Borderlands/La Frontera
1987
- mexican american women
- civilization
- race relations
- folklore
- mexican americans
- poetry
- essays
- literary collections
- bilingual poetry
- bilingual essays
The story
"Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume challenge how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This 20th anniversary edition features a new introduction comprised of commentaries from writers, teachers, and activists on the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa's visionary work."--Jacket. via WorldCat.org
What it’s like
Hybrid, restless prose that shifts without warning between essay and poem, English and Spanish, the scholarly and the confessional, so a page can open in dense argument and close in a line of verse that sounds like it was spoken aloud. Sentences are often short and incantatory, with Spanish words and Nahuatl-tinged phrases left untranslated, and the typography breaks into fragments and stacked lines that give the sense of a notebook kept in motion. The sensory world is the Texas-Mexico borderland: heat off the desert, the smell of the fields, the hum of the highway, the pull of a border town at night. Its vibe is defiant, tender and bruised, a mix of anger and tenderness that reads best in slow, rereadable bursts. It suits a quiet evening with a notebook nearby, or a stretch when you want to be unsettled and moved in equal measure. Intensity is moderate: frank talk of racism, sexual violence, and the body's trauma appears in several essays, handled directly rather than graphically. The arcs are inward ones, a voice reckoning with its divided self and claiming a place between languages, cultures and identities. Written for readers who want language that refuses to sit still, and for anyone curious about identity, mestiza consciousness, queer and feminist thought, or poetry that doubles as argument.
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