[In the following essay, Rotger uses the term “sangre fértil” to describe Anzaldúa's ability to speak from a borderland position between a variety of cultures, languages, and perspectives and discusses the author's creation of a new consciousness as a feminist and political activist.]

In her elegy “Para los Californios Muertos” (“To the Dead Californios”)¹ the Californian poet of Mexican origin Lorna Dee Cervantes conjures up the vague historical memory of the destruction of the towns and culture of Californios during the US occupation of former Mexican territory. This occupation began around the 1820s and culminated with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), by which Mexico was stripped of the territories that today comprise the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and half of Colorado. In Cervantes' poem, a visit to a restaurant where the only vestige of her descendants is a cold brass plaque, stirs the poetic voice's raging lament for a history effaced by stretches of highway, white houses and “yanqui remnants.” In contrast with the blood shed in intercultural warfare, the poet's blood is referred to as fertile:

I run my fingers
across this brass plaque.
Its cold stirs in me a memory
of silver buckles and spent bullets,
of embroidered shawls and dark rebozos.
Yo recuerdo los antepasados muertos.
Los recuerdo en la sangre,
la sangre fértil.
(I remember the dead ancestors
I remember them in my blood,
my fertile blood)
What refuge did you find here,
ancient Californios?
Now at this restaurant nothing remains
but his old oak and an ill-placed plaque.
Is it true that you still live here
in the shadows of these white, high-class houses?
Soy la hija pobrecita
pero puedo maldecir estas fantasmas blancas.
Las fantasmas tuyas deben aquí quedarse,
solas las tuyas. [sic](2)
(I am only your poor daughter
but I can curse these white ghosts.
Your ghosts should remain here,
Only yours)

The evocation of “sangre fértil” has a double function that reveals the position of the speaking subject within the oppressed group. On the one hand, it is the poet's claim of consanguinity and kinship with those whose blood was spilt in battle. She is therefore speaking about a collective history that she claims to share, but has been lost. On the other hand, “sangre fértil” is a figuration of the committed poet's written expression of sadness and anger at the loss and destruction of a culture. Consequently, she is also speaking for those who died at a moment in which they can no longer speak for themselves. In the work that I discuss in this essay, Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa similarly speaks for herself and for others. The most remarkable trait of Anzaldúa's speaking position is that it is explicitly described as both within and without a variety of collectivities and cultures (Chicano/a, US-American, Mexican, indigenous people, white people, women, feminists, Hispanic, Spanish-speaking, English-speaking). This speaker uses her borderland position in between worlds, languages, and cultural codes as a privileged place from which she tries to undo the “epistemic violence” that has kept the voices of men and women of Mexican descent unheard by creating a new consciousness.³ Anzaldúa's rhetoric in this rich “cultural autobiography,” as Caren Kaplan would call it, may be appropriately described with Cervantes' metaphoric epithet “sangre fértil.”⁴ The speaker's painful borderland existence brings about a new politically committed feminist consciousness and mythology capable of approaching and understanding a variety of social, gender, class and ethnic issues that have often been at odds with each other. In addition, “sangre fértil” also designates the challenges and the struggles that Anzaldúa faces as a speaker in between cultures, as both subject and object. These are challenges and struggles that we, as readers of her work, are also bound to confront.

Anzaldúa's autobiography may be included within Caren Kaplan's category of “outlaw genres.” Such genres defy conventional distinctions between autobiography, poetic prose, mythical or magical narrative, political pamphlet and/or manifesto, critical essay and historical document. For one thing, Borderlands/La Frontera incorporates and mingles all of these genres in an original production where the more aesthetic space of the text is grounded in the historical and political circumstances that pervade the “real” material space the speaking subject has inhabited. The terms “Borderlands/La Frontera” that entitle the work do not refer to a psychological disposition that easily accommodates contradictory categories. Anzaldúa is concerned with the material, psychological and emotional pain of those who live in the geographical, political, cultural and economic frontier between Mexico and the US. This is a struggle with contradictory notions of self-imposed by a variety of cultures. She attempts to forge a sense of place out of a sense of constant displacement. Her position, as she says repeatedly, is that of “mediator,” of someone who speaks for herself as both subject (a writer, an academic, and an author) and object (descendant of a Texan family of farmers whose territories were expropriated, a Chicana, a lesbian). Taking that double position and refusing to do away with it, she uses her knowledge, her privilege and her personal experience as a woman of Mexican origin, a descendant of migrant workers, and a lesbian, to establish a dialogue between these multiple locations and identities.

The very first chapter of Anzaldúa's work begins with the description and figurative representation of intercultural, geographic bloodshed in South Texas. The speaker places her own personal struggle within the history of her homeland, the side of the US-Mexican border “between the Nueces and the Rio Grande,” which she describes as an “open wound,” “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”⁵ This land, Anzaldúa says, “has survived possession and ill-use by five countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the US, the Confederacy, and the US again. It has survived Anglo-Mexican blood feuds, lynchings, burnings, rapes, pillage” (90). The history of the Texas border between Mexico and the US is one of violent clashes, poverty, and displacement. Anzaldúa's birthplace was subjected to the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century and the US invasion and “deterritorialization” of Mexican indigenous peoples since the early 1800s.⁶ US imperialism led to the creation of the Republic of Texas by Anglo-Texans in 1836, to the eventual annexation of the territory to the US in 1848, and to native Mexicans' virtual abandonment of the region in the 1850s. Anzaldúa tells us that the industrialization of the border following land expropriations and the establishment of agribusiness corporations and factories in the 1880s accounts for the massive presence of a poor Mexican migrant working class in this area. The speaker describes the subjection of her own family to race hatred after the Anglo invasion, her own widowed mother's and grandmother's loss of lands, and their powerlessness to contest a foreign law and language they did not understand. Borderlands merges collective, personal, and family history with popular sayings and songs such as those by the conjunto/band Los Tigres del Norte:

El otro México que acá hemos construido
El espacio es lo que ha sido
Territorio nacional.
Este es el esfuerzo de todos nuestros hermanos
Y latinoamericanos que han sabido
Progresar [sic].

(1)

(The other Mexico that we have built here
This space has been
National territory.
This is the struggle of all our brothers
And Latin-Americans who've managed
to make progress)

Like Cervantes' elegy, Anzaldúa's autobiographical writing springs from a collective history of cultural clashes and intends to be regenerating. Its rhetoric weaves descriptions of the “real” geographical, socio-cultural space of the borderlands and of the “imagined” space of a new mestiza healing consciousness. This new consciousness takes marginality in its various forms as a starting point for redefining American culture and geographical borders. It claims a “third culture,” a “closed culture,” a homeland which the speaker identifies with the mythical, utopian, egalitarian land that Chicanos invented in the 1960s and called Aztlán. Aztlán is the name that Aztec Indians had supposedly given to the territories now consisting of the US Southwestern States that used to belong to Mexico.⁷ In her “re-appropriation” of Aztlán the new mestiza redefines American nationalism and Chicano ethnic nationalism. She stands up against the constitution of the American national imagery at the expense of ethnic minorities and non-heterosexual people, but she also opposes the Chicano nationalist discourse of the late 1960s that excluded both women and homosexuals. As Norma Alarcón has argued, the utopian “neonationalism” or “ethnonationalism” of writers like Anzaldúa is guided by the notions of provisionality, multiplicity, and never by the separatist utopianism of former Chicano cultural nationalism:⁸

[I]n the Americas today, the processes of sociopolitical empire and nation-making displacements over a five-hundred-year history are such that the notion of “Home” is as mobile as the populations, a “home” without juridically nationalized geopolitical territory.⁹

As revisited by Anzaldúa, Aztlán ceases to be geographical territory that must be “re-conquered.” Despite this writer's appropriation of the indigenist Chicano term, Aztlán changes its meaning to stand for a symbolic claim for the rights of the dispossessed. In Anzaldúa's work it is a utopia forged by a new hybrid, mestiza consciousness, a land where illegal Mexican workers, sexual outlaws and other disenfranchised beings may coexist with their particular differences. As the African-American cultural critic bell hooks has observed, “[s]paces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice.”¹⁰ For Anzaldúa, Aztlán is the borderlands to which the title of her work alludes. This region, very much in spite of Anzaldúa, is a real “frontline, a war zone,” the habitat of the undocumented, the queers, the maquiladora workers, the farm workers, the cholo gangs, the mojada (female wetback),¹¹ “the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead” (3).

In addition, Aztlán also stands for the subjective borderlands of the imagination, a site of conflict and resistance that is, as we will see, crucial for the regenerating and healing process that Anzaldúa's creative writing seeks to bring about. In both cases, the borderlands, are, as she says in the preface, “not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape.”¹² In its claim for a “safe” communal place where sexism, racism and any other discriminatory practices will not exist, in its distinction between the oppressors and the oppressed, as well as in the manifest internal fragmentation of the autobiographical self and the communities described, Borderlands follows Caren Kaplan's definition of “cultural autobiography.” Kaplan observes that this sort of personal stories that link individuals with communities go beyond the limits of the individual and the exclusive focus on the self of Western autobiographies, becoming instead forms of healing and cultural survival.¹³ In the case of Anzaldúa, the title of her work is an indicator that this healing must come from a dangerous mental and cultural region between the self and Other.

The histories of collective displacement and struggle where Anzaldúa grounds her narrative have their counterpart in the psychological “inner war” of the autobiographical subject, a correlate of the outside wars occurring in specific borderland territories. As a lesbian and as a Chicana, Anzaldúa's autobiographical persona, the mestiza, lives in a constant state of transition between cultural codes, in a constant war against a “cultural tyranny” that often makes her afraid of being rejected in both the Anglo and the Chicano communities. The speaker establishes the usual equivalence between home, race, culture and community, but her own hesitance and fear of going back reveals the inadequacy of such identification. She has “[f]ear of going home. And of not being taken in. … Most [queers] unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable part of the self our mother/culture/race will totally reject us.” For the woman of color the world “is not a safe place to live in”: “Alienated from her mother culture, ‘alien’ in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self” (20). The mestiza feels “sold out” by her people, and defines herself as “hija de la chingada” (daughter of the fucked one), thus turning over the fundamental Mexican cultural construct of woman as traitor that will be later explored in this essay. Even if “‘home’ permeates every sinew and cartilage” in her body, she abhors and escapes the way her culture treats women in making them meek and subservient to men: “I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me” (16). Her “guerra de independencia” (war of independence) is a battle against herself to bring out the various others that make her a stranger in a variety of homes. In Borderlands the “Shadow-Beast,” Coatlicue, Cihuacoatl (the serpent goddess), and the various dark aspects of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin become the figurative representations of these others in herself, the rebels that “refuse to take orders from outside authorities” and go against imposed paradigms and behavior (16). Anzaldúa's confrontation of the “Shadow Beast,” to give an example, is a fight against the fear felt when a culture makes one push the supposedly “unacceptable parts into the shadows,” a fear that in psychoanalytical terms is known as abjection.

Kristeva defines the abject as the filthy, the horrid; in other words, that which the subject thrusts aside in order to live, and which in writing or representation becomes a metaphor of Otherness or alterity: “what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”¹⁴ Kristeva's definition of the marginal involves conceiving it as a generalized, neutralized Other that may be found in the limits of representation of a decontextualized, disengaged writing.¹⁵ In a different vein, the feminist critic Judith Butler, suggests that there are certain abject zones within the social order that also threaten with dissolution; these are zones that the subject imagines as a threat to its own integrity and to which it responds “I would rather die than do or be that.”¹⁶ As George Yúdice remarks, the recognition that there is something other upon which writing and representation rest, is no guarantee that we are interested in the marginality of actual people.¹⁷ Anzaldúa does not merely want to unsettle the symbolic order that defines and constrains a subject trapped in language. She is not content with textual pleasure and disruption and cannot write from a figurative “pure” abjection or marginality, but from the constant repositioned margin that she calls the borderlands. The experience she relates is one of historical, social and institutional estrangement from a variety of codes and cultures. In order to overcome this eternal, “pure,” marginal position, meaning and figuration cannot possibly be effaced or collapsed; rather, they have to be constantly reconstructed and renewed to produce new values by taking what can be used from each and everyone of the codes the mestiza is exposed to.

Anzaldúa urges us to explore the relationship between the psychological, the historical and the social. She strives to find a “path of knowledge—one of knowing [and of learning] the history of oppression of our raza [race]” (19). In this particular case, the speaker's sexual difference and displacement as a lesbian in Chicano/a and American culture, and her marginal position as a woman within the Chicano/a community, has provided a way to understand her liminality with respect to cultural codes and discourses. She sees herself as “half and half, mita' y mita,' neither one or the other.” She “made the choice to be queer” and, therefore, “slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts” and fights against the despotic power of value laden dualisms and binary oppositions such as man-woman, white-Mexican, heterosexual-lesbian (19). For many feminist separatists lesbianism has been a speaking position from which it has been possible to undermine dualities, but this position has also established the limits of one's identity against patriarchy. This is the case, for example, of Faultline, the first “coming-out” novel written by Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, a writer of Mexican descent. The metaphor of the “faultline” that titles her work stands for a marginal position from which to unsettle dualities. The novel proposes a utopian familial order that is founded upon the common eccentric psychological disposition of her characters. This position is only vaguely related to “real” social struggles against oppression. Conversely, in Borderlands lesbianism is more a sign of the speaker's multiple identity that is subject to change depending on history and circumstance, than of an inherent “true” psychological identity. No doubt, Borderlands belongs to innovative autobiographical narratives by women of color in which, according to Biddy Martin, lesbianism is no longer an exclusionist ground for identity politics, but a central position from which women can launch a political and intellectual project. In these writings lesbianism does not create identity boundaries; nor does it do away with them completely; it helps the subject to remain in a constant state of “renegotiation” of boundaries, to create coalitions and affiliations that are not always comfortable, to imagine “home” as always provisional.¹⁸ Both at the level of content and form, Borderlands disrupts clear-cut views of identity, disciplinary categories, generic paradigms, forms of thought, and barriers between languages and national loyalties. As Anzaldúa says, the mestiza has both many names and no names and crosses over from one identity to another not without pain or struggle. Each crossing involves “making sense,” “making connections,” “formulating insights,” “incrementing consciousness” about all the different worlds that she inhabits (43-8). The “thin edge of barbwire,” which the speaker identifies as the mestiza's home in the first pages of Borderlands, is another of Anzaldúa's vivid images evoking this sense of displacement as well as the blood and the pain of crossing borders—be them physical or psychological.

As a “mediator” between cultures that defies oppressive hierarchical structures and binary oppositions, Anzaldúa's persona faces the challenge posited by the postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak. In her now classic essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak has reminded us of the importance of distinguishing between aesthetic representation (Darstellung, to speak about) and political representation (Vertretung, to speak for). Her emphasis on the double meaning of the notion of “representation,” as exemplified by the two German terms, should be a warning to all those who claim to speak for those who cannot do so for themselves. For Spivak, the distinction between speaking about and speaking for stands for the difficult predicament of the post-colonial intellectual and/or writer that wants to “unlearn” the discursive mechanisms that keep the Other silent, and attempts to rewrite and represent its history. As Spivak sees it, this intellectual and/or writer needs to be aware that “representing” in art or philosophy (darstellen) is also “speaking for” (vertreten). Both meanings of the term are related but not necessarily consistent nor in harmony with each other. Those who stage representational practices (Darstellung) may be the agents of the present, oppressive structure of power or the proponents of a different, liberating one (Vertretung). Spivak is therefore concerned with the ways in which writers and intellectuals deal with their double position as witnesses of the experience of certain groups, and as interpreters of such an experience from within official institutions. The intellectual may define the concrete experience of others without being critical of the position from which he/she speaks within institutions that serve power, which precludes the production of a counter-ideology.¹⁹ If, as Spivak says, the language of those who dominate the subaltern is at once the language that represents her, she can never be known, can never speak and, therefore, is condemned to perpetual Otherness.

Gloria Anzaldúa's speaking subject is not fully Other in any of the communities she speaks about, and yet she is also Other in that she does not fully feel at home in any of them. The following passage illustrates the mestiza's ambiguous position:

As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman's sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet.

(80-81)

The way for Anzaldúa to avoid fetishising or aestheticising Otherness while yet speaking about and for its various forms, is to turn her marginal position in relation to several communities to her advantage. This allows her to redefine the concept of Otherness and marginality as a position from which one can speak. Because the speaker is never fully comfortable anywhere, she always speaks from the margin of a community or a discourse, but that margin is constituted by drawing on elements that may be central in other discourses. Marginality to a place means being in the center of something else; yet, that center always shifts depending on what she has to oppose, and such constant shifting prevents her from falling into the trap of constructing an absolute center and an absolute margin. In consequence, she disrupts binary oppositions and learns “to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view (…) to juggle cultures” (79). This double position of centrality within marginality allows the mestiza to speak both for and about others while always calling attention to the fact that her perspective is partial, insecure, and that it is always open to new meanings that may change.

Knowledge, as Anzaldúa says, is the only way in which “divided loyalties” can be overcome and boundaries can be redrawn: “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images of our heads” (87). These “images of our heads,” which we may also call myths, have, according to Roland Barthes, a historical foundation: “myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things.”²⁰ In becoming form, Barthes argues, the mythical signifier, the semiological chain upon which it is built, loses historicity; meaning is not lost, only impoverished, divested of the contingency that produced it. Barthes stresses the open character of myth, the instability of its meaning, its dependability on function: “the fundamental character of the mythical concept is to be appropriated.”²¹ A very pertinent instance to the subject of this discussion is the historical/mythical figure of Malinche, who has been appropriated according to different purposes in Mexican/Chicano culture.²² For Chicanas like Anzaldúa, mythmaking has the function of re-telling or rather re-imagining history from a female perspective, as well as of celebrating a lost indigenous female racial heritage and pride. The best antidote to myth, Barthes says, is to use artificial myths as a weapon: “since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?”²³ In this vein, Anzaldúa constructs a counter-mythical language. As she puts it, she wants the freedom “to fashion my gods out of my entrails,” a new culture “with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture” (22). Anzaldúa does not represent reality as it really is; she creates a whole new signification out of a variety of revised, appropriated Mexican signifiers. As Rachel Blau Duplessis has put it, “making a critical mythopoesis goes against the grain of a major function of myth: the affirmation of dominant culture.” The critical mythic act may be used to say that a group is the privileged site of noncolonial consciousness, which reiterates and capitalizes on the affirmative function of myth and applies it to what Duplessis calls “the muted group.”²⁴ On the other hand, as Duplessis says, to tell tales that are not central to mainstream culture involves the transformation of hegemonic society and its history.²⁵

The speaking subject of Borderlands is enmeshed in a racial formation where there is a strong association between race and culture. As Mary Kaminsky has said, in the US “white is the norm and non-white is race.”²⁶ This speaking subject appropriates indigenous figures and gives them politicized oppositional value even at the expense of inverting the white-Other opposition. Paradoxically, the fusion of opposites black-white, light-darkness, night-day is described as embodied by the indigenous goddess Coatlicue. In the chapter entitled “Entering into the Serpent” Anzaldúa claims back the resisting power of Aztec goddesses embodied by the serpent. This violent, destructive aspect of the female goddesses was suppressed with the advent of patriarchy, which caused the division of female deities into benevolent creatures of light and creation and monstrous creatures of night and destruction. Coatlicue and the various powerful aspects of this serpent goddess—Cihuacoatl, Cotlalopeuh, Tlazolteotl, Tonantzin—are all reincarnations of what the speaker calls “the godwoman in me” (50), the archetypal representation of the fusion of opposites—male-female, life-death, light-darkness—that prevailed in an early matrilineal Aztec society. The serpent becomes a symbol of a long-lost Aztec female power with which the speaker confronts dominant mythical tales that deny it. Drawing on anthropological sources that legitimate her account, Anzaldúa's mestiza traces the oppression of women back to Aztec mythologies that emerged with the rise of institutions of patrilineal descent from the 9th to the 11th centuries AD. These mythologies show the growing importance of the values of war, valor, and arms which eventually would prevail in the male-dominated Aztec state. The oppression of the indigenous woman is traced back to the disruption of the balance between male and female forces that culminated in the constitution of this state and the destruction of a matrilineal society based on the equal distribution of power amongst clans and tribes. With the extinction of the female resisting force in Aztec culture, wailing became the Indian woman's only form of protest in male-dominated world.²⁷

Apart from drawing on the historical and social implications of mythology, Anzaldúa also recasts the colonial allegories of the Spanish and Mexican fathers, where Woman is depicted as the internal essence of a violated tradition, culture and place that Man needs to protect or possess. These sexualized allegories of the rape of the land, Norma Alarcón tells us, are the base of the dichotomy between virgins (docile women) and whores (treacherous women).²⁸ Anzaldúa claims that her Chicana identity “is grounded in the Indian woman's history of resistance,” a history of silent resistance that conceals the real-life stories of indigenous women (54). She uses the popular legend of La Llorona against the grain of its usual social function in Mexican/Chicano culture. In its most traditional interpretations, La Llorona is a negative image of motherhood; a supernatural figure eternally condemned to search for her lost children as a punishment for her illicit affair with a white man or a man of higher social standing. In Anzaldúa's text, however, the wailing woman is identified with those women who participated in the collective rituals of mourning and wailing at a time in which women had no other recourse for protesting against war (33). It is by recasting this popular legendary or mythical figures that Anzaldúa recovers the unrecorded history of women who lost their children in battle. She also pays homage to the women who, like Mexico's mythical mother Malinche, have been and are being betrayed by their own culture and forced to remain silent during the aggression of another culture.²⁹ These “unofficial” historical sources such as the legend of la Llorona and the story of Malinche are related to the history of all the women who have been made ashamed of their condition, enslaved and abused by their Aztec, Mexican, Spaniard, Anglo and Chicano male counterparts. The contemporary version of these figures are Mexican migrant female workers, the mojada, the woman at the maquiladora,³⁰ and any other Latin-American women who have suffered in intercultural warfare. Even if Anzaldúa's mythological figures such as Coatlicue occasionally evoke an idyllic past free of oppositions, dualities and hierarchies, and hence, of patriarchy, her mythology has healing function in the present and a liberating potential in a distant future. This counter-mythology disputes those master narratives that fail to comprise the local experiences of the marginal subjects Anzaldúa speaks about. In addition, they reclaim and rework the past to create a new cultural ethos and a new historical subject, becoming, in Juan Flores and George Yúdice's words, an “ethnicity-as-practice.”³¹ Myths are mainly used by the speaking subject as affirmative, resisting tools with the aim of raising consciousness rather than as proposals of a single, authentic female ethnic self. The autobiographical subject has a mediating function insofar as it tells about a history of resistance in which she is also immersed, not about the universal, univocal, transparent Chicana/o experience and history.

As Barthes has rightly argued, myth abolishes the complexity of human acts and lives,³² so part of Anzaldúa's writing complements her political mythology with a more realistic style that conveys disturbing scenes from these women's ordinary lives. The poem “En nombre de todas las madres que han perdido a sus hijos en la guerra,” (“In the name of all the women who have lost their children in war”) included in the section of Borderlands entitled “Women Alone,” is Anzaldúa's homage to this silent resistance. Seeking to recover the voices of real women, the poem is the grievous monologue of a Latin-American working class mother. She is sitting by a pool of blood after her youngest son has been killed by a bullet during a war in an unidentified Latin-American country. Unlike other bilingual poems where Anzaldúa provides a glossary for non-Spanish speakers, this poem is entirely written in Spanish, which emphasizes the Otherness of the speaker for an Anglo reading public. The poem begins with the woman's thoughts as she holds her dead child in her arms in a pool or blood and refuses to move. She then gives vivid, horrifying descriptions of the shootings that have caused the death of people and children like her own, the shelling that has broken the land, and, with an imprecation to the Mother of God, reflects her own distress over so much death and destruction:

Le cubro su cabecita,
mi criatura con sus piesecitos fríos.
Aquí lo tendré acurrucado en mis brazos
-hasta que me muera.
Parece años desde que estoy sentada aquí
en este charco de sangre.
Esto pasó esta mañana.
Cuando oí ese tiroteo
se me paró la sangre.
Con el niño dormido en mis brazos
corrí pa'fuera.
Trozos de tierra se levantaban,
volaban por todos los rumbos.
Pedazos de ramas caían como lluvia,
una lluvia mohosa.
Vi a mis vecinos caer heridos,
la sangre chiris pitiando en mis brazos,
cayendo en su carita.
Unos soldados pecho a tierra
disparaban sus rifles
y más ayá vi unos hombres armados con ametralladoras,
disparaban a la gente, a los jacales.
Cerca de mis pies la balacera rompía la tierra.
Detrás de mi sentí mi jacal echar fuego,
un calor fuerte me aventó adelante.
Tres golpes en el pecho sentí, uno tras otro,
vi los agujeros de su camisita.
(…)
Todo el mundo olía a sangre.
Madre dios, ¿quién habrá cometido este mal?

(160-163)

(I cover his little head,
my baby with little cold feet.
I will nurse him in my arms
until I die.
It seems years since I've been sitting here
In this pool of blood.
It just happened this morning.
When I heard the shooting
My blood stopped.
With the boy asleep in my arms
I ran outside.
Pieces of earth were flying,
Flying in all directions.
Pieces of branches falling like rain,
A moldy rain.
I saw my wounded neighbours fall,
The blood splashing my arms,
Falling on his little face.
Some soldiers lying on the ground
Were shooting their guns
And further ahead I saw some men with weapons,
Shooting at the people, at the kids.
Down by my feet the bullets were breaking the soil.
And behind me I felt my son go on fire,
A strong heat pushed me forward.
I felt three blows on my chest, one after the other
I saw the holes on his little shirt.
(…)
Everything smelled of blood.
Mother of God, who will have done this evil?)

This Third World pietà gives us an explicit description of the child's mutilated body, thus conveying a dramatic depiction of the effects of war:

Con un pedazo de mi falda,
le limpio su carita
salpicada de sangre.
Ay, Madre dios, un ojito le cuelga
y el otro no parpadea.
Ay mijito, no pude atajarte la muerte.
Un duelo me sube como una fiebre.
¿Quién curará a mi hijo?
Mojo su cuerpecito.
Entre su pavico meto su intestino.
Aplico a sus ojos agua fría.
Pongo su ojito izquierdo en su cuenca,
se le sale y se le resbala por su mejilla.
Limpio la sangre en sus párpados.
Soplo sobre su cabecita,
soplo sobre sus cuevas.
Nueve veces soplo.
Sane, mi hijo, sane.
(With a piece of my skirt,
I clean his little face
Splashed with blood,
Ah, Mother of God, one of his eyes is hanging
The other one cannot blink.
Ah, my son, I could not prevent your death.
Pain grows like fever.
Who will heal my son?
I wet his little body.
I put his intestine back in place.
I wash his eyes with cold water.
I put back his left eye in his socket,
And it comes out and slides down his cheeks.
I clean the blood in his eyelids.
I blow over his little head,
I blow over his sockets.
I blow nine times.
There, my son, there.)

The low-class indigenous woman, usually misconceived through stereotypes as ignorant, superstitious, submissive, silent and long-suffering is replaced by a mad, desperate woman whose prayers to a fundamental maternal figure, the Virgin Mary, combine with her rage and desire to kill all those men who make war. Although she remains powerless and paralyzed by pain, she now questions her very role as a woman and as a mother:

Qué han hecho con nuestra tierra?
¿Pa' qué hacemos niños?
¿Pa' qué les damos vida?
¿Para qué sean masacracos?
¿Para qué los güeros
se burlen de la gente?
En sus ojos nosotros los indios
somos peores que los animales.
(What have they done to our land?
Why do we breed children?
Why do we give them life?
So that they be massacred?
So that Whites
laugh at our people?
In their eyes, we Indians
are worse than animals.)

The woman's desperate, failed attempts to repeat the ritual of maternity highlight the contradictions between patriarchal institutionalized motherhood in many Latin-American countries (marianismo),³³ and the actual meaninglessness of this ritual in the context of the attacks from “remote places” on the land and civilian population (163). The poem culminates in the woman's prayer to the Virgin in the name of all the women who have lost their children in a war, a prayer for her own death, and for the safety of the soul of her child who died too young to be a good Christian.

Anzaldúa does not only deal with women's agony, for Chicano/Mexican men have also suffered self-effacement and humiliation during social exploitation, war, and occupation, which has led them to make women the scapegoats of their fears of emasculation. An alternative source of self-validation and collaboration between men and women, Anzaldúa writes, should be found in the rewriting of history and culture—not in the humiliation of women. Writing against silence is however not an easy task, especially for women. As she says in a passage describing the writing process, her words are a struggle against a silence produced by violence, a silence which in turn has brought about her own ignorance of the stories of other women of previous generations. In the poem “To Live in the Borderlands Means You,” the mestiza affirms that the india in her, betrayed 500 years ago, is no longer speaking to her (145). While the French feminist ideologue Hélène Cixous traces the source of her language to her union with her mother and her “good mother's milk,”³⁴ the mestiza finds in the shared silence and oppression of indigenous peoples the image for her writing practice. As in Cervantes' poem, blood becomes Anzaldúa's metaphor for describing the struggle to find a voice and resist the erasure of a violent culture and history: “Escribo con la tinta de mi sangre [I write with the ink of my blood]. I write in red. (…) 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).

Like any other text by a woman of color in which indigenous mythologies, stories and popular culture are present, Borderlands runs the risk of becoming an exotic commodity in a market ruled by what Robert Carr calls the “shock of the new.”³⁵ However, the resisting strategies of this cultural autobiography cannot be ignored. Anzaldúa's autobiographical persona does not emerge as the external intelligence of an essentialised ethnic self. The autobiographical “I” speaks against a variety of ethnic, political, feminist, national élites by refusing the steps followed by traditional, linear, fictional and/or non-fictional autobiographical narratives. Both of these genres consolidate all their parts in a monologic “I” and find a source of authority in the suppression of the sources of their enunciation.³⁶ As in the resisting autobiographies that Caren Kaplan calls “outlaw genres,” Anzaldúa's Borderlands blends family history, testimony, personal accounts, lyrical prose, poetry, popular songs and sayings, mythology, fantasy and political discourse. This collective, cultural autobiography makes a constant reference to the sources of the speaker's discourse (her ambiguous position as a woman born and raised in the Texas border, a lesbian, a Chicana with divided loyalties towards Mexican culture, an American citizen that condemns the militarization and industrialization of the border). The text therefore avoids centralizing the fragmented self and community in a coherent “I” or a coherent narrative. Anzaldúa's purpose is twofold. She lets us know how her predicament and that of other Chicanos/as has been affected by the manipulation of representation and history. She also participates in the creation of una cultura mestiza (a mestiza culture) out of the pain and struggle of living in the borderlands of various codes. It is in this borderland psychic space where her new feminist, Chicana, working class vision is forged. The borderlands are therefore both a physical and a psychological territory where several emotions, cultures, discourses, economies and subjects clash and become intertwined. The Mexican-American border regions are the dwelling of those who suffer from the total or partial estrangement, rejection and marginalisation from the American and the Mexican nations, from their own families, from their own culture. This multi-faceted Otherness, the simultaneous association to and dissociation from a variety of places and collectivities, which is indeed painful, is turned into something positive by the Chicana writer.

It is the source of the borderland consciousness that, as the mestiza puts it, “take[s] inventory,” “[d]espojando, desgranando, quitando paja” (removing, separating, throwing out chaff), and differentiates between “lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo impuesto” (between inherited, acquired, imposed values), filtering the lies, “(l)uego bota lo que no vale” (tosses out what is not useful). Thus, Anzaldúa's mestiza gets rid of oppressive traditions but includes men, white people, homosexuals, and the variety of ethnic groups that make up US society in the creation of a new culture: “The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains” (82). The mestiza identifies with the forgotten mythical aspects of indigenous female figures. Part of her inner and outer struggle is the appropriation of and the coming to terms with these figures as a woman indebted to the indigenist, working class politics of the Chicano movement and to the feminist politics of women of color. She therefore salvages and revises popular legends and history. Hence, the borderlands, which are initially a symbol for otherness are turned into a new location for the speaking subject whose language is created by means of the strategic recovery of histories and cultures and the reinvention of myths. In speaking from the psychic and physical space of the borderlands, the Other mediates and negotiates between codes. In Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera the blood spilt in geographic and cultural borderlands by indigenous peoples, farmers, mojadas, cholos, migrant field or maquiladora workers, lesbians, American-Indians, Blacks, Whites or Asian is a fertile blood. This blood transforms into a writing that transmits communal knowledge, positive images of self and community, and a desire for a social and intellectual ethos free of confining racial, social, gender and national boundaries.

Notes

1. For some Chicana writers like Cervantes and Anzaldúa, the use of code switching from Spanish to English and vice versa is a way of expressing a bicultural identity. I have found it pertinent to translate the sections in Spanish in order to make them understandable to non-Spanish speaking readers. These sections will appear in brackets next to the original Spanish words.

2. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981) 42.

3. “Epistemic violence” the term the post-colonial critic Gayatri Spivak uses to refer to the unquestioned premises by which the absolute Other has always been a “pure” signifier and a refraction of the Western imperialist self. According to Spivak, the cultural self-representation of the colonizer is always at the expense of the figure of the “native” who cannot speak and is portrayed as an unchanging essence. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education Ltd, 1988) 271-313.

4. Caren Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects,” De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) 115-138.

5. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (S. Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987) 3. Further references to this edition will be given after quotations in the text.

6. Deleuze and Guattari use the term “deterritorialization” to refer to the constant movement and displacement of peoples and cultures in the contemporary world. “Deterrítorialization” also alludes to affective, social and economic losses. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1972).

7. Alurista, “Cultural Nationalism and Chicano Literature,” Missions in Conflict: Essays on US-Mexican Relations and Chicano Culture, eds. Renate von Bardeleben, Dietrich Briesemeister, and Juan Bruce-Novoa (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1986) 41-52.

8. For more detailed accounts of the cultural nationalism of the Chicano Movement and its political failures, see Carlos Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (New York: Verso, 1989), and Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

9. Norma Alarcón, “Anzaldúa's Frontera: Inscribing Gynetics,” Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity, eds. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg (Durham, NC, and London: Duke U P, 1996) 41-53.

10. bell hooks, Yearning. Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990) 152.

11. The cholo is the contemporary version of the pachuco, the Mexican-American young man who is part of a gang. The mojada or wetback is an undocumented person who crosses the Río Grande.

12. Unpaged preface to Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera.

13. Kaplan 132.

14. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia U P, 1982) 2.

15. George Yúdice, “Testimonio y Concientización,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 36.2 (1992): 207-227.

16. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 243.

17. Yúdice 218.

18. Biddy Martin, “Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference(s),” Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, eds. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) 77-103.

19. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 275.

20. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 110.

21. Barthes 119.

22. In her work La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), Sandra Messinger Cypess traces the development of this figure from the work of the chroniclers and inventors of legends after the conquest (where she appears as the Great Mother of a new Mexican mestizo race) to the literature and essays of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries during the Mexican independence and post-independence movements (where she is portrayed as the traitor to her people, a victim, or as is the case in the literature of Mexican and Chicana writers, an example of assertive womanhood).

23. Barthes 135.

24. Rachel Blau Duplessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985) 107.

25. Duplessis 122.

26. Amy Kaminsky, “Gender, Race, Raza,” Feminist Studies 20.1 (1994): 7-31.

27. One of Anzaldúa's sources is the anthropological essay by June Nash “The Aztecs and the Ideology of Male Dominance” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4.2 (1978): 349-362.

28. Norma Alarcón, “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism,” Cultural Critique 13 (1989): 57-87.

29. La Llorona and La Malinche are recurrent figures in the literature by Chicanas. These figures result from the opposition between the White Anglo/Spanish father and the Mestiza/Indian/Mexican mother as a sign of feminist-indigenist self-affirmation. Many essays have been published with regard to the resisting potential of the myth and the legend for Mexican and Chicana feminists. Two of the most compelling ones are Norma Alarcón, “Traddutora, Traditora” and José E. Limón, “La Llorona, The Third Legend of Greater Mexico: Cultural Symbols, Women and the Political Unconscious,” Renato Rosaldo Series Monograph, ed. Ignacio M. García, vol. 2 (1984-85) (Mexican American Studies & Research Center, University of Arizona, 1986) 59-93.

30. The maquiladoras are the foreign-owned assembly plants that line all the US-Mexico border. They resulted from the Border Industrialization Program (BIP), initiated by the government of Mexico in 1966. Intended to reduce the number of illegal immigrants into the US, this industrialization program led to the proliferation of these industries. However, immigration increased.

31. Juan Flores and George Yúdice, “Living Borders/Buscando América: Languages of Latino Self-Formation,” Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity, ed. Juan Flores (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992) 218-219.

32. Barthes 143.

33. For a further discussion on how the nationalist-Catholic gender ideology of marianismo has become a political as well as a resistance tool in Latin-American totalitarian regimes see Sarah A. Radcliffe, “Women's Place/El lugar de las mujeres,” Place and the Politics of Identity, eds. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (New York & London: Routledge, 1993) 102-116.

34. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price-Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991) 339.

35. Robert Carr, “Representando el testimonio: notas sobre el cruce divisorio primer mundo/tercer mundo,” Revista de crítica literaria norteamericana xviii.36 (1992): 73-94.

36. Yúdice 224.