Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2002)

• Mexican American writer and political activist
• Identity politics, multicultural identities, mestizaje
• Was a teacher at high school for migrant workers and also taught at the university level
• Articulates the understandings and aspiration of ethnic, feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1960's and also examines their contradictions
  • for literary studies these movements have resulted in the politization of teaching and criticism
  • at stake is identity. social movements demand equal rights and economic opportunity but also respect, affirmation, acknowledgement in all their difference from the norms.
• these movements interacted with literary studies in 3 ways:
  • interest for different identities met French poststructuralism in american universities. Derrida's concept of difference (although different from the idea of cultural differences) helped explore the heterogeneity of identity. Poststructuralist's questioning of boundaries and the integrity of defined identities inspired interest for mixed identities
  • Opposition to New Criticism in terms of its disregard for the authorial voice. Increase of the regard for personal in the 1960's (the personal is political) and for the recovery of unheard voices in American history at the same time that literary criticism recovers interest for the authorial figure.
    • Interest for nonmale, nonwhite nonheterosexual authors (recovery work).
    • interest for narratives of personal experience in past and contemporary texts.
    • Anzaldúa's theoretical work mixes cultural analysis with history, memories, poems, politics. Stylistic possibilities open up with the interest for the personal voice.
    • interest for writers who use the "master's tongue" (like she does).
    • Interest to create a space for Spanish voices but also English is important to reach a wide audience. So there is a mix of languages as well as genres.
  • focus of social movements on identity and culture coincides with the displacement in literary theory since 1965 from text to context (cultural studies).
    • text as a symptom of its context and the author's identity and not as a self enclosed unity of pure aesthetic elements.
      • writing, reading and interpreting as dynamic processes through which identities and cultures are produced and transformed
      • identities are made of cultural representations and literature is one of the fields in which the identities are constructed.
      • Anzaldúa sees her work as the production of a new culture.
    • Cultural representations:
      • are powerful, invested with authority of the social institutions that endorse them
      • have the potential to harm
      • to be immersed in a culture means that its cultural representations are ours and us.
      • the major political work is thus inner emphasizing transformation of values and beliefs more than changes in electe dofficials, laws, working conditions
        • reponse to civil rights movement which changed laws and institutional structures of a society where racism was real, but could not in consequence create a nonracist society
        • meant to contest the nebulous quality of racism and sexism in America, where prejudices are not overt but still have concrete effects in material aspects such as poverty, education and employment inequality.
      • Interest in conveying the experience of a nonwhite and nonheterosexual woman to live in post-civil rights movement America
        • desire for acknowledgment of the contradictions in America and of her own existance
      • revision of the concept of identity
        • tracing our roots is no longer a source for knowing who we are, the illusion of a single origin and purity must be abandoned
        • identity is always hybrid, formed over time, multiple cultures and always in transformation

Criticism

• Cultural politics is vague and non concrete when compared to everyday issues

• is contradictory

• simplistic notions of group solidarity

  From Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Chapter 7. La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness

• La raza cósmica: According to José de Vasconcelos, a race embracing the four major races of the world.
  • opposite to racial purity practiced by America and to the idea of a pure Aryan
  • inclusivity
  • result: not an inferior being but a more adaptable species with rich gene pool
• a new mestiza consciousness, a consciousness of the Borderland

Una lucha de fronteras/A struggle of borders

• contradictory consciousness, perplexity and ambivalence
• different cultures and value systems. Multiple and opposing messages. Cultural collision.
• Different value systems attack each other and the individual attempts a counterstance:
  • a step towards liberation, but not a way of life.
  • Acting and not reacting
  • being on both shores at once

A tolerance for ambiguity

• it is not possible to hold concepts in rigid boundaries: rigidity is death
• La mestiza must remain flexible, must have tolerance for contradictions and ambiguity, juggling of cultures, must operate in a pluralistic mode,
• must sustain contradictions and turn the ambivalence into something else:
  • a work that takes place subconsciously
  • attempt to work out a synthesis, which results in a third element: a new consciousness
  • the future depends on breaking down the paradigm, then it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures
    • creating a new mythos: changing how we perceive reality, how we see ourselves, how we behave
    • creation of a new consciousness
      • this consciousness must break down the subject-object duality and show how duality is transcended

  La encrucijada/the crossroads

• mestiza has no country yet all countries are hers, has no race yet the queer in her is in all races
• cultureless bc rejects traditional male-derived culture, however, cultured at the same time because she participates in the creation of a new culture.
• an act of kneading that has produced a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definition of light and dark and gives them new meanings.

El camino de la mestiza/the mestiza way

• how to differentiate between what is inherited, what is acquired and what is imposed?
  • consider history and discards what is not true or valid
  • rupture with oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions
  • communication of the rupture and documentation of the struggle
  • reinterpretation of history and shaping of new myths
  • new perspective on darkskinned people, women and queers
  • strengthening of tolerance and intolerance for ambiguity
  • will to share and vulnerability to other ways of thinking and seeing
  • surrendering of notions of safety and the familiar
  • deconstruction, construction
  • transformation of the small "I" into the total Self.

Que no se nos olviden los hombres

• machismo is an Anglo invention
  • being macho for previous generations of men meant being strong to support the family and showing love to them
  • the Anglo feels inadequate, interior, powerless and transfers these feelings to the Chicano by shaming him for the Gringos, Chicanos are too humble and self effacing,shameful and self deprecating
  • for Latinos the Chicano is linguistically inadequate
  • with Native Americans he suffers a racial amnesia because he ignores the common blood and guilt for his Spanish antecessors who took Native American's lands and oppressed them
  • hubris when with Mexicans of the other side
  • deep sense of racial shame
  • loss of sense of dignity and respect in the macho feeds a false machismo which makes him put down women and brutalize them
  • love for the mother
  • shame, addiction
• understanding of all these causes but no excuse nor tolerance for them
• demand that the men of their race admit for these behaviors and their commitment to stop them
• Mestizas must support each other in fighting the sexism of the Mexican-Indian culture
  • unlearn the puta/virgen dichotomy
  • need for a new masculinity which can be vulnerable / and the new men need the movement
• because they are the supreme crossers of borders, homosexuals have a strong bond with queer people everywhere
  • our role is to link people with each other
• chicanos need to hear the homosexual experience, because they have always been at the forefront of liberation struggles in the Us

Somos una gente/Divided loyalties

• Chicanos must allow white people to be their allies
  • share history with them so that they overcome their racial fear and ignorance and follow Chicano's lead.
• Chicanos must voice their needs to white society
  • for whites to acknowledge their rejection of them
  • for whites to acknowledge the crimes they have commited against Chicanos
  • for whites to make public restitution for what they have done
  • admit that Mexico is the whites' double, and that they need to take back the shadow to mend the intracultural split

  By your true faces we will know you

  • dominant white culture is killing Chicanos with its ignorance.
  • White culture has subjugated Chicanos and never allowed them to be themselves fully
  • Native Americans, Chicanos and Mexicans must know each other histories
  • Latinxs must know of each others' cultures
  • there must be inner changes before anything can be transposed to the real world

  El día de la chicana

• search for Chicanxs' true identity
• new rituals

El retorno

• personal story, origins of the author
• Lower Río Grande Valley, a land that has survived possession and ill use, and still is
• devaluation of Mexican peso, poverty in the Valley (recent history)
• author's family
• hope for the land to be Mexican and Indian again