Curious

For all the controversy that surrounds it, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza remains a seminal work. Anzaldúa sifts through the dualistic and hegemonic aspects of cultural identity with beauty and passion. Her work exhibits a pluralistic self-identity in the Chicana mestiza (her description of border consciousness).

Borderlands/La Frontera has always had an ironic reception. Typically, white, feminist literary scholars lap it up (accepting it as an extension of their own identity theories), while the Latino/a academicians acknowledge Anzaldúa with cool reserve (with hopes of offsetting her extensive reliance on artistic license). Anzaldúa’s strength in B/LF doubles as a weakness. When read as a work of literature, B/LF embodies migrant angst. When read as a work of theory, its ambivalent use of terms transforms it into a discomforting, theoretical paradox. Although Anzaldúa’s representation of Chicano/a history and culture may leave something to be desired, her unique message deserves close dissection.

In “Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject,” Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano mediates between the justifications for these extreme receptions Anzaldúa’s work earned. Yarbro-Bejarano strives for a didactic neutrality, guiding rather than rebutting per se. Her exploration drove me to re-read B/LF with more attention, as I hope others will also do. To that end, I want to share Yarbro-Bejarano cautions against two pitfalls for the reader: (a) an eagerness to separate Anzaldúa’s theory from its contextual community and (b) a temptation to universalize la frontera experience. The opening paragraph of B/LF, characteristic of the author’s succulent, lucid prose, entices one to fall prey to both misguided applications:

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country–a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.

Anzaldúa’s powerful writing leaves the reader with an emotional recognition of la frontera even if one must admit to being unfamiliar with the Chicano/a reality. While her contextual exploration is quite specific, it is easy to dabble in broader applications of her vivid (if unfortunately exhausted by postmodernists) borderland existence.

It is easy to assume that the terms of Anzaldúa’s own argument (boundaries, miscegenation, crossing, territory) fluidly fit within the dialogues taking place around other theory campfires which also seek to undermine binaries. But Anzaldúa’s ideas should probably be seen as part of a specific, original whole (lesbian, Chicana identity) rather than the theoretical conventions of another identity critic. Contextually, I suspect that Anzaldúa, to her credit or vice versa, writes as an island, solemn in its utter individuality. At the time of publication, B/LF was a bit of a lone reed (both by intention and default, I suspect).

Adjacent to these considerations, I want to piggy-back Yarbro-Bejarano’s cautions against any reading which would naively universalize B/LF’s identity issues. If I could state it better myself, I would, but Yarbro-Bejarano does so beautifully:

Anzaldúa’s Borderlands exemplifies the articulation between the contemporary awareness that all identity is constructed across difference and the necessity of a new politics of difference to accompany this new sense of self…[but] while Anzaldúa’s writing recognizes the importance of narratives of displacement in the formation of her subjectivity, she is also aware of the material conditions of existence, the real histories of these narratives.

Anzaldúa does not seem to be prolonging self-migrancy for post-modernity’s sake. Her identity battle involves more than self-displacement. It’s rooted in a specific, contemporary, cultural, and historical American identity battle. As such, I feel Borderlands/La Frontera will remain seminal even once its relevance to 21st century Americans fades. Re-read it if you get the chance. It deserves some appreciation.