Gloria Anzaldúa's "Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza"

(upbeat music) Hey everyone, today I'm gonna discuss and excuse my pronunciation, but I'm gonna try. Gloria and Nalua's. Gloria and Nalua's Borderlands La Franchera, where we know it, English speakers say it, Gloria and Zelda was. I would love someone to correct me on that pronunciation because it's difficult for my Anglo-As. But before jumping into it, if you wanna follow me, you can do that at Instagram. If you felt like seeing pictures of my cats, if you wanna help me out, you can do that. I obviously liking, sharing, subscribing. If you wanna help monetarily, you know to do that with the links as well. Obviously no pressure. If you're listening to this in podcast form, you can find the YouTube version on YouTube, where I also do videos sometimes, and then vice versa. I don't have any ads in podcast form because you can't skip those, or you can't get an ad block for those, where I just assume most people have ad block. And yeah, so I don't always stand any more of your time discussing that. Yeah, let's jump into it. Now I wanna say as a preface that obviously, I'm coming out this text with very little, if not any knowledge about Chicana, or Latina, culture, or identity. And so I really wanna put that up front that I'm coming at this with the most limited possible understanding. With that being said, I spent a great deal of time trying to grasp with, you know, not only the Spanish that's embedded within the text here, but the references to, you know, indigenous myth, to Mexican beliefs that I otherwise wouldn't know. So while I'm going to try and present the most holistic full presentation of this as I can, you cannot fully grasp what's going on here without reading it yourself. So you must do that because there's poetry baked into this, including, you know, beautiful poetry in Spanish that even if you don't know the language, you can read it and you can still, assuming you know English, you can still, you know, feel the beauty of the kind of rhythmic patterns and the rhymes that really, for me, stand out a lot. So obviously this starts with like any other book with chapter one, The Homeland, Atslán, which refers to the Southwest United States. So the Aztecas de Notree are the largest single tribe of indigenous people in the Americas, South-West, in the American Southwest, that is the Aslan. Sorry for my stumbling here, but I'm good, I'm good, I'm on track now. So these people once occupied a land that is now recognized as two lands, that is you have the Mexico and the United States. But the people who are the descendants of said, of said indigenous people, you know, exist on both. They exist both in Northern Mexico, down into Southern Mexico, into the Southern United States. So they occupy both of these territories and they occupy the borderlands between the two, between the two territories. And the US and Mexico for any of us stands in for a meeting place of the first and third world, that is with a very clear dividing line, especially in how it has been propagated by Trump, to have a very stark divide between the imagined third world and the imagined first world. But this effort is almost for not. In fact, it produced something of the opposite that it was meant to. So we had this border constructed or this idea of a border. And as we probably know, a border is meant to divide. It is meant to dichotomize. It is meant to create a distinction, a very clear one at that. But it actually had the opposite effect. And it actually constituted a third space. That is a space that is indeterminate, a space that does not abide by the binary distinction that a border presupposes. The border culture for Agnialua's, I really hope I'm pronouncing that right. And the border culture for Agnialua is in a constant state of transition. It is the meeting place of a plethora of different cultures. It is essentially for her occupied by the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half-dead, which who are all viewed as per the normative operational viewing institutions, they're regarded as abnormal. But this abnormality is kind of fragile. That is, in a lot of cases, this abnormality can be corrected if people simply identified with either the Mexican recognized national identity or the American one, most often the American one, because that affords certain privileges. Obviously, we can think of things like the model minority here or tokenism or anything like that. And with it comes obviously certain privileges, but also quite a few negative side effects that we'll get into a little bit as we go on here. Now, of course, the kind of distinction we see drawn between the United States and Mexico is extremely problematic considering the fact that for many millennia, indigenous people occupied that land without such a distinction. Now, this isn't to say that there weren't indigenous nations that had some recognition about land, but in no way was it nearly as neatly demarcated as the mapped borders we see it. So then she gets into the kind of history of colonization here, describing the way that following Spanish invasion of the Americas, what we saw was the decimation of the indigenous people around that area, that is Southern United States, North Mexico Central America. We saw that population reduced from 25 million to about 1.5 million in just 50 years, which is a pretty significant decrease in the population. And of course, disease plays a significant role there, which people weren't necessarily aware of, I assume, even though they, while they may not have had knowledge about viruses, they were very aware of what was happening and didn't want to reduce its effects. But there is a bit of a lingering mystery here, and that is why 1.5 million people, why did anyone survive? Well, Ania Lua suggests that Ania Lua, Ania Lua, God, suggests that these are the people that mingled. These are the people that, to some extent, became hybrids of indigenous culture and Spanish culture. Taking in some degree of immunity with that. And they were the first mestizos, so the people that are kind of mix of both, they are a blend, or a mestiza, in the case of women. So these were, and their offspring would then come to be the Chicanos, Chicanos, Mexican-Americans, people that are these hybrids of two different, two or more different cultures. Now, mingling was obviously occurring, but this mingling was tempered by the establishment of very clear splits between, you know, colonizing Europeans and indigenous people. And obviously what came with that is a recognition of superiority on the part of Europeans, at least educationally, or at least that belief and religiously, that they then used to further subjugate the indigenous population. So it wasn't as though mingling was just occurring to no end. There were these very clear distinctions still in play. And these distinctions came to be galvanized in the form of the United States, which was diametrically opposed to Spain, which was, you know, the new distinction between not only European people and indigenous people, but the British colonizers and the Spanish ones. So what was seen then was a kind of mingling in what was then Mexico. And then there was a kind of homogenization with slaves, of course, in the colonies in the United States. And of course, the Americans weren't satisfied with this, and they took over, for anyone who knows basic American history, they then took over Texas, Colorado, California, Arizona, all from New Mexico, all from, I guess, the Spanish descendants, the descendants of Spanish colonization, which meant that the border between the United States and Mexico got pushed down some 150, maybe a little more, bit more miles. Now what happened was people had kind of a choice. Either people could go down with the border and then be still in Mexico, but they were in essentially an alien territory that was unfamiliar with them, even though it was still the same country. Like, if you need a way to imagine that, imagine someone from rural Texas suddenly having to live in Manhattan. It would be a very unfamiliar scene to them and one that they perhaps wouldn't be able to thrive in just because it is so different to them So you had people that did that and of course they were disenfranchised which made them Vulnerable to exploitation or yet people that stayed who Lost their land and had to then be exploited just to make a living to be able to survive So there was no winning in this situation So of course in Mexico where America was beginning to you know Take advantage of cheap labor. They could then exploit the people there that had recently been kicked out of their of their homes because they had nothing else to do they you know their families were in shambles forcing people to go to work that maybe historically or previously hadn't been working which obviously created Would create a ripple effect throughout history causing certain Disenfranchisement intergenerational trauma making it difficult for people to crawl out of that that whole that cycle of exploitation So these American companies these American capitalists would exploit these people and to that you know They would say well we can get paid more if we just did this a hundred miles up or just in the southern United States So why not go there and of course that was met with terrible hardships Not only was it difficult to get into the United States with various people exploiting them to get in coyotes Making it making it exceptionally difficult to do it safely But then once they arrived there it was a matter of trying to survive in a country that hated them So that chapter kind of sets the stage for the situation that Agnallua's finds Finds herself in and that she she wants to begin to think through in terms of her own Chicana identity her own Mexican American identity one that she doesn't want to situate within either Specifically she locates herself firmly within this kind of interstitial liminal space between the United States and Mexico and that puts us here into chapter two and Excuse my pronunciation Mup mientos de rebelia I las cults rascit trai si on an which roughly translates into movements of resistance and the cultures of betrayal trai si on an is betrayal and from that resembles the French which is a trahir which is familiar anyways, so so Annalia luas recognizes that she lives on the border of freedom and control in her own life So she has stripped essentially removed her own sovereignty in an effort to kind of kill the Fascist within her not that it was ever there but to kill the commanding side of herself Yet she still finds herself at the behest of these various controlling institutions these various controlling cultures essentially her Native culture in in Mexico she finds to be a controlling culture a culture that she says was crafted by men and Transmitted by women or continued by women And how she recalls that many women all the all the women that told her in her life that it was okay for men to beat their wives So these women essentially communicating this message to her So she doesn't want to look back and lionize her time And in her own country with her own family because she sees that as being Extremely problematic in its own right nor does she want to completely embrace this kind of American ideal because that is Extremely problematic as well and so she feels very comfortable in this in between space So she then further meditates on the kinds of control that was extended on women's bodies in her own community And more universally and how the treatment of women is due to the fact that there was a primal fear that men have of women for their capacity to give life they men were Extremely envious of that and of women's capacity to endure to to deal with hardship in the way that men couldn't men would fall into the bottle or turn to anger because they could not deal with hardship in the way that women could And so men imposed control upon women's bodies mostly young women who would be At the behest of their father their brother their uncle and and Yalua recounts how she was told as a young girl Not to be alone with her own male family members because she didn't know They didn't know what these male family members would do and it was just taken to be the woman's responsibility to avoid violent men then for men not to be incestuous pedophiles So all of this Obviously did not sit well with her especially her identifying as a queer woman She in no way wanted to fall back into these kind of traditional roles that meant women's Subjection in her own community. She instead wanted to cross boundaries She wanted to open up new possibilities for herself in the embracement of these borderlands and So with that it was not the unfamiliar that she feared what she feared most was the familiar What she feared most was home because that was a rigid space a Rigid space that imposed control on her body or sought to impose that control that sought the silencer and this is echoed in the United States as well And she traces her own T'Kanna identity the one that refuses to fall into a rigid Kind of a rigid paradigm here. She traces that to the Indian woman's history of resistance So as such she essentially as I kind of already said she had an ambiguous relationship to her homeland Now with that being said and I've read some critiques of this work that They they take her to be This privileged Latina woman and it's only because of her privilege that she's able to completely renounce her Identity and to be able to embrace these new things Whereas for most women they can't do that. They just simply cannot However, she's very clear that she doesn't want she's not criticizing anyone who is forced into these situations In fact, she says that that is what they need to do to survive But that she just wants no part in it herself, which I think is totally fair Like she shouldn't have to subject herself to that if she has a way out and for her that way out is by her embracing Three different sides of herself that is her Mexican side her Indian side Indigenous side and her white side And here that pushes us into chapter three entering into the serpent now. This is where it gets extremely difficult for me as someone who isn't familiar with this The kind of mythos that inspires Ania Lewis reading of this situation, but I'm gonna try I'm gonna try so the serpent Antidates humanity And yet still desires to mingle with humanity and the snake occupies more than one world the snake Exists in many worlds and the snake has the the forked tongue right double pronged. It's like It embraces two different things as a dual identity And it gets this from the you know the we get this from the the Vedic tradition where the snake wanted to eat the Soma so bad that it was pushing its tongue up on the ground and that's what produced the kind of forked tongue effect So we get we have the snake figure that exists between worlds that exists before worlds and that slithers into worlds and She has a very interesting relationship to the snake and she recounts a time where she was bitten by a snake and since that time She both fears it and and seeks out the snake She's fascinated by the snake and it puts her obviously in this new liminal space You know of a fearing and seeking out this snake wanting to be in between but snakes and Snakes were not always a sight of fear in fact for her ancestors they were commanded by the goddess Quot la loppe Quot la loppe who who is essentially the one who had dominion over the snakes And so there was a figure to keep the snake in check and to keep that snake and the snake a part of The world in such a way is to not cause too much havoc and This was a time this during the time of this dominion over the snakes when The there was a quality between the sexes when there wasn't the formation of the Aztec Aztec in the Aztec militaristic and patriarchal regime that would essentially spell the devise of countless countless people and Before then there was some we can glean some sense of equality between people Where there was an it kind of embraced fluidity There wasn't just a kind of rigid domination of one group, one patriarchal formation over others. So at the time when the snake could be held in check, there was an embracement on the part of culture of indeterminacy, of fluidity. It wasn't just something that occurred in these kind of sporadic ways in response as a kind of ab reaction to all of the controlling regimes that we see emerging now. It was just part of the system as a whole, if I can even call it a system. And now that the snake haunts her dreams after she got, she was bitten by it. It's always at the following her wherever she goes. And for a long time, she thought to herself that she should ignore those images of the snake. But that was really for her white rational brain telling her to forget it. And it was only when she embraced it. It was only when she began to recognize the state, the snake, that she was streamlined into the secrets of her culture and the universe, which would kind of be allowed by what we call the "quatliku state". But such secrets are not made available by something like Christianity that relies very heavily on rigid binaries. Christianity teaches us nothing of what she calls "la facultade", which she defines as the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, which is the facultat. To see in surface phenomena the deeper roots behind it all. And this is a capacity that is more available to those that don't feel safe in the world, that don't have a home in which they feel safe in. Those people are open up to this faculty, that is for close to others because they have no need for it. They get to sit comfortably and to disappear into the folds of power. So she says it this way, "When we're up against the wall, when we have all sorts of oppressions coming at us, we are forced to develop this faculty so that we'll know when the next person is going to slap us or lock us away." And that puts us here into chapter 4, the "quatliku state". So when Enialua's father died, her mother covered the mirrors in the house. So perhaps her ancestry had told her she took this from her ancestors that mirrors were windows into the afterlife, into the spirit world, and she didn't want that connection. Because Mexican Indians made mirrors of volcanic glass known as obsidian, which would allow them to glimpse not only into the "netherworld" but to glimpse into the very will of the gods, to almost know what the gods wanted before the gods did. But Enialua has a very interesting relationship to mirrors. She suggests that they are the site for the Constitution of subjects and objects. Where if you look at yourself in the mirror, you are a viewing subject. You are an autonomous being that chooses to see. But in the act of seeing yourself in the reflection, you are freezing yourself and you are opening yourself up to self-criticism. How many of us have to look in the mirror before we leave the house? We have to make sure that we are right. We are proper. And so what she says is that that is a freezing of identity in that moment. You freeze yourself in the act of seeing yourself, which she extrapolates to understand the gaze of oppression more broadly, like those oppressors look upon the oppressed and freeze them in their oppression. So the "Cotlucu" state is that state in which it is possible to rest oneself away from that freezing gaze. It is essentially in her words the mountain, the earth mother, who conceived all celestial beings out of her cavernous womb. She is the symbol of the fusion of opposites. The "Cotlucu" state is that which completely disturbs the subject object binary and explodes those categories, opening it up into a soup of different possibilities. Now specifically for her, she says that this state is brought about when she overwhelmingly refuses to know something about herself, when she is confronted with something about herself that she feels like she has to embrace, then she enters this state, because she is refusing this kind of rigid truth. And this state emerges to essentially allow her entry into this truth. It allows Anyalyua to forego her "I" her "I"ness and to embrace instead herself. Interestingly enough, there is another story in the "Reveida" when God, I can't remember which God, there are actually three gods. No, I think it is two humans in a god, but these two humans go up to a god and say, you know, what is the. they ask some extremely metaphysically difficult questions. And then this god eventually concludes by saying that you are comprised of two selves. There is the self and there is the "I". The self is what says "I am". And so the task is for you to recognize what that self is. And we see that echoed here. And I don't mean to draw comparisons or equivalences between Central American Indigenous history or myth or belief and Indian, the Vedic tradition. I just like the acknowledging the similarities. But anyways, I digress. So this self that you embrace, the self that exists beneath the "I" is not stable. It is a self that is non-being and it is the self that exists on the borderlands, La Frampeira, it is the mestizo self that is not open to rigid distinctions. It is a self that says what it wants. It is not concerned with the next title of the next chapter, "How to tame a wild tongue". This self is something that speaks its mind, where moving into chapter 5, and Yalua recounts how so many times growing up in Southern United States, her language was beaten out of her. Where if she spoke Spanish, or if she identifies as Chicana, she would be beaten up in the school yard, she would be hit along with other kids that didn't speak English. So beyond that though, there were teachers that told her she couldn't speak it. If she was out in public and she spoke it, she would get like glares or she would get people telling her to speak American, the whole song and dance of racist United States identity. But she is clear that she really embraces this Chicana Spanish, it doesn't Latinas Spanish, because it is for her she really wants to emphasize this borderland language, this language that she outright embraces the idea of spanglish. Now the introduction of various Anglicisms into her Spanish language, because she sees herself existing on the borders of both and taking from both. Beyond that she was also adopting like specific dialects and English, specific dialects from people working class English people from upper class English people, academic English people and so on. But in all that she also recognized the kind of oppressive undertone within that very specific culture where you had Chicana people, Chicano people essentially criticizing others for not being like Chicano enough or not having the right tongue, not speaking properly, which of course she wants no part of. So with every opportunity she could get she would love to embrace her in Mexican heritage even if it was within an American setting like seeing Mexican films Mexican made films or music or anything like that. And that propels us here into chapter 6, Delili La Pali, the path of the red and black ink, where like her the movies she was watching she loved to create and write stories she loved essentially being creative. And it is in the side of her that she recognized the fundamental difference between western art and her Mexican heritage art where she saw that western art was things that go in museums and they're put behind lock and key and there are people with machine guns guarding them. You know they're closed off from the people whereas indigenous art is something that is kept in sacred places like she says the home, the home is a sacred place it's not this functional instrumental place where you have to just recharge your batteries you know just to go back to your nine to five the next day. It is instead a place for communal activities for communal setting. where art can be displayed for the community. So she prescribes to the West a kind of loosening of its restrictive or its emphasis on control. We're not even with its own culture where it takes the art pieces that it likes and puts them in museums and locks them away, but the fact that historically, you know, white European settlers have gone all over the world, taken the kinds of art that they like, throw them in their own museum, so you know, completely uprooting them from their contexts. And in this kind of interaction where you have this engagement with other cultures by these European, these white settler colonists, you don't see the kind of mestizo or mestizo identity forming that an anyaluha embraces because it is one of domination. It is one that does not engage with another culture in order to be changed. It is one that wants to dominate another culture, steal from another culture for its own self. And what she is doing is completely different. She wants to be challenged. She wants to come to grips with something that is different from her so that she can be propelled into newness. And it is only in this state, the state of renouncing ones rigid self identity, ethnocentrism, urecentrism, or whatever, that for her art is possible. Art can only happen when you are existing prepared to accommodate newness because art is always new. If it is not new, it is not art. And art for her is that capacity where it allows the soul to concretize and it allows the body to etherealize. In other words, it allows the soul to take shape while the body disappears. It falls into a vapor. And that puts us into the last chapter here, that consensia de la mestiza towards a new consciousness. So it is the new mestiza consciousness. And she says that this new mestiza consciousness emerges essentially from this intermingling of disparate people. And it is for that reason, diametrically opposed to the kind of European Aryan idea of, you know, just essentially monogamous incestuous intermingling. And this is a consciousness of the borderland existing in between, not just in one side or another. And of course, as we've already said, this mestiza consciousness breaks the subject object duality. It has no homeland. You can't find the mestiza anywhere like the snake. It occupies every world, as per its own want. It exists everywhere. And its project is to end oppression. It is above all, for that reason, a feminist project. It recognizes first and foremost the oppression of women all across the world, but also of course, the intersection of that with class and race. And so for that reason, she doesn't want to foreclose engagement with anyone. She wants to create a kind of frontline solidarity with other people, with other marginalized people on the world. That means working with white women, especially because otherwise it wouldn't be an inclusive project. And we can obviously more radical feminists would have some problems with this undoubtedly, especially those like black feminists, because white women are helpless. A lot of the time, they can't just be worked with and then all the problems will be fixed. But anyways, that more or less covers it. And I just want to read the last line that is an excerpt from some kind of poem where it writes that says the land was Mexican once. It was Indian always and is and will begin again. I'm sorry, it will be again. And yeah, so you know, there are poems riddled throughout this text. And it the last half of the book that I'm not even going to touch because I don't want to do, I don't want to completely destroy the poetry with my poor reading skills. It's just it's all very beautiful. And I really want to emphasize that the way to get through this text is to read it yourself, not what I'm doing here. I can't give you anything near what you can get from this. But I hope I was able to give you something, at least if you don't have the time to read this, that you were able to get something out of it. If I did anything wrong, I would love to hear about it. If I mispronounced anything, well, no, sorry. Anything I mispronounced, I would love to hear about it, especially Agnialua, Ritspai and Valua or Anzeldua, I could just be totally wrong. Yeah, I'd love to hear about it. Catch you next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]