SOURCE: Embry, Marcus. “Cholo Angels in Guadalajara: The Politics and Poetics of Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera.” Women & Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 87-108.

[In the following essay, Embry explores issues of Chicana cultural and sexual identity in Borderlands/La Frontera.]

BORDERLANDS IN THE ACADEMY

When introducing an upper-level undergraduate course in Chicana/o or Latina/o Studies, there is a high probability that Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera will be among the texts to which many students have already been exposed. Despite the book's popularity and use in a variety of courses, Borderlands/La Frontera has a relatively brief critical biography, and among the critical examinations, there are only a handful of close textual analyses. Lately, other facets and terms of Latinidad, once contained in Latin American, Latina/o, and Chicana/o Studies, have been appropriated far afield, in some ways continuing or paralleling the dissemination of Borderlands/La Frontera. But there are dangers in these appropriations, specifically the elision or erasure of the Latina/o experience, in all its variety and difference, that forms Latinidad. In the following close reading of Borderlands/La Frontera, I will examine how Anzaldúa's 1987 text navigates the problems caused by contemporary appropriations of Latinidad, and the variety and difference within Latinidad.

As Chicana/o Studies has continued to grow and become increasingly incorporated into general academic discourse, applications of Chicana/o have begun appearing in places far from, to quote a phrase, “The Heart of Aztlán.” I am not referring to Chicana/o criticism or literature written by Chicana/os who do not live in or are not from the Southwest, but instead to appropriations of Chicanismo to explain or signify ideas about race and identity that are not necessarily related to Chicana/os, if we take Chicana/o to at least signify some sort of descendance from or kinship relationship to Mexico. Perhaps one of the outer edges of this usage is in an article by Jean-Luc Nancy, in which he argues that

[e]verything, everyone—male, female—who alters me, subjects me to mestizaje. This has nothing to do with mixed blood or mixed cultures. Even the process of “mixing” in general, long celebrated by a certain theoretical literary and artistic tradition—even this kind of “mixing” must remain suspect: it should not be turned into a new substance, a new identity.

A mestizo is someone who is on the border, on the very border of meaning. And we are all out there, exposed.

(Nancy 1994, 121)

Although Nancy's purpose is to examine the concept of mestizaje,¹ he begins with the sentence, “You are called Chicanos” (Nancy 1994, 113). And he explicitly describes many of the racist and oppressive conditions that intersect Chicana/o identity and the geopolitical boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. Ultimately, however, he separates mestizaje from Chicana/o, and ends by arguing against an essential meaning of mestizaje by expanding it to include all people whose identities are combinations of language and ethno-graphing. But as Norma Alarcón points out,

[t]he historical discussion of “mixed blood” in the Americas including its juridical normalizations, further problematizes Nancy's prohibition since it might silence the legal history of the racialization of the pre-Columbian subject, that of postslavery African Americans, and of others such as Chicanos.

(Alarcón 1994, 130)

Recent events, such as the passage of Proposition 187 in California in 1994, should emphatically remind us of the necessity to bear in mind that the word “Chicano” and its associations with mestizaje constantly recall geopolitical borders and the people who live and die there. Given the prevalence of anti-essentialism, and the ever-expanding concept of Chicana/o identity as complex and anything but “transparent” (Chabram 1990, 207), we have arrived at a question of form, of poetics, of how to articulate identity within a paradox that Alarcón describes as “the politics of ‘identity’ on the one hand and the cultural politics of ‘difference’ on the other” (Alarcón 1994, 125).

This paradox is central in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, not only in Borderlands/La Frontera, but in interviews and publications that have followed. Nevertheless, Borderlands/La Frontera itself is constantly invoked in references to alternative discursive or critical methods, and is widely disseminated in the classrooms of post-secondary education. From Cherríe Moraga's 1989 review of Borderlands/La Frontera through Carl Gutiérrez-Jones's recent publication examining Chicano culture and legal discourse, Anzaldúa's narrative style is invoked as “some of the most innovative Chicana feminist work to date” (Gutiérrez-Jones 1995, 118). In her previously cited article, Alarcón states the most prevalent criticism of Borderlands/La Frontera: Anzaldúa is guilty of essentializing race, mestizaje (Alarcón 1994, 129). Alarcón further points out that “the charges against Anzaldúa are made at conferences, or muttered in classrooms and academic hallways” (Alarcón 1994, 129). Another accusation leveled at the text is that it is full of “New Age”-type passages, although these charges are the quietest and most pernicious, because they directly contradict the idiosyncracies of the text that have been so widely celebrated.

In a 1991 interview with AnaLouise Keating, Gloria Anzaldúa suggests that she has heard these objections: speaking of her own sense of spirituality, Anzaldúa refers to the popularity of spiritualism in California, and labels it a “pseudo-spiritual New Age awareness.” She adds that

right now in the academy with high theorists, it's very incorrect to talk about that part [the spiritual part of one's personality] because they're afraid that that part is something innate and therefore they'll be labeled essentialists. Because the women who talk about spirituality a lot of times will talk about la diosa, the goddess, and how women are innately nurturing, and how they're peaceful. But they're not. It's all learned. … So they equate that kind of essentialism with spirituality, and I don't. And maybe in the past there is that in my writing. …

(Keating 1993a, 114)

In a recent article, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano succinctly addresses the issue of essentializations of mestizaje in Borderlands/La Frontera. Importantly, Yarbro-Bejarano intends her article to address Anzaldúa's text as both a contribution to “paradigmatic shifts in theorizing difference,” and also as a point of contention between “the enthusiastic embrace of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by many white feminists and area scholars and, on the other hand, the critiques voiced by some critics, particularly Chicana/o academicians” (Yarbro-Bejarano 1994, 7). In this effort, Yarbro-Bejarano addresses both the text's wide dissemination, and also the critical mutterings that, for the most part, have been endured at conferences and in hallways, but not so often published. Yarbro-Bejarano's method of addressing charges of an essentialized native American identity in the text is a remarkable analysis of Anzaldúa's appropriation and resignification of the pre-Columbian deity Coatlicue. In many ways, Yarbro-Bejarano's analysis is a culmination of past efforts such as the analyses of Maria Lugones and AnaLouise Keating (Lugones 1992; Keating 1993b). Lugones examines Borderlands/La Frontera from an admittedly personal perspective, and finds “borderdwelling friendship in it” (Lugones 1992, 31). But it is this tendency (although not Lugones's specifically) to universalize Anzaldúa's “mestiza or border consciousness” that Yarbro-Bejarano warns is the first step in eliding the specificities of personal experience and place within which Anzaldúa so carefully locates her text. Keating's analysis of the appropriation and resignification of Coatlicue is also remarkable, but Keating addresses Anzaldúa's sexuality only as a last comment, as one part of the text's queerness. As Yarbro-Bejarano points out, “[i]n a textual move privileging lesbianism often overlooked in the critical reception of the text, Anzaldúa makes ‘being queer,’ like the Coatlicue state, signify a ‘path to something else’” (Yarbro-Bejarano 1994, 19).

In the following close reading, I will contribute to the critical move that Yarbro-Bejarano makes, rereading Anzaldúa's remarkable appropriation and resignification of symbols and symbolic orders while recognizing the specificities of racial, gendered, and sexual identities that Anzaldúa weaves through the text. But I will continue the analysis to account for the ever-growing recognition of difference within Chicana/o and Latina/o identity, difference that leads Anzaldúa to suspect that “unity is another Anglo invention like their one sole god and the myth of the monopole” (Anzaldúa 1990, 146).² In the interview with Keating, Anzaldúa not only illustrates the legion of differences that preclude Latina/o unity, but adds that

if you take the Chicanos there's differences between the California ones, the ones in Arizona, in New Mexico, in Texas, in the Midwest. Yes, we have a lot of common stuff, but it's a big imposition, a big burden, to put on an ethnic group that they should get their shit together and unite.

(Keating 1993a, 110)

In essence, this recognition of the differences within Chicanisma/o sums up Alarcón's paradox, the difficulty of the politics of identity within the cultural politics of difference.

Anzaldúa describes her own personality as a resisting one, as a strong sense of “It's not fair and I'm going to fight against it because it's not fair” (Keating 1993a, 122). For Anzaldúa, the location of the unfairness is not important: “It wasn't fair the way my culture treated girls. It wasn't fair the way the white culture treats ethnic groups” (Keating 1993a, 122). Like many Chicana critics, Anzaldúa writes against the transparency of the Chicano identity that was established through the political and academic struggles of the sixties, seventies, and early eighties. This transparency, this universalization or unity, grew from a cultural politics that first necessitated a presence and voice to establish “difference.” A great deal of these cultural politics were grounded in assertions of shared cultural difference, perhaps the most available of which was the religious difference between the predominant Catholicism of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicanos, and the predominant Protestantism of Anglos (or myth thereof). This conflation of Catholicism and Chicanos itself became a part of Chicano catholicism, literally from the Greek katholikos, the universal, general identity of Chicanos.

CHOLO ANGELS: RESIGNIFYING CATHOLICISM

I will explore how Borderlands/La Frontera navigates Alarcón's paradox through a queer performance, a performativity that retains the specificity of Anzaldúa's many identities, while simultaneously reappropriating and resignifying religious and mythological symbols in a manner that opens the catholicism of Chicana/o identity to include non-Catholic Chicana/os. I want to focus on a specific passage: “Guadalupe unites people of different races, religions, languages: Chicano protestants, American Indians, and whites” (Andzaldúa, 1987, 30).³ Though coming into focus in Latina/o and Chicana/o studies only recently (and then, only slightly), there have been several examinations of non-Catholic members of both communities. Brackenridge and García-Treto have explored the history of Chicana/o participation in the Presbyterian Church, and Justo L. Gonzalez recently edited a collection of articles examining the history of Chicana/o United Methodism (Brackenridge and García-Treto 1974; Gonzalez 1991). More importantly, in 1993, the Asociación para la Educación Teológica Hispana (Association for Hispanic Theological Education) held a conference on “Latino/Hispanic Protestantism,” the papers of which were published under the title, Hidden Stories: Unveiling the History of the Latino Church (Rodriguez-Diaz and Cortes-Fuentes 1994). In 1987, Andrés Guerrero attempted to reconcile his own construction of Guadalupe as “the essence of being Mexican” (Guerrero 1993, 96), with the Protestantism of some of the Chicano activists he interviewed for his book, particularly Reies Lopez Tijerina, who was an evangelical Pentecostal minister, and Ruben Armendariz and Tomás Atencio, both Presbyterians from Texas and New Mexico. Guerrero asked the Protestants about Guadalupe's signification for them as non-Catholics, and the result was that Atencio and Armendariz “developed the concept of Guadalupe as a symbol of identity more powerfully than did the Catholics” (Guerrero 1993, 107). In other words, they read into the symbol of Guadalupe the political, cultural, and historical signification, or catholicism, that Guerrero had already overdetermined by the construction of the question they were answering. However, in order to reconcile the essentialism of Guadalupe as symbol of identity and protest with their non-Catholicism, they explained that Guadalupe was not a religious symbol in that she did not necessarily represent “the Mother of God” and all the attendant Catholic dogma. Although perhaps unintentionally, Guerrero touches on a process whereby religious symbols are appropriated as part of a cultural politics of difference; within the community in which they are deployed, their signification changes as part of the process of identity politics.

This appropriation and resignification is not confined to the U.S. side of the border. In A la brava, ése (1988), Mexican sociologist José Manuel Valenzuela Arce focuses on the appropriation of punk and Cholo identities by young Mexicans not only in border cities, but in the largest central Mexican cities as well. Valenzuela Arce documents specific communities within Mexican cities which find expression in symbolic orders or representations that are neither autochthonous nor indigenous to Mexico. Punk identity is a Euro-U.S. phenomenon, while Cholo identity is specific to the U.S. (estadunidense), coming from the barrios of East Los Angeles and the history of the Pachucos and Zoot Suiters. Yet, Cholo identity is full of Catholic iconography and images, including the Virgen de Guadalupe surrounded by little angels wearing pendleton shirts buttoned at the neck, long baggy trousers, and bandannas—the exact same images evident in movies about Cholo barrios in East Los Angeles, such as American Me. Valenzuela Arce argues that the Catholicism of Mexicanidad (“Mexicanness”) managed to jump across the border with Mexican Americans in the 1940s, who became the Pachucos and Zoot Suiters. Amazingly, this identity—replete with its Catholic imagery—has now managed to jump back across the national border and become an identity claimed by inner-city Mexican youths, most of whom have only seen U.S. Cholos in movies and magazines. For the Cholos, Catholicism is appropriated and changed as a cultural signifier, a sign on the same level as lowrider cars and the clothing of the Zoot Suiters. In interviews with the Mexican youths, Valenzuela Arce illustrates that the Cholo Catholic symbols represent religion, specifically Catholicism, and yet their manner of appropriation is the same as the other symbols of Cholismo. While in the U.S., paintings of the Virgen and angels symbolize cultural and ethnic difference from an Anglo-Protestant hegemony, in Mexico these symbols mark class and cultural difference, but not one based on an opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism. Instead, the Cholito angels signify an identity of difference that crosses over the U.S./Mexican geopolitical border.

In contemporary Mexican cultural criticism, the geopolitical border is central. Jorge Bustamante describes it thus:

The geographical neighborliness of Mexico and the U.S. has produced a phenomenon of human relations in which one can understand a combination of social interactions between individuals of different nationalities, levels of economic development, cultural traditions and values, and different degrees of power, in spite of how these countries have attained a minimum of accord about how to mutually satisfy their respective needs with reciprocal actions and interactions.

(Bustamante 1992, 117)⁴

The border is a site of understanding. Moreover, the border is a site of cultural construction. In 1992, José Carlos Lozano Rendón formulated the problem differently:

The imminence of a free trade agreement between Mexico and the U.S. has aroused a preoccupation among certain sectors about the possible loss of cultural identity among the Mexican public. This preoccupation, expressed for a long time in references to the northern borders of the country, is based in a belief that the greater the contact and links with the U.S., the greater the deterioration of the values and attitudes which form the sense of belonging and loyalty to Mexican culture.

(Lozano Rendón 1992, 51)⁵

The Cholo angels, then, become a sign that marks an oppositional identity synechdochically, by representing the historical construction of Chicanismo in the U.S., as well as metaphorically, by representing new cultural identities within Mexican cities that are a result of the continuing cultural commerce across the national border. The religious symbol thus displays a certain carrying weight, an ability to function in a variety of representational formations.

With the image of the Cholo angel in the background, we can begin to perceive Anzaldúa's resignification of religious symbols through her sense of her identity as Catholic. She associates her family not with Roman Catholicism, but with “a folk Catholicism with many pagan elements” (27). In a passage similar to Guerrero's, Anzaldúa defines Guadalupe as “the single most potent religious, political and cultural image of the Chicano/mexicano” (30). At first glance, Anzaldúa seems to be appealing to an essential Catholicism as part of her Chicana identity. She begins her last chapter, “Towards a New Consciousness,” by citing José Vasconcelos's formulation of “una raza mestiza, la raza cosmica” (77; “a mestizo race, the cosmic race”), one of the Ur-texts in the search for Mexicanidad that eventually culminated in Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude. Like Paz, Anzaldúa's Catholicism is synthetic, a syncretic mixture of the symbols of Spanish Catholicism and native American religious practices—hence the folk nature of Chicana/o Catholicism and the pagan elements that differentiate it from Roman Catholicism. This is a matter of the Mexican soul: “[d]eep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul. …” (62). Unlike Paz, however, Anzaldúa doesn't speak of identity in terms of Christian souls, but rather spirits. “No matter to what use my people put the supranatural world, it is evident to me now that the spirit world, whose existence the whites are so adamant in denying, does in fact exist” (38).

Anzaldúa's use of the word “spirits” highlights the difference between her use of Catholicism and the Catholicism with which Paz constructs his labyrinth. Anzaldúa's analysis of Chicana identity and its Catholicism concerns not a sense of an essentialized Mexican identity that is Other to the U.S., but a sense of Chicana identity that is grounded in a native American heritage. Quoting Jack Forbes and Eric Wolf, she begins Borderlands/La Frontera with the words, “The Aztecas del norte … compose the largest single tribe or nation of Anishinabeg (Indians) found in the United States today. … Some call themselves Chicanos and see themselves as people whose true homeland is Aztlán [the U.S. Southwest]” (1).⁶ The final words of the prose section of the book echo the opening:

This land was Mexican once
                    was Indian always
                              and is.
                                                            And will be again.

(91)

Anzaldúa's subjectivity, her Chicana/mestiza identity, is not only Chicana, but native American as well.

In this regard, García Canclini's objections to Paz's classless Mexican essentialism are resonant with Anzaldúa's use of Catholicism:

In his [Paz's] interpretations of culture, history and politics, he is principally interested in the elites and their ideas. Occasionally, he mentions social movements, technological changes, material vicissitudes of capitalism and society, but he never systematically examines even one of these processes.

(García Canclini 1989, 96-97)⁷

Anzaldúa, however, specifically examines social movements and the material vicissitudes of capitalism and society. Anzaldúa reads Catholicism as a politics based on not only the history of Chicana/o/Anglo relations, but the history of pre-Columbian native American relations as well. Anzaldúa combines Catholic and Protestant religions as Western religions that together prohibit the sense of spirit and soul in which she grounds her Chicana identity (37). Interestingly, Anzaldúa combines Paz's sense of “Puritan” denial of the body—“white rationality” deems the existence of the “Other World” as paganism (36)—with a critique of how Catholicism was used as a tool of oppression by the Spaniards against native Americans. Furthermore, Anzaldúa explores the manner in which Catholicism oppresses her gender and sexuality.

QUEERING SPIRITUALITY: RELIGIOUS SYMBOL AS SOCIAL MEMORY

Anzaldúa's intervention in the field of Chicana/o identity is from the perspective of both woman and queer. In the first chapter, she outlines the boundaries of Aztlán, beginning with a description of the U.S./Mexican border as an “open wound” where “the Third World scrapes against the first and bleeds” (3). She tells the story of the peopling of the Americas, beginning with the Athapaskans crossing the Bering Straits, through the Aztec conquest of the central Mexican plateau, the Spanish conquest, the conflict over Texas, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the dispossession and exploitation of the Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest, and the devaluation of the peso. The chapter moves to a description of the Border Patrol and the exploited life that awaits undocumented workers who are not caught. Finally, the chapter concludes with a contextualization of these histories and conditions as they affect women: “the Mexican woman is especially at risk,” often raped or sold into prostitution by coyotes, taken advantage of by U.S. employers; “like all women, she is prey to a sense of physical helplessness” (12).

Anzaldúa then describes her own sense of rebellion in chapter two. Calling her rebelliousness the “Shadow-Beast” within her, Anzaldúa argues that “culture forms our beliefs” and that “culture is made by those in power—men” (16). This is reinforced by the Church, which insists that women are subservient to men (17). Associating the supernatural with undivine “animal” impulses (such as sexuality, the unconscious, the unknown, the alien) and also the divine (the superhuman and “the god in us”), Anzaldúa argues that “culture and religion seek to protect us from these two forces” (17). And yet, “Woman is the stranger, the other. She is man's recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast” (17). Even within the history and context of victimization and exploitation which grounds Chicana identity within a people made up of both genders, it is culture and religion, the male and the Church, that construct woman in a manner that once again victimizes and exploits her.

Further, Anzaldúa's queer identity focuses her rebellion. Writing of the three roles available to a woman of her culture (nun, prostitute, mother), Anzaldúa describes a fourth choice, “entering the world by way of education and career and becoming self-autonomous persons” (17). This option is informed by her queer identity: “‘Y cuándo te casas, Gloria? Se te va a pasar el tren.’ Y yo les digo, ‘Pos si me caso, no va ser con un hombre.’ Se quedan calladitas” (17; “‘And when will you marry, Gloria? The train is going to pass you by.’ And I say to them, ‘Well, if I marry, it won't be to a man.’ They are left speechless.”). She argues that although selfishness and ambition are read differently in Chicana/o and Anglo cultures, deviance is tolerated by neither, nor by many native American cultures. Thus, the queer is the Shadow-Beast in all cultures. Yet for Anzaldúa, queer identity is both male and female: “I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within” (19). Queer identity is the site of rebellion:

For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior. … It's an interesting path, one that continually slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts. … It is a way of balancing, of mitigating duality.

(19)

This formulation of queer identity is central to Borderlands/La Frontera: in this sense of queerness exists the basis of Anzaldúa's analyses of religion as politics, the oppression of Chicana/o culture, and the poetics of signification that the book performs.

Anzaldúa's discussion of a male-female queer identity in the context of the history and peoples of the Southwest recalls Ramón Gutiérrez's important—and highly contested—1991 history of New Mexico, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away. Gutiérrez's analysis of sexual politics in Pueblo communities during the colonial period leads him to conclude: “[a]mong the Pueblo Indians sexual intercourse was a metaphor for politics. Coitus was the symbol of cosmic harmony created through the union of opposites (male-female, sky-earth, rainseeds)” (Gutiérrez 1991, 71).⁸ Likewise, her notion resonates with the half-men/half-women that Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca saw on his journey through 16th century North America: “[i]n the time I was among these people, I witnessed a diabolical practice: a man living with a eunuch. Eunuchs go partly dressed, like women, and perform women's duties” (Cabeza de Vaca 1961, 100). Gutiérrez argues that the function of these half-men/half-women was political: they served as sexual partners for unmarried males and thus precluded arguments between men over women. This analytical maneuver in a study of colonial American history accounts for both the severe criticism of Gutiérrez's historical accuracy, and also the celebration of the text as an intervention in a subdiscipline of history that only now is receiving analysis from the perspective of sexuality.⁹ Beyond the other controversy his text has generated, I find Gutiérrez's formulation problematic at best, not because male-male sexual activity is read as a political act within communities, but because, once again, women become the site of commerce, the object through which and about which political relationships are negotiated.

By contrast, Anzaldúa's analysis of the gendered politics of religious systems engages the complex historical cultural interactions of native American peoples prior to the arrival of Catholics and Spaniards. Analyzing the Mexican national symbol of the eagle holding a snake in its beak while perched on a cactus, Anzaldúa equates the eagle with the sun, the father, and the snake with the earth, the mother; the “symbolic sacrifice of the serpent to the “higher” masculine powers indicates that the patriarchal order had already vanquished the feminine and matriarchal order in pre-Columbian America” (5). Tracing a history of the Toltec, Chichimec, Mexitin, Azteca-Mexica, and Aztec peoples, she claims that before the Aztecs, “the principle of balanced opposition between the sexes existed” (31), and that “[m]atrilineal descent characterized the Toltecs and perhaps early Aztec society” (33). She argues that “Coatlicue, Lady of the Serpent Skirt, contained and balanced the dualities of male and female, light and dark, life and death” (32). As different groups gained control of the religious systems, the roles of the gods were reinterpreted as both a result of cultural mixing, and also as a basis of social organization and control. Finally, though, “[t]he Aztec ruler, Itzcoatl, destroyed all the painted documents (books called codices) and (re)wrote a mythology that validated the wars of conquest and thus continued the shift from a tribe based on clans to one based on classes” (32).

In this passage, Anzaldúa improves on Gutiérrez's analysis on the role of sexuality in native American political structures by not only addressing the gendered politics and relationships of the various peoples, but also by presenting pre-Columbian peoples as dynamic and changing, rather than as a static community with whom the Spaniards interacted. By introducing the idea of class structures, Anzaldúa rereads the split between opposing dualities as one of class conflict as well, so that by 1492, the Aztec “nobility kept the tribute, the commoner got nothing” and the society was divided by class antagonism (34). The Tlaxcalans who assisted Cortés in capturing Mexico City were one of the many conquered tribes “who hated the Aztecs because of the rape of their women and the heavy taxes levied on them” (34). And thus, “the Aztec nation fell not because Malinali (la Chingada) interpreted for and slept with Cortés, but because the ruling elite had subverted the solidarity between men and women and between noble and commoner” (34). This rereading of the conquest not only rewrites the role of Malinali, La Malinche, but provides the link between class oppression and its articulation and development through symbolic orders which, in turn, re-articulated the political relationships of gender.

From this perspective, Anzaldúa understands the politics of Catholicism as a result of Spanish appropriation of an already-existing Aztecan patriarchal symbolic order. After the Azteca-Mexica culture had demonized and subverted the female deities, the Spaniards appropriated this structure by “making la Virgen de Guadalupe/Virgen María into chaste virgins and Tlazolteotl/Coatlicue/la Chingada into putas [whores]” (28). After the Virgen de Guadalupe appeared on December 9, 1531 to Juan Diego, she gradually became the symbol of Mexico and Latino Catholicism: “la Virgen de Guadalupe began to eclipse all the other male and female religious figures in Mexico, Central America and parts of the U.S. Southwest” (29).

Anzaldúa recovers the gendered politics that link her identities of Chicana/Indian/woman/queer by linking the names, and by resignifying the symbols, of her identity, oppression, and resistance across boundaries of history and religion/mythology. “La Virgen de Guadalupe's Indian name is Coatlalopeuh. She is the central deity connecting us to our Indian ancestry” (27). And in this way, she “is the symbol of the mestizo true to his or her Indian values” (30).

So, don't give me your tenets and your laws. Don't give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.

(22)

Here, then, is Anzaldúa's sense of spirit and soul, rooted both in a subtle understanding of the politics of both religious symbolism and pre- and post-Columbian American cultural collisions, and rooted in her many subjectivities, and her sense of rebellion. Anzaldúa understands the histories and deployments of religions and gods, and the politics they represent. From this knowledge, she fashions her own gods, constructs her own representation of politics through religious symbol. And the god she fashions, the symbol she chooses, is Coatlicue, the serpent.

THE POETICS OF COATLICUE

Coatlicue is for Anzaldúa both an identity and a poetics. Borderlands/La Frontera is a remarkable work in that it is simultaneously a collection of poetry, a history, an autobiography, a memoir, and a theoretical examination and construction of an identity politics. The manner in which all these elements combine and dialogue with each other allows Anzaldúa to address the Borderlands both in terms of personal identity, and political identity as well. Just as the text examines the social constructions of personal identities, it also interrogates the constructions of a social identity, the Chicana/o, and the aesthetics of representing this construction. In other words, Anzaldúa constructs her identity through the symbol of Coatlicue at the same time that Coatlicue constructs the text itself.

In an article entitled “Writing in the Borderlands,” Diane P. Freedman argues that Anzaldúa (and Susan Griffin) “employ the central trope of border-crossing as both theme and compositional mode” (Freedman 1992, 211). Freedman identifies one of the central features of Anzaldúa's text, namely to complicate identity and write from loci of enunciation that can be labeled woman/lesbian/Chicana, and emphasizes the writer within these various identities. Freedman argues that Anzaldúa writes from a personal perspective of having grown up in the Lower Valley of Texas, but ultimately argues that “[b]orders can thus evoke a cozy, domestic scene. Think of cloth borders appearing at the loom, in quilts” (Freedman 1992, 215). She quotes a similar passage in Borderlands/La Frontera which reads, in part, “in looking at this book that I'm almost finished writing, I see a mosaic pattern (Aztec like) emerging …” (66). Anzaldúa's words “Aztec like” escape her analysis, and she likewise ignores Anzaldúa's passages (indeed an entire chapter) dealing with the red and black ink of Nahual codices. This omission is very telling; despite Freedman's intention to find connections between the personal history and specificity of the author and the text, she misses the connection Anzaldúa makes between this weaving function that grounds the logic of the text, and the weavings of Chicana identity that are directly bound to things “Aztec like.” In other words, Freedman misses the point that for Anzaldúa, the reciprocal relationships between her identity constructions and textual constructions are channelled through Anzaldúa's sense of native American identity, her sense of the spirit world, and her reclamation of the symbolic orders of spirits to represent the historical specificity of her Chicana and native American identities as they intersect with her sexual and gender identities.

The personal narratives contained in chapter three, entitled “Entering into the Serpent,” detail Anzaldúa's Coatlicue identity and her constant interactions with snakes. In the beginning of in the first section, entitled “Ella tiene su tomo,” Anzaldúa describes an episode from her childhood in which she is bitten by a rattlesnake; her mother kills the snake by hacking it into pieces; Anzaldúa buries the pieces, and then spends the nights watching the rattle (which she evidently saved) in the moonlight, dreaming and imagining that she is transforming into a snake.

Always when they [snakes] cross my path, fear and elation flood my body. I know things older than Freud, older than gender … Like the ancient Olmecs, I know Earth is a coiled Serpent. Forty years it's taken me to enter 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)

Here Anzaldúa begins to present her personal construction of her Shadow-Beast, as her personal narrative merges with symbols of gods and religions, and rebellions against them. The combination of Freud with Olmecs, of psychoanalysis with a native American cosmology, illustrates Anzaldúa's sense that religion is an epistemology rather than an eschatology, and that the pagan symbols of serpents and animal bodies and souls, tonos, are directly related to bodily emotion and desire—fear and elation flooding her body—the site of her construction, oppression, and resistance. Thus, as her personal narratives in chapter three focus on more “mystical” episodes from her childhood, stories of brujas and snakes in South Texas and the development of Facultad (sixth sense), they merge with her earlier passages on cultural and religious construction of women and queerness as the Shadow-Beast. Coatlicue, the god she fashions to represent herself, becomes both a mental and a physical state, and the subject of chapter four, “The Coatlicue State.”

When Anzaldúa writes of her queer identity in chapter two, she describes the fear of being outed, the fear that “the Shadow-Beast will break out of its cage” (20). The mirror is a site of fear, because the serpent stares back at the viewer, and drags her underground. There seems no way to change the nature of the serpent, to “put feathers on this particular serpent” (20). And yet, some have looked at the face of the serpent and “uncovered the lie” (20). Clearly, by recovering the symbol of the snake and its association with evil and darkness through a patriarchal order and oppression, Anzaldúa does find a way to put feathers on the serpent, to reunite the opposing elements (male/female, earth/sky, day/night) within the single image of the Serpent.

In chapter four, after describing how her mother covered all the mirrors in the house after her father's death, Anzaldúa writes that the mirror served as a door through which the soul can pass to the other side, and her mother did not want the children to follow their father into the place of dead souls. At the same time, Anzaldúa theorizes the mirror in terms of seeing, of the gaze, and the manner in which the gaze constructs the viewer's perceptions of herself in ways that “freeze us,” creating definitions or making permanent the significations that are present in the gaze. Further, Anzaldúa recognizes the centrality of sight in this relationship of the mirror, and thus perception is central to the process, so that in the gaze there is a source of knowledge, of “seeing through.” In the mirror, she sees “Gloria, the everyday face; Prieta and Prietita, my childhood faces; Gaudi, the face my mother and sister and brothers know. And there in the black, obsidian mirror of the Nahuas is yet another face, a stranger's face” (44). She sees the different constructions of her identity, represented by her many names. Here Anzaldúa's eyes and nose, the mark of her indigenous blood, seem to dominate her reflection—in a manner strikingly similar to Richard Rodriguez's discussion, in his controversial autobiography, Hunger of Memory, of confronting his facial features in the mirror (Rodriguez 1988, 124-25). Unlike Rodriguez, however, for Anzaldúa these aspects do not create an anxiety that is articulated through a discourse in the voice of the patriarch; rather these allow her to reclaim the political orders from the pre-Columbian peoples whose blood she shares. Thus she sees another face in the obsidian mirror of the “Mexican Indians” from “ancient times” (42). All these faces constitute gazes from different angles, and link her bodily reflection to her social reality: a socially constructed representation with multiple characters—Chicana, indigenous, woman, and queer.

By linking bodily and social representation and specificity, Anzaldúa demonstrates a way of seeing that is Coatlicue: “we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes” (78-79). This, finally, is the aesthetic of Borderlands/La Frontera:

She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of. … This step is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths. She adopts new perspectives toward the darkskinned, women, and queers.

(82)

Anzaldúa writes Borderlands/La Frontera in the red ink and black ink with which the ancient Aztecs wrote their codices, and whose different colors symbolize writing and wisdom, two forces that can be united in representation (69). Anzaldúa looks at her hand writing, and she sees feathers growing from it (from the hand of a serpent body), and thus, she writes in both the black ink of words, and the red ink of her blood, her body, the representations and constructions of her subjectivity (71). And through this aesthetic, in this way of seeing, Anzaldúa appropriates, reinterprets, and resignifies the symbols and symbolic orders that represent the constructions of her various identities.

Throughout her remarkable analysis of historical and social constructions of gender and sexuality and their codification in religious symbols, Anzaldúa never slips into a discourse that is removed from her Chicana identity. And in fact, explaining why she left home in order to obtain an education and thus choose the fourth option of what a woman can become, she writes that “Not me sold out my people but they me” (21). She details Chicano oppression of Chicanas, and straight oppression of queers within Chicana/o culture. But despite the differences within the identity of Chicana/o, the history of both her family and the history of the Lower Valley in Texas illustrate the necessity to resist arguing that Chicana/o identity can be erased as a basis for political identity and action. In this way, Anzaldúa navigates between cultural politics of difference and the politics of identity.

Anzaldúa's navigation depends on her appropriation and use of Coatlicue to signify both the historical construction of Chicana, native American, sexual, and gendered identity, and also a poetics of iteration. To restate the quotation with which we began:

To Mexicans on both sides of the border, Guadalupe is the symbol of our rebellion against the rich, upper and middleclass; against their subjugation of the poor and the indio.

Guadalupe unites people of different races, religions, languages: Chicano protestants, American Indians, and whites.

(30)

Guadalupe unites Mexicans on both sides of the border by signifying their class rebellion, but Guadalupe also unites a variety of people who are not necessarily participating in the class rebellion, and some of whom are not Mexican. Just as the Cholo angels and Guadalupe signify an identity politics and/or a cultural politics of difference in Mexican and U.S. cities, Anzaldúa's resignified Guadalupe unites these various people through symbolizing both the constructions of their identities, and also the manner in which one can rebel against and resist such constructions. Additionally, Anzaldúa's Guadalupe provides the hermeneutic necessary to address identity politics without eliding or erasing politics of difference, while at the same time addressing politics of difference without essentializing difference into a catholic identity that precludes identity politics. Anzaldúa's Guadalupe is Coatlicue, the symbol of the new mestiza whose political status has been recovered through an examination of the history and politics of her religious signifiers. To be sure, Chicana/o protestants participate in Protestantism's rejection of “mediation” and the symbols of Catholicism. But when the symbol of Latin American and Chicana/o Catholicism represents Chicana/o protestants, it does so as a signifier of their construction as an identity of difference, of the meaning of Chicana/o identity, a construction in which all Chicana/os are assumed to be C/catholic.

Notes

1. Mestizo literally means of mixed blood; mestizaje refers to the state of being of mixed blood. In Latino/a studies, mestizaje refers to the mixing of Spanish and Indian blood that theoretically (and ideologically) produced the Mexican people, and by extension, the Mexican and Mexican-American people who live in what is now the U.S. Nancy, of course, is arguing for a substantially altered concept of mixing and blood, and their metaphorical and metonymical significations.

2. My close reading will address only the first section of Borderlands/La Frontera, in other words, the prose or narrative section. For a detailed analysis of the second section, the poetry, see Sonia Saldívar-Hull 1991.

3. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera will hereafter be cited by parenthetical page reference only.

4. My translation. “La vencidad geográfica entre México y Estados Unidos ha producido un fenómeno de relaciones humanas que se pueden entender como un conjunto de interacciones sociales entre individuos de diferentes nacionalidades, niveles de desarrollo económico, tradiciones y valores culturales y de diferente grado de poser, a pesar de lo cual estos países han logrado un mínimo de acuerdo como para satisfacer mutuamente sus respectivas necesidades con acciones e interacciones recíprocas” (Bustamante 1992, 117).

5. My translation. “La inminencia de un acuerdo de libre comercio entre México y Estados Unidos ha hecho surgir en algunos sectores preocupación por una posible pérdida de identidad cultural en la población mexicana. Esta preocupación, externada desde hace mucho teimpo en referencia a la fontera norte del país, se basa en la creencia de que a mayor contacto y vinculación con Estados Unidos, mayor deterioro en los valores y actitudes que conforman el sentido de pertenencia y lealtad a la cultura mexicana” (Lozano Rendón 1992, 51).

6. Anzaldúa's endnote reads: Jack D. Forbes, Aztecas del Norte: The Chicanos of Aztlán. (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Premier Books, 1973), 13, 183; Eric R. Wolf, Sons of Shaking Earth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1959), 32. The quotation marks, parentheses, and brackets are Anzaldúa's.

7. My translation. “También porque en sus [Paz] interpretaciones de la cultura, la historia y la política le interesan principalmente las élites y las ideas. En ocasiones, menciona movimientos sociales, cambios tecnológicos, las peripecias materiales del capitalismo y el socialismo, pero nunca examina sistemáticamente uno sólo de esos procesos” (García Canclini 1989, 96-97).

8. Gutiérrez and his book are a fascinating study in themselves of the politics and discourses that attend the introduction of queer discourse into “virgin” fields. Gutiérrez won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1983, when he was 32, and before he had published any booklength manuscript. For a suggestion of the intense personal feeling that this provoked among Gutiérrez's academic colleagues, see Tomás Almaguer's comments in Liz McMillen's 1992 article. An example of the celebration that attended Gutiérrez's sexuality-based intervention in colonial history of the Americas is in Roberto M. Salmón's 1992 review. Ted Jojola (1993) and Ralph H. Vigil (1994) exemplify the devastating criticisms of Gutiérrez's motives and historical inaccuracies. Lastly, Susan A. Miller (1993) suggests that the historical and citational inaccuracies of the text can not only be faulted to Gutiérrez, but also to Stanford University Press's haste to print the manuscript.

9. The historical inaccuracies of Gutiérrez's text and the criticism that has focused on it are in some ways similar to the often heard criticisms of Anzaldúa's sometimes startling interpretations of pre-Columbian history. Yarbro-Bejarano responds to this criticism of Anzaldúa by arguing that her text is not purporting to be a history, but rather a hermeneutic in which symbols are appropriated and resignified. The differences between symbols that are religious, mythic, and historical is certainly another borderland in contention, as is the maneuver involved in eliding ideologies of sexuality on the basis of “historical accuracy.” References to other historians who address sexuality in colonial history of the Americas can be found in Susan Kellogg (1992).

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