~d
by the part of the. psyche that does 'not speak, that commW,Ucat~s ....
in images and symbols. which are the faces of feelings, that is,
behind which feeli.p.gs reside/hide. The one possessing this sensitivity is e.xcruciatirigly alive to the world.
Those who are pushed out of the tribe for being different are
likely to become more sensitized (when not brutalized into insensitivity). Those who do not feel psychologically or physically safe
in the world are more apt to develop this sense. Those who are
pounced on the most have it the str6ngest...:_the females, the
homosexuais of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, ~he p~r
secuted, the marginalized, the foreign.
When we're up agaitlst the wall, when we have all. sorts of
OI?pres~ions coming at US, we are forced tO develop this faculty
61
Entering Into the Serpent
'.;
'
4
I
La herencia de Coatlicue
The Coatlicue State
protean being
dark dumb windo-wless no moon glides
across the stone
the nightsky
alone
alone
no lights just mirrorwalls 'obsidiaii
smoky
in'the
mirror she sees a woman with four heads the heads
turning round and round spokes of a wheel her neck
is an axle
she stares at each face
each wishes the
other not there
the obsidian knife in the air
the
building so high
should she jump
would she feel
tumbling down the steps
the. breeze fanning her face
of the t_emple heart ,Offered up to the sun
wall
growing thin thinner
she is eyeless
a mo~e
burrowing deeper tunneling here 'tunneling there
tunneiirig tbrougntnealr-'intne~photograph a:d.oii6fe____ .it;nage a ghost arm alongside the flesh one
inside her
head the cracks ricocheting
bisecting
she hears t!J.e rattlesnakes
stirring in
crisscrossing
a jar
being fed with her flesh
she listens to the
seam between dusk and dark they are talking she hears
their frozen thumpings
the soul encased in black
she bends to catch a
obsidian' smoking
smoking
feather of herself
as she falls
lost jn the
silence
of the empty air
turning
turning
at midnight
turning into a wild pig how to get back
all th~ feathers
put them in the jar
the rattlinr
64
windowless
nightsJcy
no moon
night
--ciuce
65
La berencia de Coatlicue I The Coatliq,te State
I tried to conceal was that I was not normal, that I was not like
tl;le others. I felt alien, I -knew I was ;llien. I was the_ mutant
stoned out of the herd, something deformed with evil inside.
She has this fear
that she .has no names
that she
has many names that she doesn't know her names She has
this fear
that she's an image
that comes and goes
clearing and darkening
the fear that she's the dreamwork
inside someone else's skull
She has this. fear
that if
she takes off her clothes
shoves her brain aside
peels off her skin
that if she drains
the blood
vessels
strips the flesh from the. bone
flushes out
the marrow
She has this fear
that when she does
reach herself
turns around to embrace herself
a
lion's or witch's or serpent's head
will turn around
. swallow her and grin
She has this fear that if she digs
into herself
she won't fmd anyone
that w~en she gets
"there"
she won't find her notches on the trees
the
birds will have eaten all the crumbs
She has this fear
that she won't fuid the way back
She felt shame for being abnormal. The ):>leeding distanced
her from others. Her body had betrayed her, She could not trust
her instincts, her "horses," because they stood for her core self,
her dark Indian self. La consentida, la rancheritci que se avergonzaba de su cuerpo tried notto show pain but the kids could
read her face ..
Her soft belly exposed to the sharp ey(!s of everyoqe; they
. see, ~hey ~('!e.~ Iheir. eye,s p_e.J1e~rate .h~~ ,!!J..ey__ s_!!! __he.r._.fr.Qrn,_h_e~d _
to belly.. Rajada. She is at their mercy, she can do nothing to
defend herself. And sl,le is ashamed .that they see her so exposed,
so vulnerable. She has to learn to push their eyes away. She has
to still her eyes from lookirig at their feelings-feelings that can
catch her in their gaze, bind her to them.
66
La herencia de Coatlicue I The Coatlicue State
67
La berencia de Coatlii:ue I The Coatlicue State
Nopal de castilla
Soy nopal de castilla like. the spineless and . therefore
qefenseless cactus that Mamagrande Ramona grew in back of her
shed. I have no protection. So I cultivate needles, nettles, razor~
sharp spikes to protect myself 'from others.
68
La herencia de Coatlicue I The Coatlicue State
69
La berencia de Coatlicue / The Coatlicue State
'l frrst saw the statue9 of this life-in-death and death-in-life,
headless "monster" goddess (as the Village Voice dubbed her) at
the Museum of Natural History irJ. New York City. She has no
head. In its place two spurts of blood gush up, transfiguring into
enormous twin rattlesnakes facing each other,' which symbolize
the e~rth-pound character of human life. She ~has no hands. In
th~ir place are two more serpents in the form of eagle-like claws,
which are repeated at her feet: claws which symbolize ,the digging of graves .into the earth as well as the sky-bound eagle, the
masculine force. Hanging from h~r n~ck is a necklace of open
. hands altern,atfug with human hearts. The hands symbolize the
'act of giving life; the hearts, the pain of Mother Earth giving birth
to all her children, asweUasthe pain that humans stiffer throughout life in their hard struggle for existence. The hearts als() n!present .the taking of life through sacrifice to the gods in exchange
for their preservation of the world'. ''In 'the center of the collar
h\lngs a human skull with living eyes in its sockets. Another identical skull is attached to her belt. Thes<;! symbolize life and death
together as parts of one process.
70
Behind the ice mask I see my own eyes. They will not look
at me. Miro que estoy entabronada, miro la resistencia-resis
tance to knowing, to letting go; to :that deep ocean where once
I dived into death. I am afraid of drowning. Resistance to sex,
intimate touching, opening myself to the alien other where I am
out of control, not on patrol. The outcome on the other side
unknown, the reins failing and the horses plunging blindly over:~"l .
the crumbling path rimming the edge of the cliff, plunging into'
its thousan9 foot drop.
Every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a
traves{a, a cros$ing. I am again an alien in new territory. And
again, and again. But if I escape conscious awareness, escape
"knowing," I won't be moving. Knowledge makes me more
aware, it makes me more conscious. "Knowing" is painful
because after "it" happens I can't stay in the same place and be
comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before.
No, it isn't enough that she is female-:-a second-class member of a conquered people who are .taught to believe they are
7i
La herencia de Coatlicue I The Coatlicue State
72
at the edge of things. But I know what I want and I stamp ahead,
arrogance edging my face. I tremble before the animal, 'the alien,
the sub- or suprahuman, the me that has something in common
with the wind and the trees and the rocks, that possesses a
demon determination and ruthlessness beyond the human.
That Which Abides
En esta tarde gris me siento entre dos aguas, el calor de mi
casa y ~~ frio de afuem. Los dos arbitran p01' el cuadro de
vidrio de la ventana. I can sense the premonition of cold in the
. waythTwfud stir~;-die'1eaves-ilfthe ffee~-mllie gfaysfate-square ....
of sky that frames my window. Winter's coming.
I sit between warmth and cold never knowing which is my
territory, domesticated as I am by human warmth and the peck
peck of my keyboard. Having lived my whole life in an ignorant
shadow, under the sight of hunger shuffling its little child feet,
whimpering, lost. Pain is the way of life. Now I sense a warm
breath on my face, see the shadow of a giant bird, her huge
wings folding over me. Ella.
I spent the first half of my .life learning to rule myself, to
grow a will, and now at midlife I find that autonomy is' a boulder
on my path that I keep crashing into. I can't seem io stay out of
my own way. I've always been aware that there is a greater
power than the conscious I. That power is my inner self, the entity that is the sum total of all my reincarnations, the godwoman
in me I call Antigua, mi Diosa, the divine within,. CoatlicueCihuacoatl-Tlazolteotl-Tonantzin-Coatlalopeuh-Guadalupe"""';'
they are one. When to bow down to Her and when to allow the~
limited conscious mind to take over-that is the problem.
Let the wound caused by the serpent.be curedbythe ser-
pent. For a few minutes, Antigua, mi Diosa, I'm going to give up.
my control to you. I'm going to pull it .out. I plunge my hands
into my solar plexus, pull. Plop. Out comes the handle with' a
dial face, dripping blood, unblinking eyes, watching. Eagle eyes,
my mother calls me. Looking, always looking, only I don't have
enough eyes. My sight is limited. Here, Antigua, take this levershaped handle with needles that measure the temperature, the
air pressure, danger. You hold it for a while. Promise to give it
back Please, Antigua.
73
I'll take over now, she tells me. The alarm will go off if
you're in danger. 'r imagine its shrill peel when danger walks
. around the corner, the insulating walls coming down around me.
Suddenly, I feel like I have another set of teeth,in my mouth.
A tremor goes through my body from my buttocks to the roof of
my mouth. On my palate I feel a tingling ticklish sensation, then
something seems to be falling on me, over me, a curtain of rain
or light. Shock pulls my breath out of me. The sphincter muscle
tugs itself up, up, and the heart in my cunt starts to beat. A light
is all around me-so intense it could be white or black or at that
. juncture where extremes turn into their opposites. It passes
through my body and comes out of the other side. I collapse into
myself:.._a delicious caving into myself_:.imploding, the -walls like
matchsticks softly folding inward in. slow motion.
I see oposici6n e insurrecci6n. I see the crack growing on
the rock. I see the fine frenzy building. I see the heat of anger or
rebellion or hope split open that rock, releasing la Coatlicue.
And someone in me takes matters into our own hands, and eventually, takes dominion over serpents-over my own body, my sexual activity, 'my soul, my mirid, my weaknesses and strengths. '
Mine. 01J.rS. Not the heteros~xual white man's or the colored
man's or the' state's or the culture's or the religion's or the par-
ents' -just ours, mine.
And suddenly l feel everything rushing to a center, a
nucleus. All the lost pieces of myself come flying from 'the
dese.rts and the mountains .and the valleys, magnetized towa,rd
that center. Completa.
Something pulsates in my body, a luminous thin thing that
grows thicker every' day. Its presence never leaves rile.. I am
never alone. That which abides: my vigilance, my thousand
sleepless serpent eyes blinking in the night, forever open. And I
am not afraid.
......
. ,.
5
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
'
,
"We're going to have to control
your tongue," the dentist says, pulling out all the metal from my
mouth. Silver bits plop and. tinkle into the basin. My mouth is a
mothedode.
The .dentist is cleaning out mY,
roots. I get a whiff of the stench when I gasp. "I can't cap that
tooth yet, you're still draining," he says,
,
1
"We're going to have to . do
something about your tongue," I hear the anger rising in his
voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing
back the drills, the long thin. needles. "I've never seen anything
as strong or as stubborn," he says. And I think, how do you tame
wild tongue, train' it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle
it? How do you make it lie down?
76
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
'
77
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
..
t.,.., d; .... ,-{) ),; 1..
[}_or a people who are neither Sparush nor live in a' (~u~try~ . .:
which Spanish is the frrst language; for a people who live in a
country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not
Anglo; for a people wlio cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what
recourse is left to them but to create their own language!}. language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of
communicating the realities and values true to. themselves-a Ian. guage with terms that are neither espafiol ni ingles, but both. We
speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages.
Chicano Spanish sprang out of the .Chicanos' need to identify ourselves as a distinct people. We needed a language with
which we could communicate with ourselves, a secret language.
For some of .us, language is a homeland closer than the
Southwest-for many Chicanos today live in the Midwest and the
East. And because we are a complex, heterogeneous people, we
speak many languages. Some of the languages we speak are:
1. Standard English'
78
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
79
How to Ta.i:ne a Wild Tongue
Chicano Spanish
Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization have
developed signillcant differenc;:esin the Spanish we speak. We collapse two adjacent vowels into a single syllable and sometimes
shift the stress in certain words such . as maiz/maiz, cohete/
cuete. We leave out certaip. consonants wheri they appear between
vowels: /ado/lao, mojado/mojad. Chicanos from South Texas pronouncedjasj as injue (fue). Chicanos use uarchaisms,"words that
are no longer in the Spanish language, words that have been
evolved out. We say seinos, truje, haiga, ansina, and naiden. We
.. , retaip the "archaic"}, as injalar, that derives fr'oni an earlierb, (the
'French haZar or the Germanic halon which was lost to standard
Spanish in the 16tJ:l century), but which is still found in several
regional dialects such as the. one ~poken in South Texas. (Due to
geography, Chicanos from the Valley of South Texas were cut off
liriguisti<;ally from other Spanish speakers. We tend to use words
that the Spaniards brought over from Medieval Spain. The majority of the Spanish colonizers in Mexico and the Southwest came
from Extremadura.....:Hernan Cortes was orie of them-and
Andaluda. Andalucians pronounce lllike a y, and their d's tend to
. be absorbed by adjacent vowels: tirado becomes tirao. They
brought el lenguaje popular, dialectos y regionaUsrrws. 4)
Chicanos and other Spanish speakers also shift ll to y and
z to s.5 We leave out initial syllables, saying tar for estar, toy for
estoy, bora for ahara (cubanos and puertorriquefios also l<7ave
out initial letters of some words.) We also leave out the fmal syllable such as pa for para. The intervocalic y, the ll as in tortt"lla, ella,
botella, gets replaced by tortia or tortiya, ea, botea. We add an
ad,ditional. syllable at the beginning of certain words: atocar for
tocar, agastar for gastar. Sometimes we'll say.lavast~ las vacijas,
other times lavates (substituting th~ ates verb endings for the aste);
We use anglicisms, words borrowed from English: bola from
ball, carpeta from carpet, mtichina de iavar (instead of lavadora) from washing machine. Tex-Mex argot, created by adding a
Spanish sound at the beginning or end of an English word such
as cookiar for cook, watcharfor watch; parkiar for park, and
rapiar for rape, is the result of tl;le pressures on Spanish speak
'
ers to adapt to English.
We don't use the word vosotros/as or its accompanying
verb form. We don't say daro (to mean yes), imaginate, or me
80
81
'o
'
'
'
M-
,,:.,
''-
_,.,,, , . _
or
My fingers
move sly against your palm .
Like women everywhere, we speak in code ..
-Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz7
'Wista~,''
82
83
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
also adapted from the Germans, who in turn had borrowed the
polka from the Czechs and Bohemians.
I remember the hot, sultry evenings when corridos-songs
of love and death on the Texas-MexiCan borderlands-reverberated out of cheap amplifiers from the local cantinas and wafted in
through my bedroom window.
Corridos frrst became widely used along the South Texas/
Mexican border during the eai~y conflict between Chicanos and
Anglos. The' cor:ridos are usually about Mexican heroes who do
valiant deeds against the Anglo oppressors. Pancho Villa's song,
. "La cucaracha," is the most famous one, Corridos of John E
"Kennedy and his death
still very popular in the Valley. Older
Chicanos rememb~r Lydia Mendoza, one of the great border
corrido sil;lgers who was called lei Gloria de Tejas. Her "El tango
negro," sung during the Great Depression, made her a singer of
the people. The everpresent corridos narrated one hundred
years of bo:t;der history, bringingnews of events as well as entertaining. These folk musicians and folk songs are our chief cultural
mythmakers, and they made our hard. lives seem bearable.
I grew up feeling ambivalent about our music.. Countrywestern and rockand-roll had more status. In the 50s and 60~,
for the slightly educated and agringado Chicanos, there existed
a sense of shame at being caught listening to our music. Yet I
couldn't stop my feet from thumping to the music, could not
stop humming the words, nor hide from myself the exhilaration
I felt when I heard it.
are
'
There are more subtle ways that we internalize identifica..tion,. especially in the forms of images and emotions. For me
food and certain smells :i.re tied fO my identity, to my homeland.
Woodsriloke <;urling up to an immense blue sky; woodsmoke perfuming my grandmother's clothes, her skin. The stench of cow
manure and the yellow patches 'on the' ground; the crack of a .22
rifle and the reek of cordite. Homemade white cheese sizzling in
a pan, melting inside a folded tortilla. My sister Hilda's hot, spicy
menudo, chile col01ado making it deep red, pieces of panza and
hominy floating on top.. My brother Carito barbecuingjajttas in
the backyard. Even now and 3,000 miles away, I can see my
mother spicing the ground beef, pork and venison with chile. My
mouth salivates at the thought of the hot steaming tamales I
would be eating if I were home.
84
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
85
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
86
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot-in
the deserts, they've created, lie bleach'ed. Humildes yet proud,
quietos yet wild, nosotros los mexlcanos-Chicanos will walk by
the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that
renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will
remain.
...
",..:.,
6
Tlilli, Tlapalli
88
Tlilli, Tlapalli I The Path of the Red and Black Ink
Invoking Art
In the ethno-poetics and performance of the shaman, my
people, the Indians, did not split the artistic from the functional,
the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life. The religious,
social and aesthetic purposes of art were all intertwined: Before
the Conquest, poets gathered to play music; dance, sing and read
poetry in open-air places around the Xoch'icuahuitl, el Arbol
Florido, Tree-in-Flower. (The Coaxihuitl or morning glory is
called the snake plant and its seeds, known as ololiuhqui, are hal.. .lucinogeruc.l) The ability of story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller and the listener into something or someone
else is shamanistic. The writer, as shape-changer, is a nahual, a
sl;laD;lan.
89
Tlilli, Tlapalli I The Path of the Red and Black Ink
there, fur; twigs, clay. My child,, but not for much longer. This
female being is angry, sad, joyful, is Coatlicue, dove, horse, serpent, cactus. Though it is a flawed thing-a clumsy, complex,
groping blind thing-for me it is alive, infused with spirit, I talk
to it; it talks to nie.
I make my offerings ofincense and cracked corn, light my
candle. In my head I some~imes will say a prayer-an affirmation
and a voicing of intent. Then I run water, wash the dishes or my
underthings; take a bath, or mop the kitchen floor. This ~mduc~
tion~ period sometimes takes a few millutes, sometime~ hours.
But always I go against a resistance. Something in me does not
' want to' do this writing. Yet once I'm immersed in it, I can go
fifteen to seventeen hours in one sitting and I don't want to
leave it.
My "stories" are acts encapsulated in time, "enacted" every
time they are spoken aioud or r~ad silently. I like to think of
them as performances and not as inert 'and "dead" objects (as the
aesthetics of Western culture think of art works). Instead, the
work has an identity; it is a "who" or a "what" and contains the
presences of persons, that is, incarnations of gods or ancestors or
.natural arid cosmic powers. The work manifests the sanie needs
as a person, it needs to be "fed," Ia tengo que baflar y vestit:
When invoked in rite, the object/event is "p~esent"; that is,
enacted," it is both physical thing and the powe~ that infuses it.
It is metaphysical in that it "spins its energies between gods and
.
I
humans" and its task is to move the gods. This type of work dedicates itself to managing the uriiverse and its energies. I'm not
... - sure-what-it -is when it is at-rest (not in performance).--It-may or
may not be a "work" then. A mask may only have tht;:. power of
presence during a ritual dance and the rest of the time it may
merely be a "thing." Some works exist forever invoked, always in
performance. _I'm thinking of totem poles, cave paintings.
Invoked art is communal and speaks of everyday life. It is dedicated to the validation of humans; that is, it makes people hopeful, happy, secure, and'it can have negative effects as well, which
propel
<>ne towards
a search for validatibn.2
I
,
,
90
Tlilli, Tlapalli I The Path of the Red and Black Ink
bears the presences of qualities and internal meanings, It is dedicated to .the validation of itself. Its task is to move humans .by
means of achieving mastery in content, technique, feeling.
Western art is always whole and always "in power." It is individual (not communal). It is "psychological~ in that it spins its energies between itselfand its witne$s.3
Western cultures behave differently toward works of art than _
do tribal cultures. The "sacrifices" Western cultures make are in
housing their art works in the best structures. designed by the
best architects; and in servicing them with insurance, guards to
---- ---protect-them,---conservators to maintain -them, specialists to
motint and display them, and the. educated and upper classes to
"view" them. Tribal cultures keep art works in honored and
sacred. places in the home and elsewhere. They attend them by
making sacrifices of blood (goat or chicken), libations of wirie.
They bathe, feed, and clothe them. The works are treated not
just as objects, but also as persons. The "witness" is a participant
in the enactment of the work 1n a ritual, and not a member of the
pri:vileged classes. 4
Ethnocentrism is the tyranny of Western aesthetics. Ail
Indian mask in an AmeriCan museum is transposed into an alit;!n
aesthetic system-where what is missing is the presence of power
invoked through performance ritual. It has become a conquered
thing, a dead ~thing" separated from nature and, therefore, its
power.
\
Modern Western painters have "borroweq," copied, or otherwise extrapolated the art of tribal cultures and called it cubism,
surrealism, 'symbolism .. The music, the beat of the drum, tQ.c:;:
Blacks' jive talk. All taken over. Whites, along with a good nut:D.., .
ber of our own people, have cut themselves offfrom their spiritual roots, and they take. our spiritual art objects in an unconscious attempt to getthem back. If they're going to do it, I'd like
them to be awar~ of what they are doing and to go about. doing
it the righ~ way. Let's all stop importing Greek inyths and the
Western Cartesian split point of view and root ourselves in the
mythological soH and soul of this contine1;1t. White America has
only attended tothe body of the earth in order to exploit it, never
to succor it or to be nurtured iii it. Instead of surreptitiously ripping off the vital energy o people of color and putting it to commercial us,e, whites could allow themselves to share and
exchange and learn from ~s in a respectful way. By takihg up
91
Tlilli, Tlapallf I The Path of the Red and Black Ink
--~ ~.
--------------- -------- ..
92
Tlilli, Tlapalli I The Path of the Red and Black Ink
six-
93
Tlilli, Tlapalli I The Path of the Red and Black Ink
my
I write the myths in me, the myths I am, the myths I want to
b~come. The word, the image and the feeling have a palpable
energy, a kind of power. Con imagenes domo mi miedo, cruzo
los abismos que tengo por deritro. Con pq.labras me hago
piedra, pajaro, puente de serpientes arrastrando a ras del suelo
todo lo que soy, todo lo c;.ue algun dia sere.
-- .....
~---
---------:----- ....
Picking out images from my soul's eye, fishing for the right
words to recreate the images. Words are blades,of grass pushing
past the opstacles, sprouting on the page; the spirit of the words
moving in the body is as concrete as flesh and as palpable; .the
hunger
to create is as substantial as fingers
and hand. '
'
.
'
,.
'
94
Tlilli, Tlapalli I
Th~
the red. Daily, I take my throat in :my hap.ds and squeeze until the
cries pour out, my larynx and soul sore from the constant
struggle.
95
Tlilli, Tlapalli I The Path' of the Red and Black Ink
\ --cantares mexicanos
96
Tlilli, Tlapalli I The Path of the Red and Black Ink
baby for nine months and then expel it permanently. These continuous multiple pregnancies are going to kill her. She is the battlefield for the pitched fight between the inner image and the
words trying to recreate it. La musa bruja has no manners.
Doesn't she know, nights are for sleeping?
She is getting too close to the
mouth of the abyss. .She is teetering on the edge, trying to balance while she makes up her mind whether to jump in or to fmd
a safer way down. That's why she makes herself sick-to postpone having to jump bli.ri.dfolded into the abyss of her own being
and there in the-depths confront her-face-,-.the-.face-underneath- the mask.
T~ be a mouth-the cost is too
high-her whole life enslaved tp that devouring mouth. Todo
pasaba por esa boca, el viento, el fuego, los mares y la Tierra.
Her body, a crossroads, a fragile bridge, cannot support the tons
of cargo passing through it. She wants to install "stop" and "go"
signal lights, instigate a curfew, police Poetry. But something
wants to come out.
Blocks (Coatlicue states) are related to my cultural ,identity.
The painful periods of confusion that I suffer from are symptomatic of a larger creative process: cultural shifts. The stress of living with cultural ambiguity both compels me to write and blocks
me. It isn't until I' in almost at the end of the blocked state that I
remember and recognize it for what it is. As soon as this happens, the piercing light of awareness melts the block and I accept
the deep and -the darkness and I hear one of my voices saying;-~~
am tired of fighting. I surrender; I give up, let go; let the wati~~
fall. On this night of the hearing. of faults,.- Tlazolteotl, diosa de
la cara negra, letfall the cockroaches that live in my hair, the
rats that nestle in my skull. Gouge out my lame eyes, rout my
demon from its nocturnal cave. Set torch to the tiger that stalks
me. Loosen the dead faces gnawing my cheekbones. I am tired.
of resisting. I surrender. I give up, let go, let the walls fall."
And in descending. to the depths I realize that down is up,
and I rise up from and into the deep: And once again I recognize
that the internal tension of oppositions can propel (if it doesn't
tear apart) the mestiza writer out of the metate where she is
being ground with corp and water, eject her out as nabuaJ, an
agent of transformation, able to modify. and shape primordial
97
Tlilli, Tlapalli I The Path of the Red and Black Ink
'\..
7
La conciencia de la mesti~a
Towards a New Consciousness
For lei rnujer de mi raza
bablara el espfritu. 1
Jose Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, envisaged una raza
mestiza, una mezcla de razas afines, una raza de color-/a
primera raza sfntesis del globo. He called it a cosmic race, la
raza c6smica, a flfth race embracing the four major races of the
world.2 Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial pur~ty that white America practices, his theory is one
of inclusivity. At the confluence of two or more genetic stl'ams,
with chromosomes constantly "crossing over," this mixture of
races, rather th3;n resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid
progeny, a mutable, more .malleable species with a rich gene
pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological ~rosspollinization, an "alien" consciousness is presently in the m~:- _____ _
ing'-a new mestiza consciousness, .una concienCia de mujer. It
is a consciousness of the Borderlands.
'
'
100
;i
101
Lq conciencia de la mestiza /Towards a New Consciousness
,.
to
of
102
La conciencia de Ia mestiza I Towards a New Consciousness
greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a
new cqnsciousness-a mestiza consciousness-and though it is
a source of intense pain, .its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each
new paradigm.
En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza~ Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By
creating a new mythos-that is, a change in the way we perceive
reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave--Ja
mestiza creates a new consciousness. /
The work of mestiza consciousness is to .break down the
subject-object duality that keeps her a pr~sonet and to show in
the flesh and through the images inher work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and
the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split
that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture,
our languages, our. thoughts. A massive uprooting. of dualistic
thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the
beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best
hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.
103
In
104
105
106
Consciousnes~
the men of our race, we demand the admission/acknowledgment/disclosure/testimony that they wound us, violate us, are
afraid of us and of our power. We need them to say they will
begin to eliminate their hurtful put-down ways. But more than
the words, we. demand acts. We say to them: We will develop
equal power with you and those who have shamed us.
It is imperative that mestizas support each other in changing the sexist elements in the Mexican-Indian culture. As long as
wom~n is put down, the Indian and the Black in. all of us is put
down. The struggle of the mestiza is above. all a feminist one. As
long as los bombres think they have to cbinga1 mujeres and each
other to be men, as long as men are taught that they are superior and therefore culturally favored over la mujer, as long as to be
a vieja is a thing of derision, there can be no real healing of our
psyches. We're halfWay there-we have such love of the Mother,
the good mother.' The first step. is to unlearn the puta/virgen
dichotomy and i:o see Coatlalopeub-Coatlicue in the Mother,
Guadalupe.
Tenderness, a sign of vulnerability, is so feared that it is
showered on women with verbal abuse and blows. Men, even
more than women, are fettered to gender roles. Women at least
have had the guts to break out of bondage. Only gay men ha':'e
had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside theQJ.
and to .challenge the current masculinity. I've encountered a few
scattered and isolated gentle stnught men, the beginnings of a
new breed; but they are confused, and entangled with sexist
behaviors that they have not been able to eradicate. We rieed a
new masculinity and the new man needs a movement:
~;
'.r-....
Lumping the males who deviate from the general norm with
man, the oppressor, is a. gross injustice. Asombra pensar que
nos bemos quedado en ese pozo oscuro donde el mundo encierra a las lesb{anas. Asombra pensar que bemos, como
femenistas y lesbianas, cerrado nuestros coraz6nes a los hombres, ~ nuestrQs bermanos los jotos, desberedados y marginates
como. nosotros. Being. the supreme crossers of cultures, homosexuals have. strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian,
Native American, Latino, and with the queer in Italy, Australia
and the rest of the planet. We come from all colors, all classes,
all races, all time periods. Our role is to link people with each
other-the Blacks witJ:l Jews with Indians with Asians with
107
whites with extraterrestrials. It is to transfer ideas and information from one culture to another. Colored homosexuals have
more knowledge of other cultures; have always been at the fore.front (although sometimes in the closet) of all liberation struggles
in this country; have suffered more fujustices and have survived
them despite all odds. Chicanos ne<;!cl to acknowledge the political and artistic contributions of their' queer. People, listen to
what your joteria is saying.
The mestizo and the queer exist at this time and point on the
evolutionary continuum for a purpose. We are a blending .that
proves that all blood is intricately woven together, and that we
ire spawned out of similar souls.
108
personhood, our self-respect. We need you to make public restitution: to say that, to compensate fat. your own sense of defectiveness, you strive for power over us, you erase our history and
our experience because it makes you feel guilty-you'd rather
forget your brutish acts. To say you've split yourself from minority groups, that you disown us, that your dual consciousness
splits off parts of yourself, transferring the "negative" parts onto
us. (Where there is persecution of minorities, there is shadow
projection. Where there is violence and war, there is repression
of shadow.) To say that you are afraid of us, that to put distance
._between us, you wear the mask of contempt. Admit that Mexico
is your double, that she exists iri the shadow of this country, that
we are irrevocably tied to her. Gringo, accept the doppelganger
in your psyche. By taking back your collective shadow the intracultural split will heal. And.fmally, tell us what you need from us.
By Your True Faces We Will Know You
I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both
blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I
exist, we exist. They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But
I haven't, we haven't.
The dominant white culture 'is killing us slowly with its ignorance. By taking away our self-dt!termination, it has made us
. weak and empty. As a people we have resisted and we have taken
expedient positions, but we have never been allowed to develop
unencumbered-we have 'never been allowed to be fully ourselves. The whites in power want us people of color to barri~de
ourselves behind our separate tribal walls so they can pick us Off
one at a time with their hidden weapons; so they can whitewash
and distqrt history. Ignorance splits people, creates prejudices.
A misinformed people is a subjugated pe;opk
Before the Chicano and the undocumented worker arid the
Mexican from the other side can come together, before the
Chicano can have unity with Native Americans and other groups,
we need to know the history of their struggle and they need to
know ours. Our mothers, our sisters and brothers, the guys who
hang out on street comers, the children in the playgrounds, each
of us must know our Indian lineage, our afro-mestizaje, our history of. resistance.
109
,_
El dia de Ia Chicana
I will not be shamed again
Nor will I shame myself.
i
Estamos viviendo en. la noche de ~a Raza, un tiempo cuando el trabajo se hace a lo /Juieto, en lo oscuro. El dfa cuando
aceptamos tal y como somas y para donde vamos y porque_;ese
dfa serd el dfa de la RC?za. Yo tengo el conpromis~ de expresar
110
nosotros valen.
On that day I say, "Yes, all you people wound us wh!!n you
reject us. Rejection strips us of self-worth; our vulnerability
exposes us to shame. It is our innate identity you fmd wanting.
We are ashamed that we need your good opinion, that we need
your acceptance. We can. no longer camouflage our needs, can
no longer let defenses and fences sprout around us. We can no
longer withdraw. To rage and look upon you with contempt is to
rage and be contemptuous of ourselves. We can no longer blame
you, nor disown the white parts, the male parts, the pathological
parts, the queer parts, the vulnerable parts. Here we are
weaponless with open arms, with only our magic. Let's try it our
way, the mestiza way, the Chicana way, the woman way." .
On that day, I search for our essential dignity as a people;.~.a
people with a sense of purpose...:..to b~long and c.ontribute tp
something greater than .our pueblo. On. that day I se~k to recover
and reshape my spiritual identity. jAnimate! Raza, a celebrar el .
dia de la Chicana.
El retorno
All mo:vem,ents are accomplished in six stages,
111
La conctencia de Ia mestiza ./Towards
a New Consciousness
'
.
.
112
113
La conciencia de la mestiza /Towards a New Consciousness
have a piece of dirt, they use car tir~s, jars; cans, shoe boxes.
Roses are the Mexican's favorite flower. I think, how Symbolicthorns and all.
,i.
. 114
Notes
Notes
The Homeland, Aztlan I El otro Mexico
1. Los Tigres del Norte is a conjunto band.
115
Notes
13. Frcim the Navajo "Protection Song" (to be sung upon going into battle). George W. Gronyn, ed., American Indian Poetry: The Standard
Anthology of Songs and Chants (New York, NY: Liveright, '1934), 97.
14. Grace Halsell, Los ilegales, trans. Mayo Antonio
Diana Mexica, 1979).
~anchez
(Editorial
116
Notes
11. Alan R. .Sandstrom, "The Tonantsi Cult of the Eastern Nahuas," .
Mother Worship: Themes and Variations, James J. Preston, ed.
12. Una tela tejida con iisperas fibras de agave. It is an oblong cloth
that hangs over the back and ties together across the shoulders.
13. Andres Gonzales Guerrero, Jr., The Si(mificance of Nuestra Senora
de G!-f-adalupe and La Raza C6smica in the Development of a Chicano
Theology of Liberation (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International,
1984), 1 122.
. .
1 .
14. Algunos dicen que Guadalupe es una palabra derivida ctel
fenguaje tirabe-qu. rsrgniftca~Rt;:rocatto.~
.
Tornie dePaola1 The Lady of
Guadalupe (New York, NY: Holiday House, 1980), 44.
15. "Desde el cielo una hermosa manana," from Propios de la misa de
Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, Guerrero, 124. .
16. From ."La Virgen Rancbera,"Guerrero, 127.
17. La Virgen Maria is often equated with the Aztec Teleoinam, the
Maya Jxchel, the Inca .Mamacocha and the Yoruba ..Yemayti.
18. Geoffrey Parrinder, ed., World Religions: From Ancient History to
the Present (NewYork, NY: Facts on File Publications, 1971), 72.
19. Levi-Strauss' paradigm which opposes nature to culture and. female
to male has rio such validity in the early history of our Indian forebears. June
Nash, "The Aztecs and the Ideology of Male Dqminance," Signs (Winter,
1978), 349.
20. Parrinder, 72.
21. Parrinder, 77.
22. Nash, 352.
23. Nash, 350, 355.
24. Parrinder, 355.
'
25. Jacques Soustelle, The Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eye of the
Spai:ush Conquest (New York, NY: Ma~rnillan Publishing. Company, 1962).
Soustelle and most other historians got their information from the Franciscan
father, Bernardino de SahagUn, chief chronicler of Indian religious life.
26. Nash, 252-253 .
. 27. Nash, 358.
28. Nash, 361-362 ..
117
Notes
29. Karl W. Luckert, Olmec Religion: A Key to Middle America an:d
Beyond cNorman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 68, 69, 87, 109.
118
Notes
6. According to Jung and James Hillman, "archetypes" are the presences
of gods and goddesses in the psyche. Hillman's book, Re~Visioning
Psychology (New York, NY: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), has ~;>een instrumental in .the development of my thought.
7. Yemayd is also known as the wind, Oyd as the whirlwind. According to Luisah Teish, I am the daughter of Yemayd,. with Oyd being the mother who raised me.
8. Another form of the goddess Coatlicue is Cbimalma, Shield Hand, a
naked cave goddess of the Huitznahua who was present atAztlan when the
Azteq;left fr_qm_tha,~point of origin. Burland, 166-167.
- . -- .. --. ----- ---~---------------- -----9. A sculpture, described as the most horrifying and monstrous in the
world, was excavated from beneath the Zocalo, the cathedral' square in
Mexico City, in 1824, where it had lain since the destruction of the Aztec
capital ofTenochtitlan. Every year since the Conquest, people had come during an autumn festival with gifts of fruit and flowers which they laid on the
pavement of the centnil square'. The Indians maintained that there was so~e
body very holy and powerful underneath. Burland, 39-40.
10. Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, translated from the
Spanish by Jack Sage (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1962), 76.
..
Al..;an
..
119
Notes
8. Rodolfo Gonzaies, I Am Joaquin I Yo SQ;V loaqufn (New York,
Bantam Books,, 1972).
was first published in 1967.
It
NY:
9. Kaufman, 68.
10. Chavez, 88-90.
11. "Hispanic" is derived from Hispanis (Espana, a name given to the .
Iberian Peninsula in ancient times when it was a part of the Roman Empiie)
and is a term designated by the U.S. government to make it easier to handle
us on paper.
12. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo created the Mexican-American in
1848.
13. Anglos, in order to 'alleviate the~ guilt for dispossessing the Chica,no,
stressed tht: Spanish part of us and perpetni.ted the myth of the Spanish
Southwest. We have accepted the fiction that we are Hispanic, i:hat-" is
Spanish, in order.to.. accommodate ourselves to the dominant culture andi~s
abhorrence of Indians. Chavez, 88-91.
I'
6. Leon-Portilla, 125.
7. In X6cbitl in Cufcatl is Nahuatl for flower and song, flor y canto.
8. Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, says th~t the artist lives under a
120
Notes
2. Vasconcelos.
3. Arthur Koestler termed this "bisociation." Alpert Rothenberg, The
Creative Process in Art,
Science, and Other
.
. Fields (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1979), 12.
4. In part, I derive my. definitiqns for "convergent" and ",divergent"
thinking from Rothenberg, 12-13.
5. To borrow chemist Ilya Prigogine's theory of"dissipative structures."
Prigogine discovered that substances interact not in predictable ways as it
was taught in science, but in different and fluctuating ways to produce new
and more complex stru.ctures, a kind of birth he caned "morphogenesis,!!-
which created unpredictable innovations. Harold Gilliam, "Searching for a
NewWorldView,"Thi~World Qanuary, 1981), 23.
6. Tortillas. de m~a harina: corn tortillas ar~ of two types, the
smooth uniform ones made in a tortilla press and usually bought at a tortilla
factory or supermarket, and gorditas, made by mixing masa with lard or
shortening or butter (my mother sometimes puts ill bits of bacon or chtcha~
rones).
7. Gina Valdes, Puentes y Fronteras: Cop/as Chicanas (Los Angeles;
CA: <:astle Lithograph, 1982), 2.
8. Richard Wilhelm, The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. Cary E
Baynes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 98.
9. "Soledad" is sung by the group Hacienda Punto en Otro Son.
10. Out of the twenty-two border counties in the four border states,
Hidalgo County (named for Father Hidalgo who was shot in 1810 after instigating Mexico's revolt against Spanish rule under the banner of la Virgen de_
Guadalupe) is the most poverty-stricken county in the nation as well as the\..
large~t home base (along with Imperial in California) for migrant farmworkers. It was here that I was born and raised. I am amazed that both it and I
have survived.
'.
Un Agitado Viento
Ehecatl, The Wind
I
Mas antes en los ranchos
124
White-wing Season
The whitemen with their guns
have come again
to fill the silence and the sky
with buckshot.
She shakes out the wrinkles
,snapping the sheets,
they. crack. like thunder
lean on the.wind.
The gringos pull their caps
down to their eyes
hand her the bills;
the green flutter in her hand
will reshingle her roof.
Once her tender arms raised up
her brother's rifle
'
pointed at the cooing so.unds
sprigs and two feathers floated down
near her feet twitching plumage
translucent eyelid blinking
acro:;s its eye
the small opened bill
blood from its niouth
She pours blueing into the washtub
plunges her arms in
puncturing the sky.
She wrlngs the sabanas
they sail and snap in. the wind.
Startled, plump bodies rise
from the wooded areas and desert brush.
The beating of feathers
white patches on wings and tail.
125
The shots
feathers fall over the fields
cover her roof.
On their way back
to the midwest
the hunters drop two birds
on her washboard.
Her eyes shiny' pellets
watching the wind
trying to lift their wings.
Tinges of pink
small twisted necks
line the furrows.
She dunks the doves in_the boiling pot
plucks out the feathers
in her belly
arumble
. the sky reddens then blackens
a flurry of night rain
gentle as feathers.
126
cervicide
La venadita. The small fawn.
They had to kill their pet, the fawn. The game warden was on the
way with his hounds. The penalty for being caught in possession
of a deer was $250 or jail. The game wfrden would put su papi
~~~~
'
127.
128
horse
(para la gente de Hargill, Texas)
Great horse running in t~e fields
come thundering tpward
the outstretched hands
nostrils flaririg at the corn
only it was knives in. the hidden hands
can a horse smell tempered steel?
129
130
131
132
"I
\
i33
ln:asas-live coals
usted YCf no puede-You can't live here by yourself any longer.
. armarios-cupboards
ve~ices-suitcases
luto-mourning clothes
platfcame dei rancho-,-Tell me about the ra.iJ.ch.
lo que hacen todos los hombres-what all men do
mujeres "fO hablan-women don't talk about such' filth
tfas-aunts
y los de la otra-and those of his other woman
!Ullieni Univcngt~
.
~fbtm~
'. .
134
Nopalitos
It's that time of day
when the musty smell of dust hangs in the air
mingling with the scent of orange blossoms.
Dogs sprawl in the heat
tongues loll, drip saliva,
flanks ripple off flies.
The wind shifts.
-~-------
--I
sm~n-mesquite -~urning;
"
'
135
and hominy
cubeta-pail
palo blanco-a tree
galla-rooster
grillos-cicadas
regafios-scoldings
~----.
-------
..L
II
LaPerdida
138
139
140
bolt/lo-a derogatory terni for Anglos meaning hard crust of loaf of white
bread.
'
.
.
entre las matas de mafz-between the com stalks
terremotes-sods
141
142
Cultures
vete
go out take the pick axe
take the shovel
my mother would tell me
hard brown earth with the axe
I'd );)ick at its dark veins
disinter.a ro_t_tj.ng_ti.tl c;ap_________________ .:. __ _
unmould a shell from a lost ocean
-,-------.
bones of an uri.known animal
with my eyes I'd measure out a rectangle
I'd swing and shove and lift
my sweat dripping ori the swelling mounds
into the hole I'd rake up and pitch
rubber-nip pled baby bottl~s
cans of Spam with twisted umbilicals
I'd overturn the cultures
spawning in Coke bottles
murky and motleyed
my brothers never helped
woman's 'work and beneath them
under the clothesline
three times a year, two feet apart
'~'.......
).
143
144
La vida me ha jorobado,
ando como anciano
ladiando de un lado al otro.
Ya casi ni veq.
La nifia le estara preguntand9
iCuando viene mi papi?
y los cbiquillos chi/lando
sus manitas. estirandole la faldd
bocas chupando sus cbicbes_ secas ---.
pobre vieja. Al menos no tengo que ver
esa mirada en sus ojos .'
que me hace un nudo en mi pecbo.
146
El sonavabitche
(for Aishe Berger)
Car flowing down a lava of highway
just happened to glance out the window
in time to see brown faces bent backs
like prehistoric boulders in a fiel~
so common a sight no one
notices
blood rushes to my face ,
twelve years I'd sat on the memory
the anger. scorching me
my, throat so tight I can
barely get the words out.
I got to the farm
in time to hear the shots
ricochet off barn,
spit into the sand,
in time to see tall men in uniforms
thumping fists on doors
metallic voices yelling Halt!
their hawk eyes constantly shifting.
When I hear the words, '''Corran muchachos"
I run back to the car, ducking,
see the glistening faces, arms outflung,
of the mexicanos running headlong
through the fields
kicking up clouds of dirt
see them reach the tree Une
foliage opening, swishing closed behind them.
I hear the tussling of bodies, grunts, panting
squeak of leather squawk of wallde-talkies
sun reflecting off gunbarrels
the world a blinding light
a great buzzing in my ears
my knees like aspens in the wind.
147
148
149
150
151
esclavos-'slaves
Pobres jijos de la Cbingada-p~of: sons of the fucked one
jregados-poor, beaten, downtrodden, in need
Vdmanos, mujer, empaca el mugrero.-'-Let's go, woman, pack our jUnk.
152
Mar de repollos
(pam la gimte que siempre ha trabajado en las labores)
Hincado, manos hinchadas
sudor flo1eciendo en su cam
su mi1ada en 'altas veredas
sus pensamientos torciendo cuerdas
para pescar esa paloma de las alturas.
Siglo tras siglo nadando
brazos artriticos dando vueltas
)' vueltas )' vueltas 1"ecorriendo surcos
un gusano en un mar verde.
una vida estremecida por el viento
meciendose en una goma de esperanza
atrapada en las redes con la paloma.
A mediodia en la Orilla
de las verdes colmenas
en la labor de un ranchito en Tejas
saca sus tortillas con chile
toma agua hecha caldo por el sol.
A veces maldice
su suerte, la tierra, el sol.
Sus ojos: inquietos pajaros volando
sobre veredas altas en busca
de esa paloma blanca
y su nido:
Hombre en verde mar.
Su herencia: manos gordas manchadas
hechando raices en la tierra.
Aunque empinado, vivia cara arriba,
en sus ojos telarafias
pescaban las plumas blancas.
Sus manos rompen repollos de sus nidos
rompen venudas hojas cubrlendo hojas tiernitas
cubrlendo hojas mas palidas, el coraz6n:
153
'.
154
A Sea of Cabbages
155
156
157
158
159
tragandose el sol.
Con obsidiana le punza cuatro veces, cinco.
iEstoy muerta? le pregunto.
For favor entierren mi matrfz conmigo.
Un relampago perforando el cielo
tiispersa la nocbe.
Me sangran, me sangran.
Tengo sefias de la muerte:
un color de bumo en medio de los ojos
que. relucen poco;
cara que se enegrece.
Alguien me empuja entre la lumbre,
aspiro bumo de. cabellos cbamuscados.
Esta pequefia muerte,
una comez6n que no me deja a gusto.
Un dedo sale del cielo, y descende,
se insitJ:Ua entre mis rajadas cavidades.
Cbispas salen del agujero
me preparo a despedirme de la vida asesina.
Revuelvo y repito palabras sin sentido.
En un Iugar interno alguien se queja.
.Suefia de una cara tiznadrt,
.de una boca escupiendo sangre
y luego comiendo atole de miel y chile.
Hacia el oriente una larga cicatriz
r:aja.el_ ci.elo._ - .. -------:
Le punza dos veces, tres, siete.
C-.
.
160
.,
III
Crossers
y otros atravesados
y no lo puedo cruzar,
al otro lado esta el mar
no lo puedo atravesar:
-Isabel Parra, "En La 'Frontera"
162
"
rur
163
todita-I swallow it
whole
'
164
..
165
166
167
168
169 .
170
Interface
(for.Frances Doughty) ,
She'd aiways been there .
occupying the same room.
It was only when Booked
at the edges of things
my eyes going wide watering,
objects blurring.
Where before there'd only been empty space,
I sensed layers and layers,
felt the air in the room thicken.
Behind my eyelids a white flash
a thin noise.
That's when I could see her.
. Once I accidentally ran my arm
through her bo?y
.."
171
_ constantly running?
I would lie on the bed.talking
she would hover over me.
Did I say talk?
We did not use words.
I pushed my thoughts toward her.
172
173
174
love
Cihuatlyotl, Woman_Alone
Yo llamo a mujer,
canto por mujer.
Cubierta- con serpientes vengo yo,
al lugar del encuentro me acerco,
repito conjuros para provocar amor.
Clamo por mujer.
Ya llego, llamo.
-Gloria Anzaldua
176
Holy Relics
(for Judy Grahn & V Sackville-West)
We are the holy relics,
th~ scattered bones of a saint,
the best loved bones of Spain.
We seek each other.
City of Avila,
__________ J3.8crenellated towers crowning a low hill.
A silent landscape rises toward indigo mountains,
empty save for clumps of broom and tormented ilex.
Here and there strange stones
like prehistoric ruins.
A granite city in a dour land,
with a cathedral for a fortress.
A land where no mists soften the rocks,
where light is relentless.
When she* died, flesh of our bones,
they buried her at the Alba de Tormes
50 miles west of Avila.
They finally buried her
in her patched and shabby habit.
Buried her in her threadworn veil.
Bricked her in a wall. of grey stone.
Nine months she lay in the grey stone.
Nine months she lay quietly.
Her daughters, the nuns of Alba, came to her dailycame to that bricked-up place in the wall.
From that place issued a scent
to which they could give no name.
Froni within that tomb
issued a sound to which they could give no name.
Day by day they waited.
They waited for the good father Gracian,
177
to
178
..
.,.
Through the bitter winds of Avila
Teresa raced from the grave.
She traveled at night,
and briefly during the run she stopped
to resuscitate a dying child
with the ed~e of her bloodstained rag,
paused to heal .the fiery eyes of a shepherd.
Toward the 88 towers and their indented embrasures
they galloped.
Through streets of.Avila,
past highwalled houses where black eyes behind lattices
stared down at the shroud riding on horseback.
Into San Jose convent he took her .
179
180
181
182
183
'
184
185
'
186
Letting Go
It's not enough
deciding to open.
You must plunge your flngers
.
into your navel, with your 't:Wo hands
split open,
spill out the lizards and horned toads
the.orchids .and the sunflo_wer.s._ __ - - - - - - - - - - ..
turn the maze inside out.
,Shake it.
Yet, you don't quite empty.
Maybe a green phlegm
hides in your cough.
You may not even lqlow
that it's there until a knot
grows in your throat
and turns into a frog.
It tickles a secret smile
ori your palate
full of tiny orgasms.
But sooner or !;iter
it reveals itself.
The green frog indiscreetly croaks.
Everyone looks up.
It's not enough
opening once..
Again you must plunge your fingers
into your naveJ, with your two hands
rip open,
drop out dead rats and cockroaches
spring rain, young ears of com.
Tum the maze inside out.
Shake it.
187 '
188
,-.
189
I Had To Go Down
I hardly ever set foot on.the floors below.
Creaking wood expanding contractitlg,
erratic ticking of the furnace
wild ani.tD.al kicking at its iron cage
frighten
me.
I don't know what impelled me to go down.
I should have waited till morning.
' . The stairs were dark
.
dust devils eddied in the corners
and the fringes of unraveling carpet
nagged at one like an abandoned child
left too long in soiled diapers
dust-streaking down my nightgown .
. I lingered on the second floor
shivering in the cold
gripping my broom dustpan mop and pail.
I flicked on every light,
pulled down curtains thickened by time,
scraped the caked tears from the windows,
stripped the bed of its stiff sheets
carried my bundle down to the first floor.
I had to make a seam on the wall
pry the door open
..
wlth the claw end of the haffimer. .)
.I heard f~otsteps in the basement,
an intruder breaking in.
But it was only a flurry of rain drops
hitting the windowpane
or the wind knocking the candle out of my hand.
I stqod among the winter trees
grey and leafless in the sunken yard
the sky vast and eternal.
I gathered the rotting wood.
It took me a time to light the fire.
190
it:
19i
192
193
195
v
Animas
198
La curandera
I'll tell you how I became a healer.
I was sick, my leg had turned white.
Sobrino went to Juan Davila
asked if Juan Davila knew
anyone who could cure' me.
Yes, Juan Davila told him,
there is a healer in Mexico.
Juan Davila crossed the border
to bring the healer.
When, Juan Davila didn't come back,
Sobrino followed hiril and found the healer dead.
Sobrino's leg became white
Juan Davila prayed and prayed
Sobrino died.
Juan Davila thought,
"It doesn't matter if one is sick or not
what matters is that one thinks so~"
In his mind Sobrino wanted to die
In his mind he thought he was dying
so he died.
199
200
201
202
mujer cacto .
La mujet del desierto
tiene espinas
las espinas son sus ojos
si tu te le arrimas te arrafia.
La mujer dei desierto
tiene largqs y afiladas garras.
. La.mujer del.desierto. mira la avispa
clavar su aguij6n
y cbingar a una tarantula
mita que la arrastra a un agujero
pone un buevo sobre ella
el buevo se abre
el bebe sale y se come la tarantula
No es facil vivir en esta tierra.
La mujer del desierto
se entierra en la arena con los lagartos
se esconde como rata
pasa el dfa bajo tierra
tiene ei cuero, duro
no se 1'eseca e'IJ. el sol
vive sin agua.
La mujer del desierto
mete la i::abeza adentro como la tortuga
desentierra rafces con su hocico
junta con las javalinas
caza conejos con los coyotes.
Como un flor la mujer del desierto
no dura mucbo tiempo
pero . cuando vive llena el desierto
con flores de nopal o de arbol paloverde.
La mujer del desierto
enroscada es serpiente cascabel
descansa durante el dfa
203
.:
204
Cuyamaca
(for Beth Brant and Chrystos)
"This tribe is the most numerous
and the most restiess, stubborn,
haughty, warlike and hostile
toward us .... n
-Don Pedro Fages, 1787
------ - --- ----Driving -down-the. canyon-------- _____ ..
on a road gouged out .of the side of. the mountain
red red earth imd exposed roots
sticking out like amputated fingers.
145 acres for saie
the Indians safely locked up in reservations
or urban ghettos.
Driving around-the mountain
inside the ca:r
fighting for silence.
Houses stick out like pimples
on the face of the mountain.
At this skirt of the mountain ranges
I i:net a woman from a nearly extinct tribe,
the Kumeyaay.
Her name was Til'pu,
meaningRoadrunnec
By a stream amidst the gushing water
under the olive woolly head of the mountain
I met her.
205
206
My Black Angelos
In the night I hear her soft whimper
wild masses of hair
.rustling in the silence.
Una mujer vaga en la nocbe
.
anda enante con las almas de los muertos.
Aiiii aiiiii aiiiiii
____--She.is..crying .for. the dead child ----- .
the lover gone, the lover not yet come:
Her grito splinters the night
fear drenches me.
I s'tink of carrion,
she turns upwind tracking me ..
Her teeth reflect the fire
from her rouged eyes
my black Angelos,
la brujt;t con las uflas largas,
I hear her at the door.
aiiiiii aitiiiaaaaaaaa
Una mujer vaga en la noche
207
-------------------
208
Creature. of Darkness .
Three weeks I've wallowed
in this deep place
this underplace
this grieving place
getting heavier and heavier
sleeping by day creeping out at night
nothing I w;mt to do
but stay small and still in the dark
. no thought
I want hot to think
that stirs up the pain
opens the wound
starts the healing
I don't want it to stop .
I want to sit here and pick at the scabs
watch the blood flow
lick the salt from my face
while all the time
a part of me cries Stop Stop
Behind that voice
shadows snicker
No, we like it here in the dark
we like sitting here with our grief
and our longing
This is where we live
Home, they whisper
We're a creature of darkness.
A lump of me says
What are you hiding
under that black log
that grey fog
a pink salamander
a mole without eyes
209
210
Antigua, mi diosa
Descalza, gateando a ciegas voy
sigo tus huellas ligeras y tu linaje viejo.
Con astillas en las rodillas voy.
Furtiva, con paso de ~ortuga
camino bajo la nocbe desajorada.
Antigua, mi. diosa, por ti sacrifique
las plantas de mis pies.
- -- ---- - -:Acantilada por tus-ojos vulnerada -voy,----.----
testiga de' este largo .invierno.
En medio de un chillido de trenes
veniste a las ruinas de Brooklyn
con tu sonido de cascabeles.
Tu voz un mill6n de alas.
Como un chubasco veniste
oliendo a almendras quemadas y copal. ,
Me diste tu golpe de hacha
ca{ como un arbol despetalando mis ojos.
Te tendiste a mi lado, tus dedos cantando como espadas
haciendo dibujos en mi cara.
Me entraste por todas las rendijas
con tu luz llenaste el hueco de mi cuerpo.
Me consumaste enterita, .
'sf, mi antigua diosa,
sembraste tus semillas de luz
en los surcos de mi cuerpo.
La cosecha: esta inquietud
que se madura en agonfa.
Y abora huyes en mis entrafias como un animal.
Toditito ha cambiado, nada me satisjace.
Ancient, querida, parece que no tengo cura.
Hace diez meses que me hago y me deshagoque tarea inacabable tu me dejaste.
No te puedo darme no,
.
no me puedo entregar .a tu regazo.
iC6mo? si nunca me he dado a m{ misma.
Antigua, mi madre, ya no soy duefia
ni de mis desengafios.
Tu acabaste con todo eso.
211
VI
ElRetorno
I
I
I
I
,.
214
Arriba mi gente
(para Tirsa Qqiiiones who wrote the .music
and Cherrie Moraga who sang it)
Chorus: Arriba mi gente, .
toda gente arriba.
In spirit as one,
all people arising
Toda la gente junta
en busca del Mundo Zurdo ---- --- --- -------------,
en busca del Mundo Zurdo
repeat
repeat
Mi gente, despierta,
limpia 'a Mr:zdre Tierra.
repeat
Y entre la llama purpura
alii renaceremos
alli renaceremos.
repeat
Chorus
Hijas de la Chingada,
born of the violated india,
guerrilleras divinasmujeres de fuegr:> ardiente
que dan luz a la noche oscura
dan lumbre al Mundo Zurdo
215
Chotus
jVolveremos!
Prenderemos Ia guerra de bien adentro
con esa luz del alma.
En esta noche Zurda
renacera el Espiritu . _ repeat
de nuestra Tierra.-
repeat
In spirit as one
all people arising.
repeat
Chorus
Levantemonos, Raza
' mujeres de septimo rayo
que ya llegamos y aquf estamos.
Arriba, despierta mi gente
216
217
burra-donkey
buey-oxen
sin fronteras...:.without borders
218
Canci6n. de la diosa de
. la noche
(for Randy Conner)
I am a vine
creeping down the moon .
. I have no keeper.
I fall into tQ.is world.
The Mother, catching m~ in her net,
entangles me in human flesh.
I wander on a path
come to the patio of a ruined temple.
Flutes lure me to a fire.
A litany fondles my hip
horns pin me to the. ground.
To cast out the brute,
I shake .earth, air, fire, and water
in the lunar sistrum.
I devour the roses of Isis.
I pass
through the gate,
come to the path on the left,
past the wellspring
beside the gnarled cypress.
At the crossroads
where her spirit shocks
she comes sweeping
through the night,
spirits and hounds
baying behind her.
Her wings keep me warm.
Three jackals
watch with me.
I am the gate
demons and vanquished gods invade
then pass into this world to get to you.
219
.. !'
220
I absorb. I convert.
When I dance it burgeons out
as song.
I seek la diosa
darkly awesome.
In love with my own kind,
I know you and inspirit you.
All others flee from me.
I buff the old scratches from bone.
With flint knife, cut in our marks.
I keep the moon from bleeding
and the sun from turning black.
But water drains from the earth.
Terror seizes me.
Death's warm hand on me.
Night, urifurl your wings
and your long hair over me.
Bring your breast
to my mouth and never wean nie.
With chant I breltk the spell,
disperse the watchers from the gates.
Wake the sleepers.
With my fist I rive
a hole in the wail:
the winds rush in,
I am the gate no longer.
You are the gate.
The deep below, the deep above.
The wa,ters overflow.
It begins where it ends,
I descend jnto black earth,
dark p'rimordial slime,
no longer repellent to me,
221
nor conflning.
The four winds
fire welds splinter with splinter.
I fmd my kindred spirits ..
The moon eclipses the sun.
La diosa lifts us.
We don the feathered mantle
and charge our fate ..
222
No se raje, chicanita
(para MissyAnzaldua)
No se raje mi prietita,
apriitese 'la faja aguantese.
Su linaje es antiguisimo,
sus raices como las de los mesquites,
bien plantadas, horadando bajo tierra
a esa corriente, el alma de tierra madretu origen.
Sf m'ijita, su gente se cre6 en los ranchos
aqui en el Valle cerquita del rio Grande
en la niera frontera.
en el tiempo antes de los gabachos
cuando Tejas era Mexico
.
De los primeros vaqueros descendiste
alia en los Vergeles, en jesus Maria-tierra Davila
Mujeres fuertisimas te crearon:
tit mama, mi hermana, mi madre, y yo.
Y sf, nos han quitado las tierras.
no nos queda ni el camposanto
donde
enterraron
a . Don Urbano, tu vis-visabuelo.
I
.
.
.Tiempos duros como pastura los cargamos
derechltas caminamos.
Ya
223
224
'225
by Karin Ikas
Karin Ikas: In your life, particularly in your personal life but also
in your writing career, you had to struggle a lot, as there was a
lot .of hardship and oppression to overcome right from the
beginning. Can you tell us a bit more about that, about your
childhood and how you were raised?
Gloria Anzaldua: I grew up on a ranch settlement called Jesus
Maria in the Valley of South Texas. At that time there were four
or five of these rariches in that area; And on each of these ranch
settlements there lived betWeen two to four families. My mother and my father, who each lived on one of these. adjoining
ranches, met there and married while. they were quite young.
My mother had just turned 16 when I was born. Both ofmy parents had no highschool education. Until I was eleven years old
we lived in a ranching environment, and all of us had to participate in farm work like, for example, working in the fields, raising animals..:_cows and chickens, et cetera. Then we mo,Ved
closer to a little town called Hargill, Texas. We had a little house
and continued ranching there. However, until i turned ten we
were continually changing places as we were working' on differ. ent ranches and in different places as migrant workers. We had
started out as migrant workers when I was about seven or eight.
But I had missed so much school in the .first years at elementary
school that after a year my .father decided he would just migrate
-by himself and leave- US at home- so- that all-of US' children- coulq
go to school regularly. I first went to school penp.imently in
Hargill, and I graduated there after eighth grade. Then we, my
sister and I, were bussed to school in Edinburgh, Texas.
Although !stopped being a migrant laborer while I was still very
young, I continued working in the fields of my home valley until
I earned my B.A. from Pan American Urliversity in 1969. So I
had learm!d the hardships of working in the fields and of being
a migrant laborer myself, and that experience formed me: I have
a very deep respect for all the migrant laborers, the so-called
campesinos. That experience also reinforced me in my work
with migrant kids. After I got my M.A. in English and Education
228
G.A.: No, not at all. I very much feel that I have changed. Their
interpretation of me through the writin~ influenced their memories, because I wasn't as political and feminist in the beginning.
I was always rebellious and political wh~n it came to the c'ultur~
al stuff, but not to the sanie degree that I was later when I wrote
229
230
pa~ticular
G.A.: One motivation for doing This Bridge Called My Back was
that when I -was at UT I wanted to focus my dissertation on feminist studies and Chicana Ilterature and soon realized that this
seemed to be an impossible project. The advisor told me that
Chicana literature was not a legitimate discipline, that it didn't
exist, and that women's studies was not so1p.ething that I sho'!lld
do. You know, this was back 'then in 1976-77. If you were a
--- --cn:rcana-ar a uiiiversl'ty;-all-you-wete-taughtw~re-'these- red,
white and blue American philosophies, systems, disciplines,
ways of knowledge. They didn't consider ethluc cultural studies
as having the impact or weight needed to enter the academy.
And so in a lot of rhese classes I felt silenced, .like I had no voice.
Finally I quit the Ph.D. program at UT and left Texas for
California in 1977. When I moved to San Francisco, I participated in the Women's Writers' Union, where I got to know Susan
Grifftn, Karen Brodine, Nellie Wong and Merle Woo, among others. Also I joined the Feminist Writers' Guild, which was a little
bit less radical. This is where I met Cherrie Moraga, whom I
asked a few months later to become my co-editor for This Bridge
Called My Back. Anyway, I found that this little community of
feminist writers in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, this
Feminist Writers' Guild, was very much excluding women :of
color. Most of the white women I knew were part of that organization. I did meet Luisah Teish th~re, though. She is an MroAmerican
woman from
Louisiana
who has all those books on
'
'
.
. .t
spirituality-and practices all that in her own life, so you can call
her a santeria. Every two weeks we would have our meetings
and everybody 'would talk about the white problems and their
white experiences. When it was my tum to talk, it was almost
like they were putting wor!Is into my mouth. They interrupted
me while I was still talking or, after. I had ftnished, they interpreted what I just said according to their thoughts and ideaS.
They thought th~t all, women were oppressed ih the same way,
and they tried to force me to accept their image of me and my
experiences. They were not willing to be open to my own presentation of myself and to accept that I might be different from
what they ~ad thought of me so far. Therefore one of the messages of This Bridge Cal~ed My Back is that gender is not the
231
'
G.A.: Yes, e~actly. Some of the things that I said _in "La. Prieta"
and "El Mundo .Zurdo 1 The left-handed w:orld" were' all introductions, the foreword and the essay to what .I said in "Spealdng
in Tongues" in This Bridge Called My Back. And I.was the only
woman of color doing that at that tirrie, that is, speaking against
this silencing from the outside by getting our work. published.
However, after- several months of struggling with. This Bridge
on my own, and trying to convince other womeri of color that
they really- h.ave-a--voice-worth being listened-to and-b-eing-pub~--
lished, I asked Cherr1e Moraga to become a co-editor and support me with this project that had become too overwhelming for '
me alone.
K.I.: How did Chicanas then receive your next book,
Borderlands 1 La Frontera?
232
writing and speaking is okay" and, "Oh, she is writing about La Virgen de Guadalupe, about la Llorona, about the corridos,
the gringos, the abusive, 'etcetera. So if she [Gloria Anzaldll'a]
does it, why J10t me as well?" The book gave them permission to
do the same thing. So they started using code-switching and
writing about all the issues they have to deal with in daily life.
To them, it wa~ like somebody was saying: You are just as important as a woman as anybody from another race. And the .experiences that you have are worth being told and written about.
-
--- -K.l.-:--How_.:-do-you,-feel--about-the-critical-rec(;!ption--Of-Borderlands?
,-
G.A.: Critics are more open towards it right now. For some reason or other I got lucky in that fhey still teach my book at school
and university. They teach it as a way of introducing students to
cultural diversity. However, some of the writing is glossed over
as, particularly, white critics and teachers often pick just some
parts of Borderlands. For example, they take the passages iri
which I talk about mestizajf! and borderlands because they can
more easily apply them to their own experiences; The angrier
parts of Borderlands,.however, are often ignored as they seem
to be too threatening and too confrontational. In some way, I
think you could call this selective critical interpretation a kind of
racism. On the othe_r hand, I am happy that the book is read at
all. For us, it is not always easy to have people read our work or
deal with our art. If the work is not interesting or entertaining
enough, forget it. So I have to keep all these different issue~
regarding the reception of my work in mind and try to compro-' {.
mise. For example, if. I had made Borderlands too inaccessible
to you by putting in too many Chicano terms, too many Spariish
words, or if I had been more fragmented in the text than I am right now, you would have been very frustrated. So there are
certain traditions in all the different genres..:..lik:e autobiography,
fiction, poetry, theory, criticism-and certain standards that you.
have to follow. Otherwise you are almbst ~aked. IUs like when
you .write a dissertation: there are certain rules you have to
apply; otherwise they won't pass you.
My whole struggle is to change the disciplines, to change the
genres, to change how people k>ok at a poem, at theory or at
233
G.A.: I do. I believe that both inter- and intracultural understanding can be enhanced. "Intraculniral" means within the
Chicano culture and Mexican culture. "Intercultural" is about
.how we are related with other cultures like the Black culture,
the Native American cultures, the white culture and the international cultures in general. I am operating on both perspectives
as I am trying to write .for different audiences. On the one hand,
I write for more of an international audience that came across
from one world to the .other and .that.,has border people.
Actually, more and more people today_becoine_:_bordet:..peoplc!._ ____:_:__
.because the pace of society has increased. Just .think about
multi-media, computers arid World Wide Web, for example. By
the. Internet you can communicate instantly with someone in.
India or somewhere else in the world, like Australia, Hungary or
China. We are all living in a society where these borders are
transgressed constantly.
K.l.: .How do you see this intercultural situation' with regard to
the Chicano culture. and the Anglo-American influence?
G.A::. In that conteJ\:t, one particular image comes intQmy mind:
the Banyan Tree. It is a tree that is originally from India but
~ll~ uu~~ ..~~;~
!J.Jh:t:llm
234
which I saw in Hawaii first. It looks like a solid walL When the
seeds from the tree fall, they don't take root in the ground. They
take root in the branches. So the seeds fall in the branches, and
it is there, above the earth, where the tree blooms and forms .its
fruits. And I thought, that is where we are getting it. Instead of
going to the roots of our Hispanic or Chicano culture we are getting it from the branches, from white dominant culture. I mean,
it is not that 'I reject everything that has to do with white culture. I like the English language, for exaC)lple, and there is a lot
of Anglo ideology that I like as well. But not all of it fits with our
experiences -and cuitural-ro-ots:-:~IDd-l:hat-is-why-iti.s-dangerous--- not to know about y:our own cultural heritage at all, because
then you d()n't have the chance to choose and select.
I also want Chicano kids to hear stuff about la Llorona, about
the border, et cetera, as early possible. I don't want them to
wait until they are eighteen or nineteen to get that information,
I think it is very important that they get to know their culture
already as chil<:lren. Here .in California. I met a lot of young
Chicanos and Chicanas who didn't have a clue about their own
Chicano culture. They lost it all. However, later on; when they
were already twenty, twenty-five or. even thirty years old, they
took classes in Chicano 'studies to learn more about their ancestors, their history and culture. But I want the kids to already
have access to this kind of iflformation. That is why I started
writing children's books. So far.I b,ave had two bilingual books
published, and I am writing the th.j.rd one at the moment. This is
going to be more for juvenile readers, little boys and girls who
',.
are like ages eleven to twelve. Next I want to write a book for
. young adultswho are about fifteen to sixteen years old as well.
With my children's books I want to provide them with more
knowledge about their roots and, by doing so; give them the
chance to choose. To choose whether they want to be completely. assimilated, whether they want to be border people, or
whether they want to be isolationists.
as
K.I.: How about your ties with Mexico? Do you still feel some
close connections with Mexico and Mexican culture it~elf?
G.A.: I am a seventh generation American ana so I don't have
any real "original Mexican" roots. So this is what happened to
235
'
K.l.: You started as a writer in 1974, but you didn't get started
by focusing on just one particular genre. You were concentrating on several, is that right?
G.A.: Sf. I wrot.e theflrst poem, the fust story, the first creative
non-fiction and a rough. draft for my first novel, all at the .same
time. So I didn't start writing just one genre over the years. I
started outwith,all of them at the same time. The onlything that
I have .added since then is the children's literature.
K.l.: Was this starting with all genres at the same time a way of
trying to figure out what you 'like and/or master best? .
Well, I think it was because I am interested in multiple projects. I have an incredible hunger to experience the world. Arid
I can best experience the world by writing about it, thinking
about it or making little drawings about. it. I always want to do
a thorough job. So .when I start out with an idea like that of
Nepantla or border crossing, for example, I want to be able. to
unravel it for different readers:.....for the academic professors a1:1d
students as well as for children and the average person. I want
to do it through different media, through poetry, fiction arid
~.A.:
236
237
however, everybody is different. There is no such i:hing as normal or average. And your culture says: "That is reality!" Women
are this way, men are this way, white people are this way. And
you start seeing behind that reality. You see the cracks and realize that there are other realities. Women can be this or that,
whites can be this ()r that. Besides physical reality there might
be a spiritual reality. A parallel ~odd, a world of the supel:'natural. After having realized all these cracks, I start articulating
them . and '1 do. this particularly in the theory. I have stories
where these women,. these prietas-they are all prietcis-actu_ally have access to other worlds through these cracks. So I take
these major things, I just go with it and work it out as much as I
can. I bring the concept of borders and borderlands more into
unraveling all that, too. And I now call it Nepantla, which is a
Nahuatl word for the space between two bodies of water, the
spac~ between two worlds. It is a limited space, a space where
you are not this or that but where you are changing. You haven't
got into the new identity yet and haven't left the old identity
behind either-you are in a kind of tran~ition. And that is what .'
Nepantla stands for. It is very awkward, uncomfortable and
frustrating to be in that Nepantla because you are in the midst
of transformation.
K. I.: The Nepi:zntla concept-'is it somehow a sequel to
Borderlands?
G.A.: No, it is not a continuation of Borderlands. It is a completely new book. The title is La Prieta, The Dark One, and I
deal .with the consequences of Nepantla as well as with-the la--Llorona figure in all its chapters .. Lei Prieta is about my being a
writer and how I look at reality, how reality gets constructed,
how knowledge gets produced and how identities get created.
The subtext is reading, writing and speaking. So Nepantla is a
way of reading the world. -You see behind the veil and you see
these scraps. Also it is a way of creating knowledge and writing
a philosophy, a system that explains the ~orld .. Nepgntla is a
stage that women and men, .and whoever is willing to change
into a new person and further grow and. develop, go through.
The concept is articulated as a process of writing: it is one of, the
stages of writing, the stage where you have all these iqeas,, all
these images, sentences and paragraphs, and where you are
238
trying to make them into one piec~, a story, plot .or whatever.,.it is all very chaotic. So you feel like you are living in that mist
of chaos~ It is also a little bit of an agony you experience. My
symbol of that is Coyolxauhqui, the moongoddess, who was
dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli. The art of composition, whether you are composing a work of fiction or your
life, or whether you are composing reality, always means pulling
off fragmented pieces and putting them together into a whole
that makes sense. A lot of my composition theories are not just
about writing but about how people live their lives, construct
their cultures, so actually abouthow-people construct-reality;-----
K.l.: If you think about people and philosophies that influenced
you in your writing and your writing philosophy, so to speak,
who or what ~ particular had a major influence on you in that
regard?
G.A.: I started out being born into a culture that philosophizes
very much. All Mexicans have all these stakes in realities, and
they are always very likely to start philosophizing about their
lives. Then when I was a little girl my way of escaping through
a .lot of the pain I suffered was through readin,g. Some of my
pain was cultural in origin-you know about being Mexicansome of it was because of my gende~, so about being this girl,
who wasn't supposed to be as important as my brothers, even
though I was older. Part of this suffering was. related to the fact .
that I was in pain most of the time because I was born with an
hormonal imbalance, which meant that I went into puberty very
early on. I remember that I was always made to feel ashamed, .
because I was having a period and had breasts when I was six
years old. Then I also was this freak who was very sensitive. My
way of dealfug with the world was to read, to escape through
reading. I w:ould read everything. Very early on I started reading
Nietzsche. Also I was reading Schoppe:nhauer, Sartre, Kafka and
most of those heavy duty guys; Then I turned more to the women
that were philosophers, like ]effner Allen and Maria Lugones, the
Latina philosopher.
K.I.: How would you describe your own philosophy?
239
. phy is like a philosophical mestizaje where I take from all different cultures-'for instance, from the cultures of Latin America,
the people of color and also the Europeans.
K.I.: I would like to talk a bit more about your spiritual reality
and religion in general. How does it look exactly? Could you
also tell us a bit more about your experiences with the Catholic
church which has a very strong hold among the Mexicans and
Mexican Americans. in general?
. G.A.: The grounding of my spiritual reality is based on indigenous Mexican spirituality, which is Nahualismo,. which loosely
translates as "shamanism." But the Nahual was a shapeshifter; a
shaman that could shift shapes, that could become a person or
an animal. The philosophy that I am now trying'to unravel also
goes back to Mexican indigen\)US times where. I use the words
like Nepantla, like conocimiento, so things that come from the
indigenous, the Mexican or the Chicano. And then I try to philosophize ahout 'that, With the spiritual mestizaje there is a
component of folk CatholiCism in it. But very early on-begin.. ning with the d~ath of my fath~r and my desencanto, my disillusionment with traditional Catholicism-'-I rebelled. The
Catholicism that Mexicans in south Texas participate iil is .more
of a folk Catholicism, as it has a lot of indigenous elements in
there. But o;, top of the indigenous elements are put the
Catholic scenes. Th'erefore underneath all those Catholic saints
and the Virgin Mary there are all these native American figures,
these indigenous Mexicans like Tonantzin.
K.l.: Is it more an ethnic-based problem you have with
Catholicism and traditional religion, then, and not so much a
gender-related issue?
G.A.: Oh no, gender is an important issue, too, as in most of the
major religions in the world..:...lik:e Christianity, Hindi and
lslam-'-women ~re second-place and inferior. Women are regarded as nothing and often treated worse than cattle. In all these
religions there is that attitude underneath. Butye~, Christianity
has cleaned up a lot of that. However, if you look at all the
. violence towards women, women are battered, molested, raped'.
or killed,-for example; one out of every three women in this
240
j'
241
242
. 243
just last year, for example. Or Tey Diana Rebolledo of th(( Uni- .
versity of New :tyt:exico in Albuquerque-spe is 'another example.
In general I would say that the professors, the academic
Chicanas are-very generous. There is a little bit more rivalry with .
.the creative writers. But I think that I am out of it because they
look at me as a gente grande, somebody who is o.der and maybe
somebody who's already got more experience.
K.I.: Borderlands I La Frontera is often regarded by critics as
an example of Chicana post-colonial writiri.g. How do you feel
about that?
G.A.: Well, there are two ways of spelling post~colonial, one W'ith
th~ dash in-between, the other one without the dash. The ones
that use the term without the 'dash are a little bit more 'us-them'
based and the ones that use tl:).e dash, of which I am one, we are
more or less in each other's pockets. So it goes both ways: it is
more an exchange between both sides. I have a term that is'
1
called nos-otras, and I P"\lt a dash between the nos and the o~ras.
The nos is the. s1,1b)ect "we," that is the .people who were in
power and colonized others. The otras is the "other," the colo- .
nized group. Then there is also the dash, the divide between us.
However, what i~ happening, after years of coloniz~tion, is. that
all the divides disappear little bit because the coloriizer, in his
or her interaction with the colonized, takes on a lot of their
attributes~ And, of course, the person who is colorJ.izing leaks
into our stuff. So we are neither one nor the other; we are really both. There is not a pure other; there is not a pure subject and
not a pure object. We are implicatedin each other's lives.
244 '
G:A.: First .I would like to finish La Prieta, The Dark One, which
will be about 24 stories. All characters in these stories were
prietas, however prietas that were different from each. other,
with different first names, different experiences; different ages,
et cetera. I started writing a couple of these stories as early as
1978. So this whole collection of stories went through different
stages of development .. About six years ago I realized that I
didn't know how w write fiction, What I was. wri_ting until then
was something like my memoirs, sort of my autobiography.
What was keeping me back was that I wa~ trying to stay with
the truth, with the experiences that actually happened. Then
I realized that to do fiction you have to be free, .imagine things,
exaggerate-whatever you need to do in order. to convey the
. kind of reality that you are trying to transmit. I began to listen
to people and talk with them about their writing and their meth- .
ods. In order to learn how to write these stories, I was making
notes about my process and I called the notes Writing Outside .,
La Prieta. It tells about my ideas for the stories, where I was '
having problems, how I did the research, et'. cetera. This was
very interesting for me because I ended up having two parts
actually: La Prieta, the fiction, on the one hand and then on the
. other, the notes that 'tell about how I did it. After La Prieta, I
plan to do the sequel to Borderlands-theoretical pieces, alot
oi which tie into the fiction~
Anyway, after La Prietlt, The Dark One is flni&hed, I want to
focus c;>n reading, writing and speaking for a while. While I am
in that process I want to w:ork on Prietita and the grave robber,
a middle-grade school book for kids. Once I get all that out of
245
the way, I am going to put out a manual, guide for writers and
artists. I am already :very excited about that manual in particular;
I would really like doing something like that.
Then I have another .series of stories for another . collection
which I intend' to publish. The title for that is Fie Nineteen. It
was going to be Fiction Nineteen originally, but I had to cut it
down to Fie Nineteen because you can't have big names for
computer: flies. The stories of Fie Nineteen are more experi-.
mental, more way out, more wild. They demons~rate that I can
free. myself a little bit more. I also ;un writiilg poetry at the
moment. I'm working on two books of poems, one is called
Nightface and the other one Tres Lenguas del Fuego ("Three
Tongues of Fire").
Another project I am working on is a book about myself and my
relationship with my mom. It i~ going to be called Myself and
(m)other. Also I would like to put together all the interviews
that were conducted with me in one book. And then I have a
Chicana dictionary in mind. I've already started collecting
entries. It is going' to be like an encyclopedia that focuses on
Chicanas and their culture.
246
Selected Bibliography
Books
Keating, Ana Louise. Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in
Paula .G~nn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua, andAudre Lorde. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press, 1996.
Rebolledo, Tey Diana. "Infinite Divisions: Constructing Identities and DisIdentities." Women Singing in the Snow: A. Cultural Analysis of Chicana
Literature.Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995. 95-116.
Articles
Adams, Kate. "Northamerican Silences: Histbry, Identity, and Witness in the
Poetry .of Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, and Leslie Marmon Silko."
Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism. Eds. Elaine Hedges
and. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Pr:ess, 1994.
130-45.
Andrist, Debra D. "La semiotica de la chicana: La escritora de Gloria
Anzaldua." Muler y literatura mexicana y chicana: Cultutas en contacto.
1L. Eds. Aralia Lopez Gonzalez, Amelia: Malagamba and Elena Urrutia.
Tijuana: Colegio de Mexico, Colegio de.la Frontera Nqri:e, 1990. 243-247.
:Arteaga, Alfred. "Heterotextual Reproduction." theory@buffalo. Fall 1996:
61-85.
Barnard, Ian. "Gloria Anzaldua's Queer Mestisaje." MELUS. 22.1 (1997):
35~53.
Bickford, Susan. "ln the Presence of Others: Arendt and Anzaldua on the
Paradox of }'ublic Appeara~ce." Feminist Interpretations of Hannah.
Arendt. Ed. Bonnie Honig. University Park: Pennsylvania State University .
Press, 1995. 313-35~
Blom, Gerdian. "Divine Individuals, Cultural Identities: Post-Identitarian
Representations and Two Chicana/o Texts." Thamyris: Mythmaking from
Past to Present. 4.2 (1997): 295-324.
Branche, Jerome. "Anzaldua: El ser y la nacion." En'torno. Uhiversidad
Auto noma de Ciudad Juarez. 34 '(1995): 39-44.
Browdy de Hernandez, Jennifer. "The Plural Self: The Politicization of
Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies~ Memory and
248
249
~-~--~--------------
250
Body Politic. Ed. and Introd. Tobin Siebers. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995. 58-95.
Palczewski, Catherine Helen. "Bodies, Borders, and Letters: Gloria
Anzaldua's 'Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers.'"
Southern Communication]ourna/62.1 (1996): 1-17.
'Perry, Donna. Interview with Gloria Anzaldua.. Back talk: Women. Writers
Speak Out. Ed. Donna Perty. New Brunswick, N]: Ru!gers UP, 1993. 19-42.
Peterson, Carla L. "Borderlands in the Classroom: Meeting Point of Two or
More Cultures. Role of the Personal Narrative in Understanding Ethnic
Differences." American Quarterly 45.2 (1993): 295-301.
Premo, Cassie. "Mutuai.Re!=ognition and theBorders Within the Self in. the
Writing of Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua." Critical Studies on the
Feminist Subject. Ed. Giovanna Covi. Trento, Italy: Universita degliStudi di
Trento, 1997. 229-43.
Raiskin, Judith. "Inverts and Hybrids: Lesbi~ Rewritings of Sexual. and.
Racial Iclentities." '[be Lesbian. Postmodern. 'Ed. Laura Doan. New York:
colunibia uP, 1994. 156-72.
Ramirez, Arturo. "El feminism() y Ia frontera: Gloria Anzaldua." A Ricardo
Gullon: Sus discipulos. Ed. Adelaida LopeZ de Martinez. ;Erie, PA: Pub. de
iaAsociaci6n de Licenciados y Doctores Espaii.oles en Estados Unidos, 1995.
03-09.
Ramos, Juanita. "Gloria E. Anzaldua 1942-." Contemporary Lesbian Writers
of the United States:A Bio-:Btbliograpbical Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Sandra
Pollack and Denise D. Knight. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. 19-25.
Reuman, Ann E. "'Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed': Gloria Anzaldua's.
Revolution of Voice." Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as ' '
Transgression. Ed. Deirdre Lashgari. Charlottesville: U P ofVrrginia, 1995.
305-19.
Ricard, Serge. "'I;.a Fiancee de Frankenstein' au:x: pays des Azteques: La
nouvelle metisse seton Gloria Anzaldua." Accra. 20 (1995): 143-55 ..
Short, Kayann. "Coming to the Table: The Differential Politics of'This Biidge
Called My Back.' Eroticism an!f Containment: Notes from the Flood Plain."
Genders 20 (1994): 3-45:
Smith, Sid'onie. "The Autobiographical Manifesto: Identities, Temporalities,
Politics~" Autobiography and Questions of Gender. Ed. Shirley Neuman;
London: Cass, 1992. 186-212.
251
Velasco, Juan. "La construccton de la mexicanidad en la narrattva chicana contemporanea:la estetica de la/s Frontera/s." Aztldn 21.1-2 (1992):
105-24.
.
Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. "The Lesbian Body in Latina Cultural Production."
Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings. Eds. Emilie 'L. Bergmann
and Paul Julian Smith. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. 181-97.
-~ "Gloria. Anzaldua's Borderlands./ La Frontera: Cultural Studies,
'Difference,' and the Non-Unitary Subject." Cultural Crittque.28 (Fall1994):
5-28.
Dissertations
(DAl Ref~rence Publication Years are Usually theYear After Ph.D. Granted)
'
I
.:.
'
is a multicultural
1982~
In 1990,
0J
change. We seek work that explores the specific!ties of the very t...JJ
LfJ
Please write, phone or e-mail us if. .you would like us .to .j)
<:!>
send you a free catalog of our other books or if you wish to be\
on our mailing list for future titles. You may buy ho~ks directly
#.f.-
~
')\
Diana Harris
Phoebe Robins Hunter
Diane Mosbacher, M.D., Ph.D.
William Preston, Jr.
Elise Rymer Turner
~..., t-!1~vcW.~ .
&lbmr;r