Borderlands La Frontera By Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa is a Mexican-American female known as a writer, homosexual feminist, activist, and philosopher since early 1980s. She wrote “Borderlands La Frontera”, a semi-autobiographical text in 1987. Her book is very fascinating because of asserted literature of different genres on the tri-cultural woman who were always oppressed and suffered from the cultural norms that were dominated by men, which places sociocultural limitations on women. She argues how she was different from the other women from her own childhood. In contrary, she provided the factual assessment of how should women need to act to improve their sociocultural status. Her tone was very calm and profound throughout the book. In the meantime, “Woman Hollering

Creek” a book of short stories published in 1991 by a Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros, which astonishingly deals with a similar role of a Mexican woman who moved to America by marriage. Cisneros's “Woman Hollering Creek” is believed to be an excellent example of a conflict within the family, which the wife must endure physical and psychological abuses from her husband in Mexican cultural background. This short story begins with vision of Cleofilas’ father who wishes his only daughter to marry and be happy for the rest of her life. Although she is anxious to begin what she thinks will be a happy, successful life, the story was ending with Cleofilas leaving her husband. Both texts well explain traditional gender roles in Mexican culture in detail which can often be distinguished that men do as they pleased. Conversely, women on the other hand are ideally placed in the home to take care of the children, and the house chores. Cisneros’ tone in her book had both faces of happiness and hopes at the beginning but saddened tone at the end of story. Both authors comprise women’s status of psychological resistance to oppression and self-esteem in their sociocultural background. The possibility of resistance is revealed by perceiving the self in the process of being oppressed as another face of the self in the process of resisting oppression to their culture and tradition. Both texts use a combination of allusions as well as ethos, logos, and pathos to present and describe hardship of women’s life in Mexican-American cultural background in the America.
Anzaldúa and Cisneros used a combination of ethos, pathos, and logos to appeal and claim about the abuse and risk women are placed in everyday in their texts.

“Culture is made by those in power-men. Males make the rules and Laws; women transmit them. How many time have I heard mothers and mother-in-law tell their sons to beat their wives for not obeying them…” (Anzaldúa), “When the moment came, and he slapped her once, and then again and again.” (Cisneros) There is a long history and undeniable cultural facts that men drove women deities away and entered men dominated deity culture by manipulating women’s status, which there is always limited in the most cultures. “The male-dominated Azteca-Mexica culture drove the powerful women deities underground by giving them monstrous attributes and by substituting male deities in their place, thus splitting the women Self and the women deities.” (Anzaldúa) Because of keeping women in inflexibly defined role in the culture, the women always have limited role in the family and the society. The women must be muted, prohibited, caged, bound into servitude with the marriage. Almost every woman didn’t have much of options to choose and must sacrifice their own lives for their husband and children in the name of rearing

family.
Both authors claimed that there were both physical and psychological cultural disconnect from the mainstream when they were living in America. They utilized allusions to express their frustrations of their own and American cultures. “Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems.” (Anzaldúa) “what she loved most now that she lived in U.S., without a television set, without the telenovelas.” “There is no place to go. Unless one counts the neighbor ladies.” (Cisneros) I, too understand how both Anzaldúa and “Cleofilas” in Cisneros's text felt disconnect from their own culture and family or being sandwiched by two different cultures those you cannot be perfect either which led to an identity crisis. Life as a child of immigrants coming from a culture that is not the mainstream can be very confusing, and lonely. You may never feel as though you have a sense of belonging anywhere. We always perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like those who are having or living in more than one culture, which happened be many minorities in the U.S.A. We have learned there is such calls a melting pod which assimilate many cultural outsiders integrated slowly to the mainstream American culture, but it is seemingly very difficult and awfully take a long period of time.
The authors claimed that women didn’t have much of options to choose from what they like to be when they are grown up. In Anzaldúa’s text, they only had three distinctive options for their own life. “For a woman of my culture there used to be only three direction she could turn: to the Church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother.” (Anzaldúa) Anzaldúa and Cisneros enlightened readers by using mix of pathos and logos to claim that the culture place much strict rules and demands on the women than men in their own culture. “In the town where she grew up, there isn’t very much to do except accompany the aunts and godmothers…” (Cisneros) The culture and Church assert women to be obedient to male. keeping women in inflexibly defined role in the culture, the women always have limited role in the family and the society. Anzaldúa claims that women were faceless and voiceless for 300 years. The women were invisible and not heard. The odd always was heavily against to women.
The “Borderlands La Frontera” is a semi-autobiographical work of Anzaldúa which has a combination of different genres that includes prose and poems in bilingual in first-person perspective detailing the invisible "borders" that exist between Latinas and non-Latinas, men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, and numerous other opposing groups. She applied different genres in her writing, which makes her book very astounding. We all need to know that cultural identity is very important to a person especially who came from different cultural background than the American mainstream culture. By using both English and Spanish in her writing, she demonstrated that Chicana literature cannot be expressed in only one language. In addition, Cisneros’s book was influenced from her own cultural heritage and norms integrated into her bilingual writing. The story was narrated mostly in third-person perspective, it is the story of a contemporary Mexican girl, “Cleofilas” who married Mexican American man but whose dominant culture was more toward to Mexican Culture. She moved with her husband Juan to the "other side," a little Texas town named Seguin from Mexico. Cisneros described this marriage as the traditional arrangement of a daughter being given by her father. She focused the influence of community mores and popular Mexican culture.
The “Borderlands” by Anzaldúa and the other “Women Hollering Creek” by Cisneros were very descriptive about a woman who is a victim of her own culture.

A culture where a female was inferior to the superior males and limits their choices of whatever they want to be in their life. Cisneros suggests that for young immigrant woman without education or perspective, immigration to "the other side" can be just as restrictive as life in Mexico. This belief pushed Mexican American women to the lower depths of society with no one to leaning against to but themselves. Men are always powerful while women are often weak and helpless. Both texts well explained traditional gender roles in Mexican culture in detail which can often be distinguished that men do as they pleased. Conversely, women on the other hand are ideally placed in the home to take care of the children, and the house chores. Anzaldúa explained her early and young adult facing difficulties and challenges from sociocultural differences in the American mainstream culture and her own men dominant Mexican traditions in the first-person point of view. Cisneros's “Woman Hollering Creek” is believed to be an excellent example of a conflict within the family, which the wife must endure physical and psychological abuses from her husband in Mexican cultural background in the U.S.A. Mexican Americans are the most numerous of all immigrant groups and are also one of our oldest ethnic groups, many having come here at least as long ago

as people with Anglo roots. There are the borderlands between countries that people can physically live inside, and there are the borderlands that can ideologically reside us. Anzaldua explained both. She grew up in the region of Texas close to the Mexican border, and she grew up a strong, independently minded lesbian in the solid heteronormative Mexican culture. Both authors did their best job by drawing attractive connections between physical and emotional borderlands, demonstrating the pain of trying to be inclusive in cultures and ideologies that do not always mix well.