Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera challenges how we think about identity and presents borders as psychological, social and cultural terrains that we both inhabit, and that inhabit us. Her strong sense of history and the telling of her own narrative give Chicanos a human identity independent from the hegemonic white American narrative that posits them as nonhuman and other. She works to give a face to Chicanos and a choice. In her words, she wants to give Chicanas the ability, “To choose whether they want to be completely assimilated, whether they want to be border people, or whether they want to be isolationists” (234). Her work separates the oppression of Chicana women from the narrative of the oppression of all women. She opens a

space for Chicana women to not leave their culture at home as they have been forced to in the past.
Her multimodal text plays out the intersections between division and unity both in form and in content.

The stylistic and narrative border crossings that Borderlands/La Frontera enacts allows it to help us understand how lives can be shaped and formed by multiple cultures but never fully belong to any of them. Rather than detracting from the work, this inability to fully belong is a dynamic state that allows for free agency through the embodying ambiguity of the borderlands. Each of the genres she chooses enriches the others rather than having the opposite effect. Thus Anzaldua can reach a wider audience by bridging genres and by ultimately bridging cultures. In her own words, “If I had made Borderlands too inaccessible to you by putting in too many Chicano terms, too many Spanish words, or if I had been more fragmented in the text than I am right now, you would have been very frustrated” (232). The accessibility of the writing remains of intense importance in the understanding of her themes. She pushes the rules of genre

just enough to have a deeper understanding of her struggles. The code-switching that takes place within the novel as well as her switching of genres speaks to the larger struggle that she has experienced. “It is the same kind of struggle mestizas have living at the borders, living in the borderlands. How much do they assimilate to the white culture and how much do we resist and risk becoming isolated in the culture and ghettoized? This issue applies to everything” (233). Moreover, she writes to show the “cracks” in reality (237); to show that there are threads that lie behind the reality we are presented with as being the norm (237). For Anzaldua the borderlands are meant to be a place lacking comfort. She says, “You haven’t got into the new identity yet and haven’t left the old identity behind either—you are in a kind of transition” (237).
Her interweaving of the geographical and state imposed borders with the psychological, racial, social, cultural borders works to present them as being as much a part of the landscape as the geographical borders. Thus these borders become incredibly uncomfortable to traverse just as geographical landscape. Moreover, each of these borders transcends temporal and actual physical constraints, making them difficult to pin down and ultimately to cross. She says, “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition” (25). Geographical and state borders have wavered throughout centuries. The shoreline, where the ocean meets the continent, is a fluid ever-changing border that changes by the hour. The physical border between Mexico and the USA is similarly fluid, for although it is a defined meeting of nation states it has changed innumerable times over the preceding centuries. The Rio Grande is a more permanent scar in the landscape, yet even this has emerged and changed over millennia. Anzaldúa gives us these physical borders and uses them as analogies of the borders which exist within herself and by extension within her race. Some borders meander while some take thousands of years to change.
In the preface to the first edition Anzaldua describes the physical borderland as “the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border” while the psychological borderlands include, “the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands” that “are not particular to the Southwest” (19-20). She goes on to say that the Borderlands “are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (20). The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo created the Borderlands as the US siphoned off half of Mexico into the United States, thus dividing families and subsequently forced Chicanos to work within the hegemonic white culture. The thousands of years’ worth of history and precedence of the presence of the people living in what is now Texas got ignored. Through the use of capital, the buying of a section of land separated a people from their culture by forcing it into the dominate white Anglo culture of the US thereby rendering them invisible. The Borderlands then contained those in the middle of two cultures, rejected by both.
The format itself of the book enacts borders on a story.

It places it in time and physicality. The mode of the novel is restrictive therefore her use of variation in storytelling allows for the ability to extract elements from the borders. She says, “This almost finished product seems an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work with several leitmotifs and with a central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance” (88). The multi-genre use of prose, poetry, myth, and the continually transitions from Spanish to English, aka code-switching, speaks to the complicated identity of the Chicano people. While the switching of languages demonstrates a cultural split, it asks the reader to confront the same ambiguity that she has been confronting for her entire life. The mixing of Spanish and English, as well as poetry and prose so the reader is forever confronted with genres and narratives which smack up against each other. This creates a sense of intense uncertainty. She writes this way because she wants us to share her experience as an individual living between cultures, and the sense of 'otherness' is one which emerges from the ambiguities that existence

creates.
By using Spanish in her novel the author places the non-Spanish-speaking reader in a position of uncertainty. By raising these questions from the reader she is illustrating her own sense of confusion and entrapment. The difference between the reader and herself is that she lives this life everyday while the reader can choose to step away from the confusion. Consequently, Anzaldua tells the powerful story of her journey through the borderlands and coming to terms with her identity.