Course and Discourse in Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands - La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Discours et parcours dans Bordelands – La Frontera de Gloria Anzaldua
p. 111-120
Résumés
L’article tente de démontrer que l’originalité de cette œuvre réside dans les multiples intersections des discours adoptés, dans l’alternance de langues et de langages – versatilité consubstantielle au propos du livre même. Le périple identitaire de l’auteur est une tentative de transgresser les frontières ethniques, sociales et sexuelles érigées par les trois cultures – mexicaine, indienne et américaine qui aboutit à une réinvention de son identité.
The article argues that the originality of Anzaldua's book lies in the intersection of discourses, of literary genres and languages that matches the peculiar, hybrid character of this autobiographical work. In her attempt at transgressing the ethnic, social and sexual boundaries set by the three cultures (Mexican, Indian, American) that have shaped her, the author aims at reinventing a new syncretic self.
Texte intégral
Alienated from her mother culture, “alien” in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self. Petrified, she can’t respond, her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits.
Gloria Anzaldua
A place on the map is also a place in history.
Adrienne Rich
1Widely praised at the time of its publication, Borderlands- La Frontera (1987), Gloria Anzaldua’s first book, is still one of the most debated works in Chicano and Women’s Studies Departments. Chicana writers had already made a significant literary breakthrough by the eighties but the use of feminist and post-colonial theory in the context of a borderlands (prose and poetry) autobiography was, indeed, quite new1.
2This article intends to go beyond the immediate interest aroused by the book; with the benefit of hindsight, it will attempt to reassess the work’s originality and relevance but also to point out its limits within the framework of recent "ethnic” and, more particularly, Chicano/a literature.
3If one can characterize the eighties as the decade “when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism”, today there are signs of a shift in the discourse of identity towards “anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national, and racial identities”2. Examined from this particular angle, Anzaldua’s Borderlands – La Frontera appears as a particularly relevant literary work, challenging the critic to adopt a cross-disciplinary approach, apt to address the multiple intersections of race, class, and gender as well as the interrelations of postcolonialism, nationalism, and ethnicity – all manifest in the book. Its very title and subtitle announce the exploration of Chicana ethnic identity within a specific localization: the U.S./Mexico frontier3.
4From a thematic point of view the originality and timeliness of Anzaldua’s work lie precisely in the focus on this place of hybridity, struggle and transgression and on its inhabitants. Borderlands – La Frontera also strikes the more conventional reader through its uncanny mixture of genres (autobiography, historical document, political manifesto, poetry collection) matched by the constant switching of languages (English / Spanish / Nahuatl)4.
5Thus, the literary text itself becomes a graphie expression of postmodernist mestizaje. In her preface to the book Anzaldua clarifies the diverse angles of her approach to the borderlands:
The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest / Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other...
6From the very first pages one senses a discrepancy between the author’s daring formai innovations and the dogmatic discourse remindful of the militant nationalism of the seventies. The Chicano Movement rhetoric actually runs like a thread throughout the book. Anzaldua clearly adheres to the theory of internal colonialism adopted by Chicano historians like Rodolfo Acuna5. As a Chicana born in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, she has an acute awareness of belonging to a community whose historical existence is due to “the migration of the U.S./Mexican border”6.
7The author is less interested in the border per se, that “dividing line set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them” (Borderlands 3) since she knows that division to be artificial, arbitrary. Her own identity has been shaped by traditions on both sides of the Rio Grande, i.e. the Mexican, Indian and Anglo-American cultures that ‘edge each other’ in the borderlands, a “vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (Borderlands 3). It is this particular space that the writer has chosen to spotlight.
8Anzualdua’s ‘ethnic project’ is manifest in her attempt to retrace the trials and tribulations of her community of which her own family’s history is exemplary. According to William Boelhower:
The subject produces ethnic semiosis through a strategic use of memory which is nothing other than the topological and genealogical interrogation of the originating culture of his (her) immigrant ancestors7.
9This strategy can actually be considered as a hallmark of “ethnie” literature in the United States. The quest for one’s genealogical roots and for the ways in which specific cultural traditions are being reshaped in the New World has been one of the significant literary leitmotifs in American literature from Frederick Douglass to Mary Antin, from Maxine Hong Kingston or Alice Walker to Philip Roth.
10In Anzaldua’s case the collective and the personal memory are closely interwoven. The Mexican-Americans are a community born in the aftermath of a war whose residual pain the writer is still not able to shake off:
1,950 mile-long open wound
dividing a pueblo, a culture,
running down the length of my body,
staking fence rods in my flesh,
splits me splits me
me raja me raja (Borderlands 2)
11The ‘open wound’ image evoking a bodily injury that has not yet been healed is quite recurrent in Chicano/a literature. Indeed, the pain associated with the loss of their land is still vivid in the collective memory of the community. Lorna Dee Cervantes resorts to similar images in her poems:
These older towns die
into stretches of freeway.
The high scaffolding cuts a clean cesarean
across belly valleys and fertile dust. (Cervantes 42)
12Along the same lines, Anzaldua’s image of the border as a place where the Third World “grates against the first and bleeds” is echoed in Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s essay “Documented/Undocumented”. The Chicano border artist feels that he lives “in the fissure between two worlds, in the infected wound: half a block from the end of Western Civilization and four miles from the start of the Mexican-American border”. (Gomez-Peña 127).
13For Anzaldua this is the territory of a population living in a limbo, the domain of transgressors (“atravesados”) of all kinds:
The prohibited and the forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal”. (Borderlands 3)
14The author openly States her belonging to this no-man’s-borderlands whose inhabitants live on the margins, rejected by both the American and the Mexican mainstream on account of their racial, political or sexual ‘deviance’ from the established norm. The most original aspect of the book lies in the conceptualizing of the borderlands as an interstitial space, as a painful but exhilarating collective experiment, possibly leading to the emergence of multiple, shifting, cross-cultural identifies8.
15There is, however, an underlying ideological ambiguity in Borderlands– La Frontera. The author seems to waver between a static concept of ethnicity marked by the “belligerently antithetical closures of the past”9 and a more dynamic vision of the ethnic self, encompassing the contradictory dimensions of ‘the new mestiza’. In other words, Anzaldua is torn apart between her ethnic allegiance to the ‘collective identity’ of the Chicano community (whose militant, didactic ideology she has internalized) and the quest for her own private self which involves a personal reassessment of the different cultures and values that have shaped her being. Hence, she is bound to delve into her own past and call into question some of the basic tenets on which she has been brought up10.
16Not surprisingly then, the starting point of Anzaldua’s individual identity quest turns out to be intimate par excellence. It is the early awareness of her lesbian sexuality (anathema in the traditional Mexican society) followed by her courageous decision to confess it openly that will determine her subsequent personal evolution.
17In this respect one must point out that a number of minority women writers in the United States have taken similar courses over the last years. For some authors (Cherrie Moraga or Luz Maria Umpierre), militant feminism (with strong ties to the post-colonial Third World women of color) and lesbianism go practically hand in hand. The phenomenon can be understood as a two-fold reaction both against the Anglo-American dominant ideology and the traditional roles ascribed to women in their own cultures.
18Without denying her Mexicanness, Anzaldua claims the right to rebel against her own people:
I abhor some of my culture’s ways, how it cripples its women, como burras, our strengths used against us, lowly burras bearing humility with dignity... I abhor how my culture makes macho caricatures of its men. I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have injured me in the name of protecting me. (Borderlands 21-22).
19Rejecting and being rejected by her “mother/culture/race” the author experiences a feeling of ‘homophobia’. She plays on the ambiguity of the term due to the interlingual play on words between the Latin ‘homo’ and the English ‘home’.
20In The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) Ana Castillo undertakes a similar critique through the eyes of two women, one of whom is a Chicana who travels back to her country of origin where she is overwhelmed by the stifling burden of tradition:
Mexico. Melancholy, profoundly right and wrong, it embraces as it strangulates. Destiny is not a metaphysical confrontation with one’s self, rather, society has knit its pattern so tight that a confrontation with it is inevitable. (Castillo 59).
21In her epistolary novel Castillo observes and records the limitations inherent in both the Anglo-American and Mexican cultures, combining the subjective and objective narratives in a quasi-ethnographic manner. She keeps a certain aloofness from each of the two societies as well as from the Chicano community, for that matter.
22Anzaldua’s attitude is considerably different insofar as she is intent on transcending bipolarities: her very homosexuality is the sexual counterpart of her mixed blood, her language is neither English nor Spanish but a constant switching of several codes, while her locus of discourse lies in the interstice between the two countries, in what she calls the no-man's-borderlands. It is from that vantage point that she agrees to serve as mediator (“I think we need to allow whites to be our allies”) provided the Anglo-American – whom she calls her double – acknowledges the sins of the past and is willing to call into question his/her own identity:
We need to say to white society:... Admit that Mexico is your double, that she exists in the shadow of this country, that we are irrevocably tied to her. Gringo, accept the doppelgänger in your psyche. By taking back your collective shadow the intracultural split will heal. (Borderlands 85-86).
23Anzaldua is actually pleading for abolishing the opposition between ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘ethnic’ since “the terms <American> and <ethnic> are themselves part of a single relational structure”. This dynamic repositioning of intercultural and interracial relations would hopefully resuit in an ‘ethnie kinesis’11.
24An entire chapter of Anzaldua’s book is devoted to the ‘linguistic kinesis’ at work in the Chicano borderlands. Statements like “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity-I am ray language” acknowledge the central role played by language in the writer’s search for self-definition. If English is an acquired language, one in which the Mexican-American writers are never really at home, their use of the Spanish language bears the mark of cultural estrangement, of painful loss. Anzaldua gives vent to this feeling of frustration common to many Chicano writers: “Deslenguados. Somos los del espanol deficiente. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huerfanos-we speak an orphan tongue”. (Borderlands 58).
25The Black Canadian poet Marlene Nourbese Philip seems to echo Anzaldua’s feeling of linguistic orphanhood in this excerpt from her Discourse on the Logic of Language:
English
is my mother tongue.
A mother tongue is not
not a foreign lan lan lang
language
I/ anguish
anguish
– a foreign anguish.
I have no mother
tongue
no mother to tongue
no tongue to mother
tongue
me (Philip 56)
26Writing in the name of the Chicano borderlands community Anzaldua rejects the English-Spanish bipolarity, claiming a kind of third language that amalgamates both Systems:
For a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard Spanish or standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language, a language with terms that are neither espanol ni inglès, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages. (Borderlands 55).
27One of the author’s most noteworthy achievements is that of having convincingly incorporated the linguistic hybridity of the borderlands into the very substance of her literary work. Like all post-colonial literatures Chicano writings “are crosscultural because they negotiate a gap between worlds, a gap in which the simultaneous processes of abrogation and appropriation continually strive to define and determine their practice”12.
28In understanding ethnic and racial identities in the United States the internai contrasts have often been figured in terms of outside contrast, “because it has always been possible to see America as a “nation of immigrants”, whose separateness could be mapped onto their places of origin”13.
29Unlike other “ethnic” American writers’ perspective (Italian or Jewish-American, for example), Anzaldua’s critique of Anglo-American society is grounded in the historico-geographical presence of her ancestors, whether Indian or Mexican, in the New World. Thus her ethnie identity has been largely shaped by the historical confrontation of her community with the Other, the Anglo-American, whom she nevertheless considers her double.
30Proud of her indigenous roots, Anzaldua lashes out against the white Americans’Eurocentrism and attacks the Western European cultural tradition forever rooted in dichotomies: subjectivity vs. objectivity, rationality vs. superstition:
This dichotomy is the root of all violence... Not only was the brain split into two functions but so was reality. Thus people who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface between the two, forced to become adept at switching modes. Such is the case with the india and the mestiza. (Borderlands 37).
31Anzaldua then is forced to switch not only (linguistic) codes but also divergent modes of perceiving reality. This constant ‘world-switching’ is her way of dramatizing the precariousness of the interstitial space she and her people inhabit14.
32Beyond this personal (and collective) quest, the writer is trying to imagine a new identity for the Americas. The project is an ambitious one. But when she reaches this point Anzaldua seemingly abandons her willingness to understand the Other and her constructive call for an authentic dialogue gives way to a hardline monologic discourse. Thus, in the following lines she is apparently calling for some strange cultural revolution which would entirely obliterate the European heritage (associated with sterility, death and wars) while welcoming the adoption of Far-Eastern religious philosophies alongside the indigenous traditions of the New World:
Let’s all stop importing Greek myths and the Western Cartesian split point of view and root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this continent... By taking up curanderismo, Santeria, shamanism, Taoism, Zen and otherwise delving into the spiritual life and ceremonies of multi-colored people, Anglos would perhaps lose the white sterility they have in their kitchens, bathrooms, hospitals, mortuaries and missile bases.
(Borderlands 68-69).
33Having started out with the manifest will to reject all dichotomous thinking, any binary categorization, Anzaldua proves eventually incapable of surmounting the very logic she has been attacking all along. Thus, reaching the last pages of the book the reader stumbles over the very same oppositions the author had set out to abolish: white vs. black/mestizo, material vs. spiritual, sterile vs. fertile, etc.
34The writer herself seems to consider this rigid, dogmatic attitude as but the first step in the Chicanos’liberation from Anglo-American cultural domination. She also thinks that the ‘recipe’ for healing her community’s collective wound involves a reaching out towards the Other, the Anglo-American:
At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once.
(Borderlands 78).
35But the vision appears to be vague, elusive; all we are told is that the healing will occur “somehow”.
36Through her focus on the borderlands as a hybrid territory in which the subversion of binarisms between the United States and Mexico is rendered possible, Anzaldua makes her own contribution to a revisionist view of this conflict-ridden area. In his recent essay “Traveling Cultures”, James Clifford acknowledges the topicality of literary, historical or anthropological works centering on conflictual borderlands and suggests that “the border experience is made to produce powerful political visions: the subversion of all binarisms, the projection of a multicultural public sphere versus hegemonic pluralism”15.
37The above-mentioned opposition can account for some of Anzaldua’s ideological contradictions. On the other hand it provides food for thought concerning the violent resurgence of ethnic and religious nationalisms in Central Europe. Anzaldua’s hesitation between a fuzzy vision of egalitarian multiculturalism and a firm, dogmatic attitude towards Anglo-America ultimately suggests it is the latter stance that will carry the day. The current unfolding of the events alluded to above belies all reasonable hope in the possible survival of "a multicultural public sphere”, free of hegemonic claims.
38Faced with such grim prospects it is Anzaldua-the poet-who suggests a possible strategy:
To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.
(Borderlands 195)
39Indeed, people’s spiritual freedom can prevail despite the imposition of physical borders.
Bibliographie
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WORKS CITED
ANZALDUA, Gloria. Borderlands- La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters / Aunt Lute. 1987.
APPIAH, K.A. & GATES, H.L. Jr. “Editors’Introduction: Multiplying Identifies”. In Critical Inquiry. XVIII, 4, 1992, 625-629.
10.4324/9780203426081 :ASHCROFT, Bill et al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. 1989.
BOELHOWER, William. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnie Semiosis in American Literature. Venezia: Edizioni Helvetia. 1984.
CASTILLO, Ana. The Mixquiahuala Letters. Binghamton, NY: Bilingual Press, 1986.
CLIFFORD, James. “Traveling Cultures”. In Grossberg, Lawrence et al, eds. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992, 96-110.
GOMES-PEÑA, Guillermo. “Documented / Undocumented” in R. Simonson & Scott Walker, eds. Multi-Cultural Literacy. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1988, 127-135.
10.25071/1923-9408.23556 :PHILIP, Marlene Nourbese. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Charlottetown: Ragweed Press, 1989.
Notes de bas de page
1 Anzaldua had previously coedited (with Cherrie Moraga) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Persephone Press. 1981; Borderlands – La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. 1987 (page references abbreviated to ‘Borderlands’).
2 Appiah & Gates, 1992, 625.
3 In a more indirect way the U.S./Mexico border has been a constant theme in Chicano writings from Antonio Villareal’s ground-breaking novel Pocho (1959) to Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971) or Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972). However, writers have mainly focused on the effects of the socio-cultural differences between Mexico and the U.S. in their protagonists’ assimilation to American society.
4 The book is accessible to readers of English which is the predominant language in the book.
5 Cf. Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America: A History of Chicanas (1981) in which the author views the Mexican-Americans in the wake of the 1848 annexation as an internally colonized people.
6 Joshua Gonzalez pointed out during a panel at the Los Angeles Conference on Bilingual Education in 1981: “We were not immigrants; the border migrated”.
7 Boelhower, 1984, 89.
8 The current events in ex-Yugoslavia are evidence of the extreme danger inherent in attempts at rectifying borders on ethnic grounds.
9 Cf. Werner Sollors “A Critique of Pure Pluralism” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed. Reconstructing American Literary History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, 251-279.
10 I am indebted to Werner Sollors’ essay “Ethnie Identity” and “Individualism”: Richard Rodriguez’s Autobiographical Writing” for this crucial distinction cf. Cahiers Charles V) No 15 oct. 1993.
11 Boelhower, 1984, 118.
12 Ashcroft et al., 1989, 39.
13 Appiah & Gates, 1992, 627.
14 I’m borrowing the terni 'world-switching’ front William Boelhower’s essay “The Ordinary Pathos of Ethnie Fiction”, in this volume.
15 In L. Grossberg et al., eds. 1992, 109.
Auteur
-
Ada Savin
Univ. St Quentin en Yvelines
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