Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942 – May 15, 2004) was an American philosopher and scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism. Her other notable publications include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), co-edited with Cherríe Moraga.
Early life and education Anzaldúa was born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas on September 26, 1942, the eldest of four children born to Urbano and Amalia ( García) Anzaldúa. Her great-grandfather, Urbano Sr., once a precinct judge in Hidalgo County, was the first owner of the Jesús María Ranch on which she was born. Her mother grew up on an adjoining ranch, Los Vergeles ("the gardens"), which was owned by her family, and she met and married Urbano Anzaldúa when both were very young. Anzaldúa was a descendant of Spanish settlers who came to the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries. The surname Anzaldúa is of Basque origin. Her paternal grandmother was of Spanish and German ancestry, descending from some of the earliest settlers of the South Texas range country. She has described her father's family as being "very poor aristocracy, but aristocracy anyway" and her mother as "very india, working class, with maybe some black blood which is always looked down on in the valley where I come from."
Anzaldúa wrote that her family gradually lost their wealth and status over the years, eventually being reduced to poverty and being forced into migrant labor, something her family resented because "[t]o work in the fields is the lowest job, and to be a migrant worker is even lower." Her father was a tenant farmer and sharecropper who kept 60% of what he earned, while 40% went to a white-owned corporation called Rio Farms, Inc. Anzaldúa claimed that her family lost their land due to a combination of both "taxes and dirty manipulation" from white people who were buying up land in South Texas through "trickery" and from the behavior of her "very irresponsible grandfather", who lost "a lot of land and money through carelessness". Anzaldúa was left with an inheritance of "a little piece" of 12 acres, which she deeded over to her mother Amalia. Her maternal grandmother Ramona Dávila had amassed land grants from the time Texas was part of Mexico, but the land was lost due to "carelessness, through white peoples' greed, and my grandmother not knowing English".
Anzaldúa wrote that she did not call herself an "india", but still claimed Indigenous ancestry. In "Speaking across the Divide", from The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Reader, she states that her white/mestiza grandmother described her as "pura indita" due to dark spots on her buttocks. Later, Anzaldúa wrote that she "recognized myself in the faces of the braceros that worked for my father. Los braceros were mostly indios from central Mexico who came to work the fields in south Texas. I recognized the Indian aspect of mexicanos by the stories my grandmothers told and by the foods we ate." Despite her family not identifying as Mexican, Anzaldúa believed that "we were still Mexican and that all Mexicans are part Indian." Although Anzaldúa has been criticized by Indigenous scholars for allegedly appropriating Indigenous identity, Anzaldúa claimed that her Indigenous critics had "misread or ... not read enough of my work." Despite claiming to be "three quarters Indian", she also wrote that she was afraid she was "violating Indian cultural boundaries" and afraid that her theories could "unwittingly contribute to the misappropriation of Native cultures" and of "people who live in real Indian bodies." She wrote that while worried that "mestizaje and a new tribalism" could "detribalize" Indigenous peoples, she believed the dialogue was imperative "no matter how risky." Writing about the "Color of Violence" conference organized by Andrea Smith in Santa Cruz, Anzaldúa accused Native American women of engaging in "a lot of finger pointing" because they had argued that non-Indigenous Chicanas' use of Indigenous identity is a "continuation of the abuse of native spirituality and the Internet appropriation of Indian symbols, rituals, vision quests, and spiritual healing practices like shamanism."
When she was 11 years old, Anzaldúa's family relocated to Hargill, Texas. She graduated as valedictorian of Edinburg High School in 1962.
She managed to pursue a university education, despite the racism, sexism and other forms of oppression she experienced as a seventh-generation Tejana and Chicana. In 1968, she received a B.A. degree in English, Art, and Secondary Education from University of Texas–Pan American, and an M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin. While in Austin, she joined politically active cultural poets and radical dramatists such as Ricardo Sanchez and Hedwig Gorski.
Career and major works
After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in English from the Pan American University (now University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), Anzaldúa worked as a preschool and special education teacher. In 1977, she moved to California, where she supported herself through her writing, lectures, and occasional teaching stints about feminism, Chicano studies, and creative writing at San Francisco State University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Florida Atlantic University, and other universities.
She is perhaps best known for co-editing This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) with Cherríe Moraga, editing Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (1990), and co-editing This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002). Anzaldúa also wrote the semi-autobiographical Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). At the time of her death, she was close to completing the book manuscript, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, which she also planned to submit as her dissertation. It has now been published posthumously by Duke University Press (2015). Her children's books include Prietita Has a Friend (1991), Friends from the Other Side – Amigos del Otro Lado (1993), and Prietita y La Llorona (1996). She also authored many fictional and poetic works.
She made contributions to fields of feminism, cultural theory/Chicana, and queer theory. Her essays are considered foundational texts in the burgeoning field of Latinx philosophy.
Anzaldúa wrote a speech called "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers", focusing on the shift towards an equal and just gender representation in literature but away from racial and cultural issues because of the rise of female writers and theorists. She also stressed in her essay the power of writing to create a world that would compensate for what the real world does not offer.Keating (ed.), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (2009), pp. 26–36.
This Bridge Called My Back
Anzaldúa's essay "La Prieta" deals with her manifestation of thoughts and horrors that have constituted her life in Texas. Anzaldúa identifies herself as an entity without a figurative home and/or peoples to completely relate to. To supplement this deficiency, Anzaldúa created her own sanctuary, Mundo Zurdo, whereby her personality transcends the norm-based lines of relating to a certain group. Instead, in her Mundo Zurdo, she is like a "Shiva, a many-armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man's world, the women's, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds".(205) The passage describes the identity battles which the author had to engage in throughout her life. Since early childhood, Anzaldúa has had to deal with the challenge of being a woman of color. From the beginnings she was exposed to her own people, to her own family's racism and "fear of women and sexuality".(198) Her family's internalized racism immediately cast her as the "other" because of their bias that being white and fair-skinned means prestige and royalty, when color subjects one to being almost the scum of society (just as her mother had complained about her prieta dating a mojado from Peru). The household she grew up in was one in which the male figure was the authoritarian head, while the female, the mother, was stuck in all the biases of this paradigm. Although this is the difficult position in which white, patriarchal society has cast women of color, gays and lesbians, she does not make them out to be the archenemy, because she believes that "casting stones is not the solution"(207) and that racism and sexism do not come from only whites but also people of color. Throughout her life, the inner racism and sexism from her childhood would haunt her, as she often was asked to choose her loyalties, whether it be to women, to people of color, or to gays/lesbians. Her analogy to Shiva is well-fitted, as she decides to go against these conventions and enter her own world: Mundo Zurdo, which allows the self to go deeper, to transcend the lines of convention and, at the same time, to recreate the self and the society. This is for Anzaldúa a form of religion, one that allows the self to deal with the injustices that society throws at it and to come out a better person, a more reasonable person.
An entry in the book, titled "Speaking In Tongues: A Letter To Third World Women Writers", spotlights the dangers Anzaldúa considers women writers of color deal with, dangers that are rooted in a lack of privileges. She talks about the transformation of writing styles and how we are taught not to air our truths. Folks are outcast as a result of speaking and writing with their native tongues. Anzaldúa wants more women writers of color to be visible and be well represented in text. Her essay compels us to write with compassion and with love. For writing is a form of gaining power by speaking our truths, and it is seen as a way to decolonize, to resist, and to unite women of color collectively within the feminist movement.
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
She is highly known for this autotheoretical book, which discusses her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border. It was selected as one of the 38 best books of 1987 by Library Journal. Borderlands examines the condition of women in Chicano and Latino culture. Anzaldúa discusses several critical issues related to Chicana experiences: heteronormativity, colonialism, and male dominance. She gives a very personal account of the oppression of Chicana lesbians and talks about the gendered expectations of behavior that normalizes women's deference to male authority in her community. She develops the idea of the "new mestiza" as a "new higher consciousness" that will break down barriers and fight against the male/female dualistic norms of gender. The first half of the book is about isolation and loneliness in the borderlands between cultures. The latter half of the book is poetry. In the book, Anzaldúa uses two variations of English and six variations of Spanish. By doing this, she deliberately makes it difficult for non-bilinguals to read. Language was one of the barriers Anzaldúa dealt with as a child, and she wanted readers to understand how frustrating things are when there are language barriers. The book was written as an outlet for her anger and encourages one to be proud of one's heritage and culture.