Gloria Anzaldúa

Like much of Anzaldúa’s work, Borderlands / La Frontera is autobiographical in many instances, and the critical theories laid out are drawn from and inspired by Anzaldúa’s personal and sociocultural experiences. She devotes a significant amount of attention to reminiscing about her childhood in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, highlighting both the comforts of her culture and the ways in which she has been ostracized from it.

A specifically contentious aspect of Anzaldúa’s relationship with her Chicana heritage is her queerness. As a lesbian, she does not feel that she has a place within the oftentimes patriarchal culture she grew up in. Women were often warned against exercising their sexuality, and homosexuality itself is viewed as sinful, resulting in a significant sense of shame. However, rather than rejecting her culture entirely, Anzaldúa wishes to reform it. The theories presented throughout Borderlands / La Frontera are drawn from the desire to take ownership of the tension between personal, cultural, and political identity. By accounting for her mixed heritage and dissecting how factors such as race, gender, and sexuality are influenced by that heritage, she hopes to create a “New Mestiza consciousness,” which blends feminist and queer thought with traditional modes of existing and creating.

In addition to representing herself as a queer, feminist, Chicana woman, Anzaldúa also represents herself as an artist. She describes her relationship with art as both deeply painful and deeply rewarding, and she venerates the transformative and communal powers of art. By creating art that is uniquely informed by the social, emotional, and physical borderlands that she exists within, Anzaldúa can help others experience her unique relationship with her culture and herself.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Mother

Anzaldúa’s mother appears frequently in the author’s recollections of her childhood. Though generally loving, Anzaldúa’s mother also often—both knowingly and unknowingly—contributed to her daughter’s sense of otherness by perpetuating patriarchal beliefs and stereotypes surrounding female sexuality and identity. This represents Anzaldúa’s belief that while men create the dominant culture, women are responsible for transmitting it. When mothers pass on toxic and harmful beliefs to their daughters, they ultimately reinforce patriarchal dominance and keep their daughters from achieving their full potential.

Coatlicue

Coatlicue, or Serpent Skirt, is an early Aztec goddess of fertility, motherhood, and the earth. She was one of the most powerful figures in the Aztec pantheon, having been the mother goddess who birthed many other gods, including Huitzilopochtli, the patron sun god of the Aztecs. However, according to Anzaldúa, as the Aztecs became an increasingly male-dominated and war-centric society, female deities were increasingly marginalized. Coatlicue was divided into different aspects of her original self. Some of these aspects include Chihuacoatl, the patron goddess of women who die in childbirth, and Tonantsi, a fertility and nature goddess. It is at the site of a ruined temple of Tonantsi that the Virgin of Guadalupe is believed to have first appeared, creating a link between the Indigenous religions of Mesoamerica and Roman Catholic beliefs.

Anzaldúa uses Coatlicue as a symbol of the reclamation of the divine feminine. The inner “Shadow-Beast” that a young Anzaldúa feared marked her as different is figured as an aspect of Coatlicue. In order to achieve an advancement of one’s own consciousness, Anzaldúa suggests that one must first confront the complicated, painful, and conflicting parts of oneself. Coatlicue represents the Indigenous heritage that many Chicano women try to suppress out of shame. She also represents female sexuality, which is suppressed and discouraged by the patriarchal beliefs within Mexican society. To confront one’s inner Coatlicue is to embrace an explicitly Indigenous and undeniably female power. By doing so,...