[In the following essay, Reuman asserts that Anzaldúa utilizes her voice to protest injustices against women and people of color and ranks the author as a bold and valuable figure in the modern literary world.]

But it was the glint
of steel at her throat
that cut through
to her voice.
She would not be
silent and still.
She would live,
arrogantly.

—Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada

As it is for the Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes in the epigraph above, so it is for her contemporary Gloria Anzaldúa, that the glint of steel at her throat does not cut her voice, but cuts through to her voice. Living on the border between Texas and Mexico, Anzaldúa finds herself in a land annexed by violent conquest, where the prominent features are hatred, anger, and exploitation.¹ As a twentieth-century Chicana tejana feminist poet and fiction writer, she realizes that little has changed since the middle of the nineteenth century when Mexican Americans, particularly women, had little voice. Alienated from both the Mexican and the American cultures, which find no room for lesbian, working-class writers of color, Anzaldúa acknowledges in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) that “this is her home / this thin edge of / barbwire,” and painfully recognizes that the dividing line is a wound that “splits me splits me” (2). Significantly, though, Anzaldúa does not let the wound destroy her. Rather, through her writing she heals the wounds, locating the points of pain, re-membering the discarded fragments of herself, and creating from the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits a new, affirmative, feminist landscape (20).

Anzaldúa is, as she writes in her preface to Borderlands/La Frontera, “a border woman,” one who lives at the juncture of cultures and struggles to keep intact her shifting and multiple identities. Coeditor with prominent Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga of the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), published author of poetry and prose, university instructor of Chicano studies, feminist studies, and creative writing, and political activist, Gloria Anzaldúa is an important voice in the literary world today. She understands the power of words and of collective voice and urges validation of a new mestiza language and way of life. In reappropriating the marginalized, she has found strength in her place of contradictions, has organized with other Third World feminists to resist divisive oppressions, and urges self-reconstruction and cultural synergy based on dialogic polyvocality, transformative crossings, and affirmative indeterminacy.

Retelling the story of the Alamo from the Mexican point of view, Anzaldúa exposes the violence enacted by white supremacists against Mexican citizens cut off from their country by the overnight erection of the border fence in 1848, and she tells the story of a people appropriated along with the land: “The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados—we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history” (7-8). The annexation of Chicanas that Anzaldúa addresses in her writings, however, is not just geographical and historical: it is cultural; it is literary; and it is personal. As a poor Mexican-American, a woman, a lesbian, and a writer, Anzaldúa faces intense and unrelenting threats of violence. If she does not renounce herself in favor of the male, she is considered selfish. If she does not marry and have children, she is a failure as a woman. If she rebels, she is a mujer mala. If she admits sensing the spiritual in the body, she is dismissed as “pagan,” “superstitious,” “irrational,” or “mad.” If she speaks bilingually or with a Chicana accent rather than keeping her English and Spanish separate and proper or untainted, she is ignored or invalidated. If she speaks of her difference, she is gagged, caged, and bound. If she questions the dominant paradigms, she is beaten or maligned. And if she names the violences done her, she can expect her tongue to be torn out by being “edited” or not published. The risks of being a woman (particularly a woman of color) are little different from those faced for speaking against violences done one as a woman: being battered, lynched, raped, sterilized, sold into prostitution. Individual annihilation, if not cultural genocide, threatens any of the marginalized if she presumes to challenge or defy white, patriarchal control.

Anzaldúa makes the brutal violence against women, workers, and people of color explicit in “We Call Them Greasers,” a poem written from the point of view of a white man raping the Mexican wife of a share-cropper. Linking women to the land, both of which to his mind are made for seminal penetration and his exploitation, the rapist in this poem “plow[s]” into the woman, unmoved by her “whimpering” and “flailing.” When he senses the woman's husband watching the rape and hears him “keening like a wild animal,” he caps violence with racist disgust for the woman he has victimized:

in that instant I felt such contempt for her
round face and beady black eyes like an Indian's.
Afterwards I sat on her face until
her arms stopped flailing,
didn't want to waste a bullet on her.

In “A Sea of Cabbages,” Anzaldúa shows through the image of a landowner “rooting” in a sea of female field workers that this is not an isolated incident but a rape that marks a history of violence. His inheritance a “thick stained hand / rooting in the earth,” the man in this poem “tears” the cabbages from their nests, and “rips” the sexualized outer leaves until he reaches the more tender leaves at the core. Significantly, though, Anzaldúa subtly subverts male power in this poem, writing at the heart of it that, although this violence against women (and perhaps, more metaphorically, this violence against women of color who write, and write radically) happens “century after century,” it is the man, not the women, who here is “flailing” and unleafed. In the last two stanzas, it is his mouth from which spume froths as the earth slams his face, his eyes that congeal in the baking sun, and his “broken shards” that are swept up by the wind; for as Anzaldúa insists, “He cannot escape his own snare.”

In “Holy Relics,” another poem in the collection, Anzaldúa extends her protest, and writes not just of the brutal dismemberment of women by patriarchal society as shown in the sanctified violence of “the good Father,” but also of the accountability of women who acquiesce in such rituals of violation. Tellingly, Anzaldúa locates her poem in a feminized space identified by muteness, womblike enclosure, and experience outside patriarchal language: a town situated in a “silent landscape,” in a “bricked-up place in the wall” from which “issued a sound to which they could give no name.” Here, the “good father Gracian,” in secret, by the light of torches held by cloistered nuns, exhumes the holy relics of Saint Teresa, entombed, significantly enough, nine months. The coffin “pulled” from the cavern, the lid “broken,” the nuns scrape the earth clinging to the woman's skin, look their fill, then swaddle her in clean linen. Birthed into violence violently, women in patriarchal societies, Anzaldúa suggests, are reified and abused, made object and spectacle, open prey to religious gazers and collectors. Worship and dismemberment are synonymous: the Father approaches the saint, lifts her hand as if to kiss it, and instead with a knife severs her wrist from her arm. Then, as if embracing a gruesome newborn, the inevitable offspring of such violent appropriation, he hugs her cleaved hand to his body. Two years later, another priest disinters the saint to claim her body for the town of Avila, cuts off her truncated arm and flings it to the nuns of Alba “as one would a bone to a dog,” and gallops off through the streets with the corpse of the saint. Though the woman's mouth is tightly shut and cannot be opened and her face is a little darker this time (“because the veil [of silence?] became stuck to it”), and though of course she is missing an arm, the rest of her body is intact. Returned to her grave by Pope's decree (prompted by assumption of ownership rather than by respect for her remains), she is again exhumed, this time surrounded by a crowd coveting her body, and pieces of her flesh are pinched off by ardent fingers: the priest snaps off two fingers from her remaining hand, another severs her right foot from her ankle, a third plucks three ribs from her breast, another gouges out an eye, and the rest auction off the scraps of her bones. Three centuries later, prying at the edges of the wound where her heart had been ripped out—the edges charred “as though by a burning iron,”—physicians examine “the remains of a woman.”

At issue, quite literally here, is women's integrity, the constant struggle particularly of women of color to keep their bodies, their selves, intact against the ravages of the privileged. Power, Anzaldúa avers, lies in passing on what we have learned, in refusing what feminist poet and essayist Audre Lorde calls “historical amnesia” and in demanding accountability for the violences done women.² Personal and societal healing and survival depend on re-membering: facing the “residues of trauma” (70), naming the violences against women of color, and acting for change.

Anzaldúa knows the silencing forces surrounding her. “Who gave us permission to perform the act of writing?” she asks in her essay “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers.” She writes: “The voice recurs in me: Who am I, a poor Chicanita from the sticks, to think I could write? How dare I even considered becoming a writer as I stooped over the tomato fields bending, bending under the hot sun, hands broadened and calloused, not fit to hold the quill, numbed into an animal stupor by the heat.”³ And even if she finds the strength to legitimize her writing, who hears her? As Anzaldúa also notes: “Unlikely to be friends of people in high literary places, the beginning woman of color is invisible both in the white male mainstream world and in the white women's feminist world, though in the latter this is gradually changing. The lesbian of color is not only invisible, she doesn't even exist. Our speech, too, is inaudible. We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane.”⁴ Yet if she is heard, she faces the threat of violent silencing: by invalidation of her voice as “too angry,” “too harsh,” or “too strident” (read “too political”); by “invitations” to blanch representations of her culture, her language, and her sexuality; or by figurative-literal mutilation. The societal expectations and implicit threat for transgression are clear: “The white man speaks: Perhaps if you scrape the dark off of your face. Maybe if you bleach your bones. Stop speaking in tongues, stop writing left-handed. Don't cultivate your colored skins nor tongues of fire if you want to make it in a right-handed world.”⁵

In the section of Borderlands/La Frontera entitled “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Anzaldúa describes a literal and forceful invasion of female space that speaks as much about patriarchal numbing of the bilingual as of the female voice: “‘We're going to have to control your tongue,’” the dentist says as he cleans out her roots and caps her teeth; “‘I've never seen anything as strong or as stubborn.’ And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?” (53) Equally destructive for Anzaldúa were the warnings of her mother to eradicate what Morrison in The Bluest Eye calls “funkiness”; to stay out of the sun lest her skin darken, to wrap her budding breasts in tight cotton girdles lest she betray her sexuality, to clip her accent.⁶ As Anzaldúa writes about her parents in her poem “Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone”: “as I grew you hacked away / at the pieces of me that were different.” Yet even more insidious than her parents' pressure to assimilate is Anzaldúa's own excision of her darker selves, which she represents variously as an animal, an intruder, a “dark shining thing.” And when it is not a part of herself that she alienates or denies, it is a part “lovingly” put to death, as in her poem “Cervicide” (a title that conjures images of the uterus as much as of a deer) where the penalty for being caught in possession of a deer (symbolic of women's Self, Anzaldúa notes) prompts Prieta (“the dark-skinned one”) to crush the skull of her beloved pet before the game warden does. “It is our custom,” she writes in “The Cannibal's Cancion,” another poem in the collection, “to consume / the person we love.” Every motion to speak battles heavy cultural encouragement to kill off the female, the sexual, the bilingual, the nonwhite, the non-Anglo parts of herself; to split body and spirit; to hold her tongue or lose it.

Crucially, though, Anzaldúa resists injunctions to silence herself. Though “annexed,” she is not conquered: “Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out” (54). Rather than bury her rage in static and impotent bitterness or internalized contempt, she transforms it into poetry. Rather than transfer blame onto her mother for being embedded in the same oppressive society Anzaldúa resists, she takes responsibility for her own complicitous rejection of socially unapproved parts of herself and learns to mother herself.⁷ Audre Lorde sees this self-mothering as the power of the erotic, an “assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered,” a springboard for change: “Mothering. Claiming some power over who we choose to be and knowing that such power is relative within the realities of our lives. Yet knowing that only through the use of that power can we effectively change those realities. Mothering means the laying to rest of what is weak, timid, and damaged—without despisal—the protection and support of what is useful for survival and change, and our joint explorations of the difference.”⁸ It is finding “the yes within ourselves.”⁹ In This Bridge Called My Back, Anzaldúa says: “I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself.”¹⁰ And a “protean being” (41), Anzaldúa makes herself into the many things she is. In her poem “Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone,” she writes:

Raza.                I don't need to flail against      you.
Raza india mexicana norteamericana,           there's no-
thing more you can chop off           or graft on me that
will change my soul.      I remain who I am, multiple
and one           of the herd, yet not of it.           I walk
on the ground of my own being             browned and
hardened by the ages.      I am fully formed      carved
by the hands of the ancients,           drenched with
the stench of today's headlines.           But my own
hands whittle           the final work           me.

For Anzaldúa as for feminist theorist bell hooks, speech is not just an expression of creative power; it is, hooks writes in Talking Back, “an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless.”¹¹ Refusing to be discarded as the remains of a woman, Anzaldúa collects the bits and pieces of writing—parts of herself—strewn across her room (“my fragments on the floor”), and confronts her demons.¹² Fearful yet fascinated by the “wild animal kicking at its iron cage,” she recognizes herself: “It had been my footsteps I'd heard” (167-69). She writes: “It was then I saw the numinous thing / it was black and it had my name / it spoke to me and I spoke to it” (172). It took her forty years, she reports in the section of her book entitled “Entering into the Serpent,” to “acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul” (26). Wrestling her own denials as well as cultural pressures to conform, she finally (though not without constant grappling) accepts and integrates “that dark shining thing” and the serpent-sexuality that are parts of herself; and she sees the vital importance of this naming and reclamation: “I know it's come down to this: / vida o muerte, life or death” (172). Anzaldúa chooses life. And she recognizes that this choice necessitates coming to terms with her anger.

In Sister Outsider, Lorde writes that “women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.”¹³ In the poem “El sonavabitche,” Anzaldúa expresses the rage that has choked her for years:

brown faces bent backs
like prehistoric boulders in a field
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.

Anzaldúa does get the words out, and she uses that speech to fight further colonization of her voice. It is a struggle, she realizes, that reaches beyond a merely personal need. “Waging war is my cosmic duty,” she writes in Borderlands/La Frontera (31). She will no longer veil the Chicana in her, nor will she repress her sexuality, or write conventional narratives, or append glossaries to her work. She will not stand quietly by as “pseudo-liberal[s] … who suffer from the white woman's burden” attempt to talk for her: “This act is a rape of our tongue and our acquiescence is a complicity to that rape. We women of color have to stop being modern medusas—throats cut, silenced into a mere hissing.”¹⁴ She will speak; she will speak for herself; and she will speak in her own language: “Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate … and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue—my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence” (59). And her affirmation extends the invitation-imperative to other women of color to write, and to write radically: “Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don't let the pen banish you from yourself. Don't let the ink coagulate in your pens. Don't let the censor snuff out the spark, nor the gags muffle your voice. Put your shit on the paper.”¹⁵

Yet even as she claims that as poets-writers, “we wield a pen as a tool, a weapon, a means of survival,” Anzaldúa acknowledges the self-doubts, fears, and pain inherent in such writing.¹⁶ “Escribo con la tinta de mi sangre. I write in red. Ink. Intimately knowing the smooth touch of paper, its speechlessness before I spill myself on the insides of trees. Daily, I battle the silence and the red. Daily, I take my throat in my hands and squeeze until the cries pour out, my larynx and soul sore from the constant struggle” (71-72). The power of writing, she insists, resides in transforming such pain: “Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression. Yet in that very act lies our survival because a woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared.”¹⁷ Evolution of her voice from throttled murmurings to defiant cries and articulate self-affirmation begins with each piece of writing, each effort to transmute pain into power, each woman's battle against silence: “The revolution begins at home.”¹⁸

That the war against silencing is also a process toward healing is clear in Anzaldúa's writing. In fact, it is such “talking back” that bell hooks places at the core of self-recovery: “Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.”¹⁹ It is her calling, Anzaldúa says, to “traffic in images” (70), a calling that transmutes anger and pain into a “numinous experience” (73). Yet this transformation, she insists, is not simple, quick, or miraculous: it is, rather, deliberate, physical, and wrenching. She states: “When I don't write the images down … I get physically ill … Because some of the images are residues of trauma which I then have to reconstruct, I sometimes get sick when I do write. … But in reconstructing the traumas behind the images, I make ‘sense’ of them, and once they have ‘meaning’ they are changed, transformed. It is then that writing heals me” (70). Like defanging a cactus, living in a borderland and writing about the experience takes patience and the ability to endure intense pain: “Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. It is like a cactus needle embedded in the flesh. It worries itself deeper and deeper, and I keep aggravating it by poking at it. When it begins to fester I have to do something to put an end to the aggravation and to figure out why I have it. I get deep down into the place where it's rooted in my skin and pluck away at it, playing it like a musical instrument—the fingers pressing, making the pain worse before it can get better. Then out it comes. No more discomfort, no more ambivalence. Until another needle pierces the skin. That's what writing is for me, an endless cycle of making it worse, making it better, but always making meaning out of the experience, whatever it may be” (73). “Making the pain worse before it can get better,” Anzaldúa presses herself to get beneath the surface, to dig out poisonous barbs embedded in her flesh.

In “Cultures,” Anzaldúa locates the beginnings of such healing in discovering her buried culture. Directed, significantly enough, by her mother to turn the soil below the clothesline for a garden, the speaker in this poem picks at the “hard brown earth” with an axe, “disinter[s]” a tin can, and “unmould[s]” a shell from a “lost” ocean, the bones of an “unknown” animal. Her sweat dripping on “the swelling mounds,” she uncovers the remnants of a distinctly female culture, bred in a modern, seemingly sterile junk heap, nettled and variegated, but nevertheless alive. She rakes up “rubber-nippled” baby bottles, cans of Spam with “twisted umbilicals”; she “overturn[s] the cultures / spawning in Coke bottles / murky and motleyed.” Significantly, her tilling of the mother-soil is done independently, without the help of any man. In her autobiographical essay “La Prieta” she makes this explicit:

Nobody's going to save you
.....There is no one who
will feed the yearning.
Face it. You will have
to do, do it yourself.(20)

Yet while there is no princely rescue, there is a feminist redemption. The effort to remember, as hooks asserts, is “expressive of the need to create spaces where one is able to redeem and reclaim the past, legacies of pain, suffering, and triumph in ways that transform present reality.”²¹ Out of the discarded, the marginalized, and the dispossessed, Anzaldúa creates a new landscape, a synergy of cultures; a place, as hooks phrases it, “where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference.”²² In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa names this enlightened way of seeing a “new mestiza consciousness”: “At the confluence of two or more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly “crossing over,” this mixture of races, rather than 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 cross-pollinization, an “alien” consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands” (77).

The mestiza of which Anzaldúa speaks is both literal and figurative: it is the borderland between Mexico and the United States, a land cast aside by patriarchal governments as a part of neither country, a wasteland, even as both cultures strive to master with rules and laws those whom they have alienated; and it is a space reclaimed by the Chicana and recreated as the intersection of several heritages, a female space of confluence and power. In Anzaldúa's reenvisionment of this borderland, the mestiza is a space for a new and richer race, a mixed race made stronger by its crossings over. “If going home is denied me,” Anzaldúa continues, “then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks or mortar and my own feminist architecture” (77).

It is in this new space that Anzaldúa locates her lesbianism, her most pronounced resistance to colonization. By her own choice, she is “two in one body,” an “entry into both worlds” (19), a crosser of unnatural boundaries. “For the lesbian of color,” Anzaldúa writes, “the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior. She goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. … The choice to be queer … is a path of knowledge—one of knowing (and of learning) the history of oppression of our raza. It is a way of balancing, of mitigating duality” (19). Perhaps most importantly, it is understanding her oppression as a lesbian that helps her to reconnect with her mother. Cherríe Moraga's words in “La Güera” seem to share meaning for Anzaldúa, her coeditor of This Bridge Called My Back. Moraga writes: “It wasn't until I acknowledged and confronted my own lesbianism in the flesh, that my heartfelt identification with and empathy for my mother's oppression—due to being poor, uneducated, and Chicana—was realized. My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most about silence and oppression.”²³ It does not seem accidental that both lesbianism and the Mother become Anzaldúa's symbols of the new mestiza, “the coming together of opposite qualities within” (19).

More than mere resistance to patriarchal society, then, Anzaldúa envisions movement toward a new world of female possibility where personal and political healing begins with retrieval of her cultural myths as they were before the Conquest. It is a vision of return to the mother: one who is a balance of many differences, a crossroads, a bridge. She writes in “La conciencia de la mestiza”: “As long as woman 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 hombres think they have to chingar 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 to see Coatlapopeuh-Coatlicue in the Mother, Guadalupe” (84).

In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa reconnects upperworld (light) Tonantsi with the underworld (dark) and sexualized Coatlicue-Tlazolteotl-Cihuacoatl from whom she had been split by the Spaniards and their Church after the Conquest, and retrieves Guadalupe, by Indian name Coatlalopeuh, who traces back to, or is an aspect of, earlier Meso-american fertility and Earth goddesses. That is, she resexes the virginized Guadalupe. The “synthesis of the old world and the new,” Guadalupe “mediates between the Spanish and the Indian cultures … and between Chicanos and the white world. She mediates between humans and the divine, between this reality and the reality of spirit entities.” Indeed, she is “the symbol of ethnic identity and of the tolerance for ambiguity that … people of mixed race … by necessity possess” (30). Importantly, though, Guadalupe is one of three mediators for Anzaldúa's people. She is joined by two other women of Aztec origin, La Chingada and La Llorona. History traditionally names the former La Malinche, cast off as the traitor woman who aided Cortés in his conquest of her people and condemned (by the culture that forced her into slavery and concubinage) as whore or mother of a bastard race of mestizos, a symbol of deviance and infection.²⁴ Anzaldúa, however, redefines her as La Chingada, “the raped mother whom we have abandoned” (30). Similarly, Anzaldúa alters the negative representations of La Llorona as a woman who transgressed her proper roles as mother, wife, and patriot.²⁵ Anzaldúa claims her as “the mother who seeks her children” (30), who laments her lost Chicanos-mexicanos (38).

Through these three women, “Our Mothers” (31), Anzaldúa rejoins long obscured parts of herself; and this reconnection allows her to be many things at once:

You say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva, a many-armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man's world, the women's, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web.

Who me confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.²⁶

Anzaldúa resists attempts to label her what literary critic Mary Dearborn in Pocahontas's Daughters refers to as a cultural schizophrenic, and claims a new literature, more Indian in its roots than English.²⁷ Native American critic and novelist Paula Gunn Allen speaks of such literature in The Sacred Hoop: persons reared in traditional American Indian societies, she says, “do not organize perceptions or external events in terms of dualities or priorities. This egalitarianism is reflected in the structure of American Indian literature, which does not rely on conflict, crisis, and resolution for organization, nor does its merit depend on the parentage, education, or connections of the author. Rather, its significance is determined by its relation to creative empowerment, its reflection of tribal understandings, and its relation to the unitary nature of reality.”²⁸

For Anzaldúa, reconnection with her history is crucial to her healing, for, as she says, “by taking back your collective shadow the intracultural split will heal” (86). And such reconnection is at the core of her power. “I write the myths in me, the myths I am, the myths I want to become” (71). Grounding a new culture in the remains of the past, she creates a stronger species with “skin tone between black and bronze” who, survivors of a Fire Age, are “alive m'ijita, very much alive”:

Yes, in a few years or centuries
la Raza will rise up, tongue intact
carrying the best of all the cultures.
That sleeping serpent,
rebellion-(r)evolution, will spring up.
Like old skin will fall the slave ways of
obedience, acceptance, silence.
Like serpent lightning we'll move, little woman.
You'll see.

(203)

In finding her mouth, her “motherlode” (53), Anzaldúa makes of herself a bridge, huge and powerful, that spans abysses.²⁹

The landscape of myth and “reality,” of light and dark, of the many-legged spider woman, is not just abstraction: it is a borderland for each of us to live in, and a new literary terrain. This new mestiza speaks, for instance, for rediscovery and validation of writing based on difference. Protesting a patriarchal, exploitative history of literature that elevates “art for art's sake,” “purity” of form, academic distancing, elitism, and individualism, Anzaldúa rejects that “sacred bull” and validates in its stead social art, mixed genres, multilingualism, writing that is simple, direct, immediate, and inclusive.³⁰ Writing, for her, is an enactment, a “performance,” a “who” as much as a “what.” Like the totem pole, it is an art form that merges the sacred and the secular, the artistic and the functional, art and everyday life (66). It is communal, inclusive, accessible to the common person, meant to be shared. It insists on going public. For, as literary critic Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests in Woman, Native, Other, “publication means the breaking of a first seal, the end of a ‘no admitted’ status, the end of a soliloquy confined to the private sphere.”³¹ Such writing, Anzaldúa asserts, celebrates open vistas; it finds its own voice, it speaks confidently, it encourages interchange, and it sees beyond itself. It is not a conquered thing.

In this new mestiza, Anzaldúa validates her voice as a first-generation writer and lesbian of color, saying that she will not be ashamed of her difference, she will not be invisible, she will not be inaudible, she will not speak in one tongue. She will speak as a woman and as a lesbian. She will write bilingually, speak with an accent. She will reflect her color loud and clear. And she will talk back: “I am possessed by a vision: that we Chicanas and Chicanos have taken back or uncovered our true faces, our dignity and self-respect. It's a validation vision” (87).

With this vision, Anzaldúa replaces barriers with bridges, urges a “crossing over,” and opens up a new world of possibility for women of color who want to speak: “It was only when I looked / at the edges of things,” she writes in her poem “Interface,” that “where before there'd only been empty space / I sensed layers and layers.” The cost of speech is clear; yet greater is the cost of silence. The personal, Anzaldúa recognizes with Lorde, is political: “I change myself, I change the world” (70).³² The hope in Anzaldúa's catalytic writing is that other women of color will discover in it their own courage to heal, that they will dare to speak, and that others will listen. In the words of bell hooks: “The struggle to end domination, the individual struggle to resist colonization, to move from object to subject, is expressed in the effort to establish the liberatory voice—that way of speaking that is no longer determined by one's status as object—as oppressed being. That way of speaking is characterized by opposition, by resistance. It demands that paradigms shift—that we learn to talk—to listen—to hear in a new way.”³³

Notes

1. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters-Aunt Lute, 1987), preface. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Anzaldúa's writing are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in this text.

2. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 117.

3. In Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back, 166.

4. Ibid., 165.

5. Ibid., 166.

6. Ibid., 198-99.

7. Anzaldúa's rejection of socially unapproved parts of herself calls to mind Cherríe Moraga's story “La Güera” in which, in reference to having disowned her language, Moraga writes that she “cut off the hands” of her gesticulating mother and aunts in her poems. Moraga and Anzaldúa, Bridge, 31.

8. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 173-74.

9. Ibid., 57.

10. Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., Bridge, 169.

11. Bell hooks, Talking Back, 8.

12. Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., Bridge, 171.

13. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 124.

14. Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., Bridge, 206.

15. Ibid., 173.

16. Ibid., 163.

17. Ibid., 171.

18. Ibid., xxiv.

19. Hooks, Talking Back, 9.

20. Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., Bridge, 200.

21. Bell hooks, Yearning, 147.

22. Ibid., 148.

23. Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., Bridge, 28-29.

24. Alfredo Mirandé and Evangelina Enríquez, La Chicana, 24.

25. Ibid., 33.

26. Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., Bridge, 205.

27. Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas's Daughters, 20.

28. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop, 59.

29. Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., Bridge, 209.

30. Ibid., 167.

31. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other, 8.

32. See also, Lorde, Sister Outsider, 11.

33. Hooks, Talking Back, 15.