Borderlands - Nielson

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Borderlands KritikIndex
Borderlands KritikIndex.......................1
1NC Shell.................................................2
Link: Nation-States...................................5
Link: Citizenship......................................6
Link: Immigration Law............................7
Link: US/Mexico Border........................12
Link: Marriage Visas..............................13
Link: Temporary Workers.......................14
Link: Gender Advantages.......................15
Link: Ecology/Environments Advantages17
Link: Economy Advantages...................18
Link: Heteronormativity Advantages.....21
Link: Terrorism Advantages...................22
Link: Drug Trafficking...........................23
Link: Critical Affs (Non- Transnational Feminism)
24
Link: Western Academics.......................25
Impacts: Feminism Turns.......................26
Impacts: Imperialism..............................28
Impacts: Biopower.................................32
Impacts: Dehumanization.......................33
Impacts: Gender Violence......................34
Impacts: Poverty.....................................35
Impacts: Colonization.............................36
Alternative: Mestiza Consciousness.......38
Alternative Solvency..............................41
Alternative Solvency: Gender/Intersectionality 52
Answer To: Perm....................................53
Answer To: Framework..........................57
Answer To: Borderlands only applies to the Latino/a Popn
Answer To: Utopian Alternative.............59
***Aff: A2 Borderlands***...................60
Borderlands Ignores Mexican Perspective61
Borderlands are Homogenizing..............63
Orientalism Turn.....................................64
Globalization Turn..................................65
Cultural Identity Turn.............................66
Immigration Reform Turn......................67
Alt Cant Solve.......................................68
Perm........................................................69
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1NC Shell
(A) LINK- Citizenship law is a boundary dividing control that creates identity around
American power.
Dudziak & Volpp 5 (Mary L. Dudziak is the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of
Law, History, and Political Science at the USC, and a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law
School. Leti Volpp professor of law -UC Berkeley) American Quarterly (57.3 593-594) ALM
On the coast,
at the California-Mexico border, a rusted sheath of metal extends from the

beach into the ocean, dividing the waves. There, grains of sand become attributes of
different sovereignties. Two nations are brought together at this edge; at the same
time, their inhabitants are marked with national identities; they come together
wearing the marks of sovereignty inscribed by the border. Yet while it classifies and
codifies subjects, the border cannot contain sovereignty itself. The border marks a
space that American power proceeds from. The metal edge on the beach descends into the ocean. From the
beach it looks as if it might extend to the horizon, dividing the ocean floor. There are borders, not marked by metal, throughout the
ocean. They mark a nation's territorial waters, a sovereignty of currents and of sea life. The
boundaries around U.S.

territorial waters are not outlined by physical structures; they exist on the shelves of
law libraries, their dimensions defined in treaties. Instead of a metal edge, there are
words on a page. The words that place seashells into the category of American sovereignty are the technology of law. Such
words are attached not only to unseeable ocean borders. They are embedded in the metal edge on the beach; they are inscribed on bodies
on either side. Law defines national borders; it delineates the consequence of borders for the peoples within them. It does not contain
sovereign power, but law has an imprint on national power wherever it is exercised.
This volume interrogates law's role in constituting American borders. One project of American studies scholarship has been to explore
American culture and history in relation to the rest of the world. 1 But the global turn in American studies raises new questions about the
boundaries of the field and of the reach of "America" itself. Once
we view the United States in a global

context, once territoryformerly the implicit boundary around American studiesis
decentered, it becomes important to ask what the frame is around "American"
studies, and to ask how, in a global context, U.S. borders and identities are
constructed. Law is one window through which to look at the construction of
American borders. Law is an important technology in the drawing of dividing lines
between American identities and the boundaries (or lack of boundaries) around
American global power. Borders are constructed in law, not only through formal legal
controls on entry and exit but also through the construction of rights of citizenship
and noncitizenship, and the regulation or legitimation of American power in other
parts of the world.
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(B) IMPACT - The narrative of the American identity as the nation of

immigrants/melting pot that welcomes and assimilates immigrants into American
citizens is empirically contrasted by a history of racial oppression. Considering some
persons as citizens and some as aliens or terrorists, the American identity is a paradox that
creates a dehumanizing multi-racial hierarchy
School. Leti Volpp professor of law -UC Berkeley) American Quarterly (57.3 593-610 ) ALM
The shackled foot on the back cover of this volume, belonging to a woman in immigration detention, reminds us how bodies are policed
in the service of maintaining national borders. Which
bodies can enter and which bodies are expelled,

and the attempted enforcement of those decisions, bounds American identity through
the incorporation of some and the exclusion of others.
The typical narrative of America as a nation of immigrants foregrounds a liberal
story of social contract and choice, whereby immigrants are welcomed and then easily
assimilate as citizens. Race sharply disrupts this narrative, given the facts of slavery,
territorial dispossession, forced removals, and racial bars to immigration and
naturalization. But this disruption is conventionally presumed not to threaten
national myths of freedom and democracy, and to be rectified through the passage of
time and progress.14 The essays in this section challenge both presumptions, in excavating
and interpreting foundational but little-known dimensions of the restrictions of movement
and membership of bodies, and in asserting that the inclusion of citizens is in fact
predicated upon exclusion.
One way to consider citizenship is to note the hydraulic relationship between the
inclusion of some persons as citizens and the exclusion of other persons as the citizens'
oppositeas aliens or, post 9/11, as terrorists. But another important and
understudied dynamic is the manner in which inclusion and exclusion can be
experienced by the same bodies. Devon Carbado, in his essay, "Racial Naturalization,"
addresses the paradox of black American identity, whereby the black American is included
as a citizen, and is presumed to belong to America, but also experiences exclusion as
racially subordinate. He labels this phenomenon an "inclusionary form of exclusion."
Carbado seeks to reconceptualize the relationship between black Americans and naturalization. To this purpose, he reformulates the
concept of naturalization, from its formal and doctrinal understandings as the process through which one becomes an American citizen,
to a social process producing American racial identity, fueled by racism. Tracing the inclusive exclusion of blacks in America to the
Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott, he notes how enslaved blacks were excluded from citizenship but included as property, which he
analogizes to unincorporated territories in the Insular Cases, described as [End Page 598] "foreign in a domestic sense," not incorporated
but "appurtenant thereto as a possession." The
granting of formal citizenship through the Fourteenth

Amendment naturalized blacks as citizens, and included them into an American
identity, but an explicitly racially subordinate American identity, visible today in the
delimiting of black social movement through the police practice of stop-and-frisk.
Carbado's essay helps us understand why racism not only "divides us as Americans"
but consolidates American national identity, as it "binds us as a nation in a
multiracial hierarchy."
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(C)ALTERNATIVE Reject the duality of aff immigration and embrace the mestiza
consciousness to break down duality between races, sexes, etc. within a new value system
embedded in a culture of harmony.
Prez 5 (Emma, Assoc. Prof. of history at the University of Texas, El Paso, NWSA Journal 17.2
(2005) 1-10) ALM
Decades ago Gloria Anzalda
comprehended what many of us spend our lives attempting to graspthat

colonization may have destroyed our indigenous civilizations but colonization could
not eliminate the evolution of an indigenous psyche. That world still persists inside
our community's psychic, material lives. We wear it on our bodies, our flesh, our mestizaje. The mixed racial
bodies and minds that we've inherited usher that past into the present and, more important, into the future. She devised her theoryla
conciencia de la mestizaas a method, a tool that offered us hope to move from a bleak present into a promising future. La conciencia
de la mestiza, mestiza consciousness is that transformative tool (81). She
said: The work of mestiza

consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner
and to show in the flesh and through the images of her work how duality is
transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored,
between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very
foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts . . . collective
consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best
hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. (80) For Gloria, mestiza
consciousness must be attained by all races, by all people. It is the consciousness that
we need to take us through the 21st century, from el cinco sol (the fifth sun) to el sexto sol (the sixth sun). The
Aztec and Maya calendars both prophesied the ending of war and violence with the ending of the fifth sun. The transition from the fifth
to the sixth sun began in 1988 and will be completed in 2012. Gloria passed on during those pivotal transitional years between the suns,
only eight years before the fifth sun fully completed its cycle to begin the transition into the sixth sun. The sixth sun will bring harmony,
peace, and justice. To quote Gloria, mestiza
consciousness will guide us toward "the creation of yet

another culture" and to "a new value system with images and symbols that connect
us to each other and the planet" (81). The "clash of cultures" will become embedded in our very flesh. The
consciousness of our crossbreeding will create a culture of harmony, where love and
hope become key. Moreover, the crossbreeding of cultures occurs, for Gloria, in the
borderlands. [End Page 2]
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Link: Nation-States
Nation-states and democracy are rooted in the Europes attempt to make itself the center of
the world
Orozco-Mendoza 8 (Elva Fabiola, thesis: Borderlands Theory: Producing
Border Epistomologies with Gloria Anzaldua, Virgina Polytechnic Institute
and State University, April 24, p. 8. DAP)
One of the goals of modernity was to change the obscurantism of the world into reason. During this period,
the European civilization expanded all over the world due to the fact that they managed to carry on the
social production of frontiers; a concept that according to Walter D. Mignolo and Madina V. Tlostanova was
On the one
side of the frontiers was civilization; on the other; nothing, just
barbarism or emptiness (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 205).9 According to this
classification, civilization was meant to be a synonym of Western
Europe while barbarism was to be understood as the remainder,
i.e. Africa, Asia, and America. From this context, then, frontiers became
the spaces of influence that Europeans accommodated to
exercise control over its periphery on the basis of racist values
that led to the establishment of opposing categories such as us
and them, or, we and others. With this classification, Europe attempted to
appoint itself the center of the world and tried to divide up the
earth to organize the worlds exploitation and to export the border form to the
periphery (Balibar, 2004: 7). Thus, exporting the border form to the periphery
not only implied organizing the world in units called nationstates, but it also meant developing a cultural or spiritual
nationalism that required citizens to associate the democratic
universality of human rights with particular national
belonging... leading inevitably to systems of exclusion: the
divide between ...populations considered native and those
considered foreign, heterogeneous, who are racially or
culturally stigmatized (Balibar, 2004: 8).
described as [a] line indicating the last point in the relentless march of civilization.
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Link: Citizenship
The borderlands and citizen are oppositions. The citizen needs negation in order to know
itself.
Nayan Shah, in "Between 'Oriental Depravity' and 'Natural Degenerates': Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans,"
focuses upon the lived experiences and regulation of the bodies of migrants once within the terrain of the United States. He newly
examines little-known sodomy, statutory rape, and vagrancy cases in California in the early twentieth century wherein Asian men,
perceived as the importers of unnatural sexual practices, were prosecuted for intergenerational, working class, and same-sex relations
with adolescent boys. While the "foreigner" and the "degenerate" were not doctrinal categories, they functioned discursively to
identify and explain moral peril. American identity consolidated around the normal masculine through the casting out of perverse
behavior, ascribed to Asian men. The cases show
an intense desire to contain and fix social boundaries

and status, which, Shah argues, was both impossible and the product of an irremediable
insecurity.
This site of legal regulationthe streets, alleys, boardinghouses, labor camps, and ranches where migrant workers
congregatedfunctioned as what Shah calls a borderland space, a location characterized by
police surveillance and anxiety about unruly, uncontained behavior that troubled
categories and boundaries. In this sense, the space of the borderland functions as the
shadow side, the other, to what is presumed to be the space of the normal. The
borderland is the opposite of what we believe to be American normality. [End Page 600]
If the borderland and American normality function as spatial opposites, what then is
the opposite of the citizen? The citizen is considered the paradigmatic member, one
who possesses full rights in the nation state. Linda Kerber, in "Toward a History of Statelessness in America,"
suggests that we understand the citizen's other not to be the citizen of another country, but to be the stateless person, the "man without a
country." The relationship between the citizen and the stateless person, she asserts, may be in some sense necessary :
the state
"needs its negation in order to know itself." As she documents, when Americans invented a political structure
in which to practice the fundamental rights of mankind, they were simultaneously devising structures that fundamentally deprived a
large segment of the population of their human rights. Thus, her essay troubles the assumption of "we the people": at its founding core,
some Americans could be considered stateless. Kerber also contradicts the
assumption of America as an ever

expanding circle of citizenship that can embrace all members over time; today, she writes,
increasing numbers of people lack secure citizenship.
15
Hannah Arendt famously wrote that citizenship is nothing less than "the right to have rights." This formulation would suggest that if
one possesses formal citizenship, one's state will enforce one's rights, and that it is the
lack of formal citizenship that has produced the nightmare of statelessness. But Kerber
productively argues that it is not enough to possess formal citizenship if citizenship does not
ensure the civil rights of a citizen. In a system of inequality among nation states, citizenship in a state cannot ensure
that a prisoner receives the right to counsel at Guantnamo. Economic vulnerability, especially along the
lines of gender, also creates what Kerber would consider de facto statelessness, a
precarious existence characterized by the failure of one's state to protect.
Statelessness, she writes, is most usefully understood not only as a status but as a practice,
made and remade through daily vulnerabilities that render one not a citizen.
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Link: Immigration Law

Law is the force that maintains these borders and creates identity, marking bodies as
citizen or alien, providing the state with a language for its global actions. In borderland
spaces, law produces categories that are seen as social problems in need of regulation,
creating illegals as well as the structure to militarize and control those bodies in order to
solve these problems through policy.
What is "law" on these borders? It is la migra, the border patrol. It is the Department of
Homeland Security, embodied in the firm hands of the airport security worker across your chest. It is there in the police lights that pull
over an African American driver who has crossed an unmarked border into a neighborhood [End Page 594] where he seems not to
belong, marking internal American spaces. Law can be a force that maintains borders, encountered with varying degrees of pain. Law
also creates spaces within which border meetings come about. Law
creates opportunities, new identities that

we might seek. It gives us a way to announce to the state that we are joined together,
as a family, or in a community that shares particular ideals. We pass laws both to
manage the terrain within the state and as an expression of who we are as a people,
within our borders. Law can also be a tool drawn upon to challenge state power. We might see in law not an inescapable
hegemony, but a role in an ascribed identity. Law does mark bodies (as citizen, as alien), but it can also
be drawn upon in constructions of self. In a world where state power seems borderless, law follows the state in its
transnational sojourns. It cannot hold back state power; instead law provides the state with a language for its global actions. In
borderland spaces, we can see what law does in American history and American
culture. In some legal scholarship, law plays the role of tagalong, following changes in society that are seen as more fundamental.
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Law's role in border regions makes apparent that the relationship between law and society is more dynamic. Mae Ngai demonstrates this
in her book Impossible Subjects, showing the ways law
produces categories that then are seen as social
problems in need of legal regulation.
The transnational labor market at the U.S.Mexico border appears, not as a

natural phenomenon, but fueled by labor needs of large-scale agriculture in the west, and by legal restrictions on Asian immigration to
the United States. Once immigration was funneled into the bracero temporary worker program or through restrictive immigration quotas,
preexisting migration outside these bounds became "illegal." At the same time, the border itself, a fluid, transnational space, was
militarized and patrolled. Through
legal and policy developments, the problem of "illegal"

immigration is structured and produced. In this example, law does not respond to natural
forces outside the law; instead it responds to a social context constructed, in part,
through law.
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Law is limited in the sense that the American identity must interrogate laws limits; in a
case of declaring clemency to a person, the laws are unclear as to when to apply the rule of
law or not, when sovereignty does or doesnt apply. It is this legal borderland that law
constructs what is the American identity is.
School. Leti Volpp professor of law -UC Berkeley) American Quarterly, 57.3, p. 597-598 ALM)
An exploration of law and borders must begin with a discussion of the borders of law itself. Law
plays a key role in

American borders, but as it does so, law is not a stable technology, a tool easily seen, whose
capacities and limits are apparent.12 Austin Sarat examines law's borders in his essay "At the
Boundaries of Law: Executive Clemency, Sovereign Prerogative, and the Dilemma of American Legality." It is the very idea that the
rule of law is central to American identity that requires us to interrogate law's limits,
he argues. Sarat's focus is on the tension between law and sovereignty. "Sovereignty troubles the rule of law by
being at once prior to and yet a product of it," he suggests. He examines sovereignty in the
context of executive clemency, where "law authorizes a kind of lawlessness." Acts of
clemency, he argues, "are quintessentially sovereign acts in that they are authorized
by law as moments when officials can 'decide who shall be removed from the purview
of the law.'"13 Because clemency removes things from the domain of law, clemency
reveals law's boundaries.
To examine clemency, Sarat turns to Alexander Hamilton's defense of the practice, against Blackstone's critique of clemency as a power
of monarchy, in debates over the U.S. Constitution. Hamilton's embrace of clemency turned in part on his image of America, a nation
faced with difficulties, but one that might "welcome its enemies back into the fold." Sarat then examines court rulings on clemency. Here
he finds instability and arbitrariness amid the attempts of judges to tame clemency through law. This very potential for arbitrariness and
abuse marks the status of clemency in law's borderland.
Clemency, as a legal borderland, helps to illuminate what might be at the center of

law, or a "rule of law," itself. As Sarat puts it, "the rule of law is replete with gaps,
fissures, and failures, places where law runs up against national interest or sovereign
prerogative. Its boundaries are unclear, uncertain, unchartable. And, in many places,
law runs out, law gives way." The places where law runs out are not places where we
lose our way, but instead where we might find it, for "it is in its bleeding borders that
law itself, and with it American identity, is constructed, contested, and made
meaningful."
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The history of US immigration restrictions is wrought with American exceptionalism that

has transitioned from a nation of immigrants and freedom to a power that attempts to
control those immigrants and outlaw their entrance to the country in the name freedom.
We can see this transition today in preemptive wars executed in the name of freedom.
In his essay "Outlawing 'Coolies': Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation," Moon-Ho Jung similarly demonstrates the
insights produced by examining together what are considered disparate sites of inquiry. Slavery and immigration are typically studied as
separate phenomena and historical processes (unless slavery is studied as a form of forced migration). Jung analyzes legislative attempts
to outlaw "coolies" in the nineteenth century to show [End Page 599] that the
complex origins of U.S.

immigration restrictions in fact lay in struggles to demarcate the legal boundary
between slavery and freedom. Thus, he questions conventional readings of anti-"coolie" agitation as stemming from
anti-Chinese rancor in California, and instead defines it as the culmination of debates over the slave trade and slavery.
"Coolies," Jung argues, were not "a people but a conglomeration of racial
imaginings" that emerged in the era of emancipation. Linked with slavery, the
banning of the importation of "coolies" allowed immigration restriction to proceed in
the name of freedom. The power of this association of immigration and freedom helps
explain the perennial contradiction of how U.S. immigration law is imagined to have
been historically unfettered, but with certain exceptions. Jung's focus on "coolies"
also provides an important piece of the story of American exceptionalism: the moral
imperative to prohibit slavery and coolieism around the world rationalized U.S. expansionism abroad, from China and Cuba in the 1850s
to the Philippines in the 1890s. Thus, as Jung asserts, the
locating, defining, and outlawing of "coolies"

helped produce the historical transition of America from a slaveholding nation to a
nation of immigrants, and from an empire of manifest destiny to a liberating empire.
We can see the legacy of this transition today in the form of a preemptive war in the
name of freedom.
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Legal borderlands are spaces of exception where the rule of law is often suspended or
revoked through dehumanization of those who do not receive rights or through the
obliteration from the imagination of those spaces. The narrative of American
exceptionalism has permitted the notion that the US is only limited to what happens within
its territorial limits, and thus what happens outside those limits does not guarantee
democracy and full rights for certain bodies.
Legal borderlands can be understood as physical zones where, as Andrew Hebard writes, the "territorial
and legal limits of the United States are being negotiated." These physical zones can exist within the fifty states and
Washington, D.C.for example within the space of U.S. prisonsor outside, in the form of an
unincorporated territory such as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. In either case they
inevitably implicate the relationship between American identity and democracy and
the rule of law. Because American identity and democracy are fused, sites where the
rule of law is suspended, revoked, or never implemented constitute what we could
consider spaces of exception. These spaces of exception, so long as they carry the
appellation "American," require some kind of legitimation for the suspension of
normal democratic processes, either through the dehumanization of those who do not
receive those rights or through the obliteration from the imagination of those spaces,
disappeared in a Bermuda Triangle of collective memory.
All three essays in this section raise the question of empire and challenge the idea of American exceptionalism, particularly the
presumption that America stands as an exception to the history of imperialism. The
idea of American
exceptionalism has permitted the notion that the United States is limited to the
territorial boundaries of the nation-state; what happens "outside" those boundaries
does not implicate the same level of concern for the rule of law, [End Page 602] democracy,
and full rights. Thus, if Guantnamo is a prison camp, or if the United States fails to guarantee equal
citizenship to residents of U.S. territories, the narrative of exceptionalism holds that
this does not implicate America itself and its commitment to the rule of law and
individual rights.
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At the border to the US, border officers must take into account who, when, and on what
legal grounds to act and also when to not-act which risks unequal social sorting by the state
Heyman 9 (Josiah McC.- Canadian Journal of Law and Society - Volume 24, Number 3, 2009)
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On what principles, and in what ways, does the United States sort out mobile
populations in its south-western border region? Analysing discretion on the part of frontline border officers is fundamental to exploring these questions. This discretion involves not only decisions
about when, on whom, and on what legal grounds to act but also decisions about
when and on whom not to act. Examination of non-actions completes the range of
information needed to delineate unequal social sorting by the state. Unequal sorting is specified
in the analysis of field materials through a novel prism, paying attention to why and how certain borderlanders are trusted in
enforcement settings while others are considered potential risks. The
allocation of trust and risk proves to be

interestingly complex, revealing several major processes operating simultaneously,
class inequality, race inequality, and the enactment of the territorial nation-state.
We must take into account the decisions that must be made towards different bodies to
understand the practice and distributive effects of power in border enforcement
Heyman 9 (Josiah McC.- Canadian Journal of Law and Society - Volume 24, Number 3, 2009)
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The decision to act or not to act, and, in particular, non-decisions or non-actions, have in
turn proved to be central to understanding taken-for-granted power arrangements in
society.8 Direct power actions in the face of opposition require explicit disagreement.
But much social activity that we would reasonably want to describe in terms of
unequal power takes place without such disagreement. In the cases I will examine, for
instance, poor unauthorized Mexican immigrants are more likely to be the objects of
explicit border [End Page 368] policing, while rich unauthorized Mexican immigrants are
less likely to be so; the latter non-action both draws on officers' anticipation of the
political and legal influence of the wealthy and also helps to maintain and even
reinforce that influence. Therefore, to understand both the practice and the
distributive effects of power in border enforcement, we must be attentive to
discretionary non-actions, and the reasons for them.9 The challenge, however, is precisely in the subtlety
of non-action as opposed to positive actions or obligatory decisions. (The term "non-action" here means not bringing punitive law
enforcement to bear in a particular situation; that is, it is a non-act in terms of the wider power order, but it requires a definite decision of
some sort at the organizational or officer level, even if in many cases the reasons for not enforcing the law are taken for granted and even
unconscious. Hence, these "actions of not acting" are, as decisions, analysable in quite specifiable ways, which is my main concern
here.)
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Link: US/Mexico Border

Visas are a tool used to maintain the physical U.S./Mexico border which ultimately force
those caught in between to struggle to fit in the norm but are constantly rejected by both
sides.
Ramlow 6 ((Todd R., Bodies in the Borderlands: Gloria Anzaluda's and
David Wojnarowicz's Mobility Machines, MELUS, Volume: 31(3), Fall, p. 178.
DAP)
Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration furthers and complicates Anzaldi6a's notions of the borderlands and
crip-queer-mestiza/o subjectivity, as well as the connections she forges between the cripple, the queer, and the mojado. In Close to the
Knives, the section titled "In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon This Will All Be Picturesque Ruins" chronicles Wojnarowicz's
physical journeying through the southwestern United States, his own crip-queer-mestizo
consciousness, and his life in the borderlands. These borderlands are, as the section title announces,
literally "in the shadow of the American Dream," outside of a normative national
fantasy of community and identity.
Wojnarowicz echoes Anzaldua, who at the end of Borderlands/La Frontera exhorts a dominant
Anglo culture to "[a]dmit that Mexico is your double, that she exists in the shadow of
this country" (86). For both Anzalduia and Wojnarowicz, Mexico functions less as a physical entity and
more as an abstract principle of sexual, physical, and cultural otherness abjected
from a normate America. Once again, we can see the desire to keep these entities separate, to
maintain distinction and stave off contagion in the military fencing stretching across
the US-Mexico border today.
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Link: Marriage Visas

Past marriage immigration policies have created a subject/object dichotomy for immigrant
women which makes them more susceptibly to violence in the borderlands of the private
home.
Crenshaw, 91 (Kimblerle, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence Against Women of Color, Stanford Law Review, July, Volume: 43(6) p. 1246-1249.
DAP)
Where systems of race, gender, and class domination converge, as they do in the experiences of battered women of color, intervention
strategies based solely on the experiences of women who do not share the same class or race backgrounds will be of limited help to
women who because of race and class face different obstacles. Such was the case in
1990 when Congress amended

the marriage fraud provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act to protect
immigrant women who were battered or exposed to extreme cruelty by the United
States citizens or permanent residents these women immigrated to the United States
to marry. Under the marriage fraud provisions of the Act, a person who immigrated to the United
States to marry a United States citizen or permanent resident had to remain
"properly" married for two years before even applying for permanent resident status ,
at which time applications for the immigrant's permanent status were required of
both spouses. Predictably, under these circumstances, many immigrant women were reluctant to
leave even the most abusive of partners for fear of being deported. When faced with the choice
between protection from their batterers and protection against deportation, many immigrant women chose the latter. Reports of the tragic
consequences of this
double subordination put pressure on Congress to include in the

Immigration Act of 1990 a provision amending the marriage fraud rules to allow for
an explicit waiver for hardship caused by domestic violence . Yet many immigrant
women, particularly immigrant women of color, have remained vulnerable to
battering because they are unable to meet the conditions established for a waiver. The
evidence required to support a waiver "can include, but is not limited to, reports and
affidavits from police, medical personnel, psychologists, school officials, and social
service agencies." For many immigrant women, limited access to these resources can make it
difficult for them to obtain the evidence needed for a waiver. And cultural barriers
often further discourage immigrant women from reporting or escaping battering
situations. Tina Shum, a family counselor at a social service agency, points out that "[t]his law sounds so easy to
apply, but there are cultural complications in the Asian community that make even
these requirements difficult.... Just to find the opportunity and courage to call us is an accomplishment for many." The
typical immigrant spouse, she suggests, may live "[i]n an extended family where
several generations live together, there may be no privacy on the telephone, no
opportunity to leave the house and no understanding of public phones. "As a consequence,
many immigrant women are wholly depend on their husbands as their link to the
world outside their homes.
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Link: Temporary Workers

Legislation that controls the influx of temporary workers through immigration quotas
creates the binary of legal versus illegal, which justifies the policing of bodies and
space of which are considered illegal.
Johnson 04 (Kelli Lyon, Director, Center for Civic Engagement Associate Professor of English
Miami University Hamilton, Violence in the Borderlands: Crossing to the Home Spaces in the
Novels of Ana Castillo, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Volume: 25(1), p. DAP)
In borderland spaces,wecanseewhatlawdoesinAmericanhistoryandAmericanculture.Insomelegal
6
scholarship,lawplaystheroleoftagalong,followingchangesinsocietythatareseenasmorefundamental. Law's role in
border regions makes apparent that the relationship between law and society is more
dynamic.MaeNgaidemonstratesthisinherbookImpossibleSubjects,showingthewayslaw produces categories
that then are seen as social problems in need of legal regulation .7The transnational
labor market at the U.S.Mexico border appears, not as a natural phenomenon, but
fueled by labor needs of large-scale agriculture in the west, and by legal restrictions
on Asian immigration to the United States.Once immigration was funneled into the
bracero temporary worker program or through restrictive immigration quotas,
preexisting migration outside these bounds became "illegal."Atthesametime,the border
itself, a fluid, transnational space, was militarized and patrolled.Through legal and
policy developments, the problem of "illegal" immigration is structured and
produced.Inthisexample,lawdoesnotrespondtonaturalforcesoutsidethelaw;insteaditrespondstoasocialcontext
constructed,inpart,throughlaw.
Temporary worker visa just do violence to the people on the borderlands and hurt their
identities
Camacho 08 Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Professor of American Studies at Yale, Migrant
Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Political in he US and Mexico Borderland 2008 pg 64
Galarza viewed braceros as a threat to the livelihood of U.S.-born farmworkers. Claims
for inter-American friendship

and national progress, he knew, acted as a powerful sanction for racial and class
discrimination against both migrants and U.S.-born Mexicans. The importation of
indentured aliens as farmworkers was less a resolution to the problems of unequal
development in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands than an expansion of a neocolonial caste
system within the globalizing agricultural economy. As such, the presence of thousands of
imported workers in labor camps, or encamped outside Mexican recruitment centers,
recalled the longer history of racialized class struggle both within Mexico and in the
agricultural labor market. The specter of hundreds of thousands of these production men mere arms detached from the
enfranchised body of the citizen crossing into the United States revealed the lineaments of class racism in the transborder society. For Mexican
Americans, the Bracero Program forced a reckoning with far more than their economic vulnerability in the United States: it revealed, once again,
their own alienated status within the nation. The mass arrival of braceros increased Mexican American ambivalence toward the migrant
newcomers, with whom they shared ethnic ties, class identity, and a history of racial discrimination. While intellectuals like Galarza exposed
capitalist modernization as a racializing project, Mexican Americans contested the conversion of their vibrant laboring culture into nothing more
than an input factor.
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Link: Gender Advantages

Gender is caught in the borderlands; societys obsession with polarized gender and sex
makes identities seem static, but the borderlands prove identities are fluid.
Gonzalez, 3 (Deena J., Loyola Mount University, Gender on the Borderlands Retextualizing
the Classics, Frontiers: a Journal of Women Studies, Volume: 24(2 & 3), p. 25. DAP)
Chicana feminism dissuades one from capturing any feminism at all under the rubric
of Gender on the Borderlands, because gender can and does mean male as well as
female, men as well as women. The original proposal for the St. Marys University conference by the same title
contained as well an implicit understanding that one other purpose was at playin addition to surveying Chicana history,
art, literature, and culture, an opportunity existed to present new directions in the
eld. The notion that the entire concept of gender was a borderland itself guided the
conference planners and Antonia Castaeda, the conference organizer. The double-sided, three-fold conference announcement depicts a
butch womans back (Claudia Rodrguez, photo by Alma Lpez), which includes the cityscape of downtown Los Angeles and is also
reproduced on the cover of this special volume. A public demonstration of women marching with banners was embedded in the art piece.
Today, more than ever before, few would conate gender and women in the same breath in the
way that sexuality was once a code word used for lesbian, gay, bisexual, or
transgendered. In fact, Chicana history argued strenuously in the work surveyed earlier in this essay that
collapsing categories was insufficient. Gender could thus only mean a plurality: male,
female, and many in between and beyond. Sex could mean heterosexual, bisexual,
gay/lesbian, and transgendered. Sexuality could mean feminine, masculine, twospirited, and many other expressions of being between and beyond. Just as social scientists amplied the concept of class to include
social location as well as caste and other categories, and just as race now includes color, ethnicity, and mixed-cultural ancestry, few of
the original, organizing concepts in Chicano/a studies have remained singular. Pluralism in interpretation reigns.
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Genderitselfisaborderland;societyhaspolarizedgender,sexuality,sex,alongwith
forcinganindividualtogiveuponeidentitytoknowanotherwherepluralismshouldbe
preferred.
Gonzalez,3(DeenaJ.,GenderontheBorderlandsRetextualizingtheClassics,Frontiers:a
JournalofWomenStudies,Volume:24(2&3),p.25.DAP)
Chicana feminism dissuades one from capturing any feminism at all under the rubric
of Gender on the Borderlands, because gender can and does mean male as well as
female, men as well as women. The original proposal for the St. Marys University conference by the same title
contained as well an implicit understanding that one other purpose was at playin addition to
surveying Chicana history, art, literature, and culture, an opportunity existed to
present new directions in the eld. The notion that the entire concept of gender was a borderland itself
guided the conference planners and Antonia Castaeda, the conference organizer. The double-sided, three-fold conference announcement
depicts a butch womans back (Claudia Rodrguez, photo by Alma Lpez), which includes the cityscape of downtown Los Angeles and
is also reproduced on the cover of this special volume. A public demonstration of women marching with banners was embedded in the
art piece.
Today, more than ever before, few would conate gender and women in the same breath in the
way that sexuality was once a code word used for lesbian, gay, bisexual, or
transgendered. In fact, Chicana history argued strenuously in the work surveyed earlier in this essay that collapsing categories
was insufcient. Gender could thus only mean a plurality: male, female, and many in
between and beyond. Sex could mean heterosexual, bisexual, gay/lesbian, and
transgendered. Sexuality could mean feminine, masculine, two-spirited, and many
other expressions of being between and beyond. Just as social scientists amplied the
concept of class to include social location as well as caste and other categories, and
just as race now includes color, ethnicity, and mixed-cultural ancestry, few of the original,
organizing concepts in Chicano/a studies have remained singular. Pluralism in interpretation reigns.
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Link: Ecology/Environments Advantages

We must consider the ecological aspects of the US-Mexico borderlands to understand how
racism, homophobia, and sexism are exacerbated by environmental exploitation in order to
prevent them in the future
Ybarra 9 (Priscilla Solis, Texas Tech, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. Volume 34,
Number 2, Summer 2009) ALM
Considering the bioregional, ecological aspects of the US-Mexico borderlands
expands our understanding of how colonization, exploitation, and racism impact the
land and its people. Scientists, scholars, and politicians agree that we are in the midst of a global
environmental crisis in which access to resources will become increasingly limited. In
a time of crisis when human societies might cooperate and collaborate to reach a
common resolution, the opposite may occur. Increasingly limited access to clean
water, healthy food, and livable land may create a hierarchy that reproduces the
oppressions that brought this crisis. Indeed, one may argue that such a hierarchy of
environmental exploitation and race already exists; environmental injustice will
increase when resources become even scarcer. Understanding how hierarchies have
operated in the past may help prevent them in the future. Lawrence Buell speculates that [i]f, as W.
E. B. Du Bois famously remarked, the key problem of the twentieth century has been the problem of the color line, it is not at all
unlikely that the twenty-first centurys most pressing problem will be the sustainability of earths environment (699). I extend Buells
observation :
the most pressing problem of the twenty-first century may be that racism,
homophobia, and sexism continue alongsideand are exacerbated bythe shrinking
sustainability of the natural environment. My examination of how Mexican Americans and the Rio Grande
Valley experienced racial oppression and exploitation following the US-Mexico War and into the twentieth century supports this claim.
While Anzaldas work comments on a more contemporary reading of these dynamics, South Texas writer Jovita Gonzlez offers
historical insight on current injustices and ecological imbalances along the border.
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Link: Economy Advantages

Stabilizingbordersinthenameoffixingtheeconomysubjectswomencaughtinthe
BorderlandsofMexicotoemploymentexploitationandultimatelypoverty.
and State University, April 24, p. 29-30. DAP)
One of Anzalduas preoccupations regarding the
spatial borderlands has to do with the economic

exploitation that Mexicans, particularly young and poor female populations,
experience on the Mexican side of the borderlands. More directly, she is bothered by the way in which
maquiladoras are allowed to operate in the Mexican side completely undermining the rights of workers. The maquiladora industry in
Mexico was created because of the Border Industrialization Program or BIP. This
program was supposedly

designed to alleviate the growing rates of unemployment and poverty by setting up
plants all along the Mexican side of the border (Portillo, Independent Television Service. et al., 2001). The
BIP program was launched a year after the conclusion of the Bracero program in 1964, and it was expected to curtail
the illegal immigration of Mexicans into the United States (Martnez, 1978). In reality,
American and other transnational companies were putting neo-liberal practices into
action and moved to the Mexican border in order to take advantage of the Mexican
cheap labor (Marchand, 2004), in which, until recently, young, poor women constituted the
majority of the workforce. However, the boom of the maquiladoras in Mexico is related to the
creation of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, United States, and
Canada. Despite the widespread opposition to NAFTA, the program was implemented in January 1, 1994
increasing the number of maquiladoras operating not only along the border area but
in all Mexico (Marchand, 2004). Although one cannot deny that the production of the maquiladoras has positively affected the
Mexican economy, the negative effects for Mexican society surpass the positive ones.
Maquiladoras at the border are in part responsible for the dehumanization and devaluation of
Mexican labor. Since economic success in corporations is measured by their capacity to generate profits, and profits are
greater when the costs of production are less, the value of the workers labor needs to
be constantly devalued by imposing racism and negative stereotypes among the
population. Young and poor females are particularly affected in this chain since they
occupy the lowest level in the social status (Saldivar-Hull, 1991).
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U.S. capitalist practices devalue the bodies in the Borderlands by making them
unintelligible and disposable and the white American the valuable profiteer.
Hames-Garcia, 00 (Michael, Department Head and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
Education, How to Tell a Mestizo from an Enchirito: Colonialism and National Culture in the
Borderlands, Diacritics, Volume: 30(4), p. 119. DAP)
In closing, I want to offer an answer to the question my title asks, How does one tell a mestizo from an Enchirito? My answer is
informed by the thinking of Anzalda, as well as Fanon and Cabral. One
must look to the specific historical

and material conditions that frame the creation and development of these two
hybrids. On the level of an intellectual abstraction, a differentiation between
Enchirito and mestizo cannot be made. The differences lie in the specificity of their
social locations and their relationships to historical forces of capitalism and
colonialism. This is not to say that what matters is whether their points of origin are
either resistant or hegemonic, but rather that their transforming, complex
relationships to capitalism and colonialism must constantly be evaluated . Thus, Taco
Bells Enchirito is a hybrid cultural form produced within a US consumer market in
which various Mexican and Mexican American cultural signifiers are extracted from
their cultural (and political) contexts. Here, hybridity is repackaged as a fast food item unrecognizable apart
from a US cultural economy and always tied to Anglo-American profit (since the
transnational corporation, Taco Bell, is Anglo-American owned) and worker
exploitation. By contrast, mestizo takes its cultural and political significance within
Mexican and Chicano contexts that remain unintelligible to a hegemonic US racial
order. Within an Anglo US understanding of race and race relations, mestizo identity
powerfully challenges binary conceptions and laws of hypodescent (one drop rules). The
anemic category of mixed race that has been urged by census reformers does little to translate the particular resistant connotations of
mestizo (within a US context), given the history of Anglo domination in the US Southwest and the particular salience of Chicanas and
Chicanos Native American and African ancestry. In embracing hybridity as a resistant political strategy, we must be on guard to always
ask: where is the hybridity taking place, in whose interests, in what ways, and to what ends?21 To return to Wrights challenge to
Anzalda, the maquiladora managers are not new mestizas, because Anzaldas category is not a formal one, including only necessary
and sufficient conditions. Mestiza consciousness also entails an attention to harm and is future-oriented, anticipating liberating
possibilities in a nonindividualized manner
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Tostabilizethenewglobalworldorderthroughglobalizationandcapitalismonlydefines
andredefinesculturalbordersandcolonizesthosewhoarestucktryingtofitwithinit.
Sandoval00(Chela,AssistantProfessorofCriticalandCulturalTheoryfortheDepartmentofChicanoStudies
atUniversityofCalifornia,SantaBarbara, ...p.18.DAP)
Other efforts have been made to define and name this new global world order. So-called
multinational late capitalism is identified and defined in works ranging from Daniel Bells The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, to
Lyotards The Postmodern Condition.3But such works are flawed, their authors little more than apologists(71), Jameson asserts, for
what is a devastating and neocolonial global transformation. Rather
than confronting or challenging

postmodern neocolonizing forces, such intellectual workers are stubbornly producing
alarming new kinds of literary criticism, based on some new aesthetic of textuality or
criture (54). Or they are generating and even welcoming news of the arrival and
inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized post-industrial
society (Daniel Bell), he writes, but often also designated transnational society, consumer
society, media society, information society, electronic society, cyber society
or high tech, and the like (55). Scholarly approaches such as these to name, define,
and grapple with globalizing first world cultural conditions must be challenged as
sadly ineffective responses to the dangers and specificities of a neocolonizing cultural
condition that Jameson suggests we name post or even hyper modernism. But
this globalizing cultural force paradoxically generates, inspires, and demands these
very same intellectual analyses of it. This scholarship must be repudiated, Jameson writes, and understood to be
a complacent (yet delirious) camp-following celebration of the aesthetics of the neocolonial world of postmodernism, even and
including its social and economic dimension. For Jameson, it is surely unacceptable (85). For
the perversity of
postmodern socio/political/economic culture must be courageously confronted and
opposed in all its neocolonial dimensions and originality.
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Link: Heteronormativity Advantages

Historically the anti-immigration laws of the US are directly linked to the heteronormative
laws enforced on both non-white and non-same sex couples
Prez 3 (Emma, Assoc. Prof. of history at the University of Texas, El Paso, Frontiers: A Journal
of Women Studies 24.2&3 - 122-131) ALM
Moreover, I would take her premise and argue further that it
is not historical coincidence that the

classifications of homosexual and heterosexual appeared at the same time that the
United States began aggressively policing the borders between the United States and
Mexico. The change from the Texas Rangers, who policed Indian and Mexican territory in the nineteenth century, to the
Border Patrol, created in 1924 to police the border between the United States and
Mexico, occurred at the moment when a new form of anti-Mexican sentiment
emerged throughout the nation. The sentiment was linked to anti-immigrant acts that
would become laws against non-Northern-Europeans. As the borders in Texas, California, Arizona, and
New Mexico were pushed against by too many Mexicans crossing the Rio Bravo, trekking back and forth through land they had crossed
for centuries and paying little attention to anything but rising river banks, the
borders become more and more

closed and only opened up when a labor shortage demanded cheap laborers.
Meanwhile, a brown race was legislated against from fear that it could potentially
infect the purportedly pure, white race in the United States. Eugenicists and sexologists, according
12
to Somerville, worked hand in hand. Consequently, the border was closed as a result of scientific
racism clouded by a white colonial heteronormative gaze looking across a river to see
racial and sexual impurities. Throughout the 1880s, 1890s, and even as late as the 1900s, Mexicans crossed from Jurez
to El Paso and back again with ease. Not until 1917 did a law impose requirements on those crossing a political border. A head tax of
13
eight dollars per person and the ability to read restricted the crossings. I would ask, How did the emergent and rigid policing of the
border between the United States and Mexico in the early twentieth century reinforce a white colonial heteronormative way of seeing
and knowing that fused race with sex? Further investigation will illustrate that
the ideologies constructed around

race and sex [End Page 126] were linked to justify who was undesirable as a citizen in the
United States. Immoral and deviant behavior included anything that was not a
heterosexual marriage between a woman and man. In the El Paso of 1891, adultery could lead to the arrest
of both man and woman. Of course, someone would have to file a complaint to have them arrested, usually an unhappy third party. The
courts listened and adjudicated many cases of adultery in which Mexican women and men were thrown into jail because they
"unlawfully live together and have carnal intercourse" outside of marriage.
14
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Link: Terrorism Advantages

In the context of American prison policy and wars without end, the War on Terrorism is
an example of the contradictions within a democratic assertion of power in that it is a legal
borderland filled with spectral violence, full of people yet empty of humanity,
Campbell's SUV-driving Americans, riding roughshod over international environmental treaties, would seem to portray the United States
at the apex of its global power. Michelle Brown's essay brings us to a contemporary paradox. It was American global power that enabled
the United States to take power in Iraq and to control the Abu Ghraib prison there. And it was the actions of Americans torturing and
humiliating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib that now threaten American legitimacy. Abu Ghraib raises the question of whether this
exercise of power leads to the conditions for its own limitation.
The idea of a rule of law, the idea that law can contain power, has perhaps been most
threatened within the walls of Abu Ghraib. Here, the power of one nation is exercised
in another through the control of prisoners by their captors. The story that emerges from Abu Ghraib
would seem the opposite of the story of liberation Yoneyama finds in constructions of postwar Japan, as the prison is exposed as a site of
torture. Yet in "'Setting the Conditions' for Abu Ghraib: The Prison Nation Abroad," Brown
argues that conflicting

understandings of the prison torture photos were constructed through law. Two legal
frames dominated the understanding of the scandal. One focused on individual
culpability, the idea that the soldiers who abused Iraqi prisoners were rogue elements
in an otherwise lawful regime. The second frame focused instead on the dispersal of
authority across a network of government and private actors, under pressure in a
post-9/11 context.
While Abu Ghraib is often cast as an exceptional site, Brown sets it in the broader
context of American prison policy, and sees the "war on terror" in the context of
other "wars without end," against drugs and crime. Abu Ghraib, she argues, renders
"the fundamental contradictions of imprisonment in a democratic context acutely
visible." Ultimately Abu Ghraib falls into a contradictory space, "a legal borderland
filled with spectral violence, a space packed with people and yet profoundly empty of
its humanity."
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Link: Drug Trafficking

United States Federal Governments immigration policies on the Mexican border are
meant to stabilize the North and South dichotomy.
Ramlow '6 (Todd R., Bodies in the Borderlands: Gloria Anzaluda's and David Wojnarowicz's
Mobility Machines, MELUS, Volume: 31(3), Fall, p. 171-172. DAP)
Today, however, after nearly twenty years of US immigration policies, neoliberal economic transactions, and neverending revisiting of politics based on the perception of drug trafficking (narco-politics), we can see how those
borderlands have been the subject of state and citizen anxieties . The defining condition of
border politics today is the maintenance of a violent distinction between "North" and
"South," between "Us/US" and "Them." Since the 1990s, the US government's Operation
Gatekeeper (1994), Operation Hold the Line (1995), Operation Rio Grande (1998), and
Operation Safeguard (1999), have steadily increased INS and military patrolling of the
US/Mexico border from Brownsville/Matamoros to San Ysidro/Tijuana.
This focused attention to policing the borderlands has been given spectacular visual representation in
the military fences erected literally on the border, and in the case of the San Ysidro/Tijuana
fence, built, tellingly, of armor plating cast off from the first Persian Gulf War. This upswing in Homeland Security
surveillance has done little to alter illegal immigration patterns, however, despite the fact that
crossing northward has become increasingly deadly. The drive of the US government to "secure" this
border, and its repeated failures to do so, make Anzaldia's border theory and mestiza consciousness, and
Wojnarowicz's extensions of the same, more urgent than ever and might help us find, or re-imagine,
alternatives to ineffective institutional violence in the US/Mexico borderlands.
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Link: Critical Affs (Non- Transnational Feminism)

Western critical studies often create boundaries and exclusion of other areas of studies
which fails to include people and studies with intersecting ideas, creating an academic
Borderlands.
Donadey, 7 (Anne, Department of European Studies and Womens Studies at San Diego State University,
Overlapping and Interlocking Frames for Humanities Literature Studies: Assia Djebar, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Gloria
Anzaldua, College Literature, Fall, Volume: 34(4), p. 25. DAP)
Several thought-provoking comparative models along the lines that I am interested in have recently been proffered. The first scholar to
propose radical intersections between U.S. Third World feminist, postcolonial, and post-structuralist theory has been Chicana theorist
Chela Sandoval. In her long-awaited Methodology of the Oppressed, she argues that it
is crucial to map out

permeable boundar[ies] (2000, 130), points of intersection and divergence between
cognate, yet separate fields that are all motivated by what she calls an ethically
democratic imperative lest we be faced with constantly having to reinvent the wheel
(112). For example, Sandoval focuses on the permeable boundary between two thinkers who are
rarely discussed together, theorist of decolonization Frantz Fanon and French
structuralist Roland Barthes, proposing a new kind of interfacing: the ability to tell
another story, a differing version, facing the degree of difference between versions,
while recognizing a function that recurs in spite of all disparities . . . . The methodology
of the oppressed is that interfacing . . . a neorhetoric of love in the post-modern
world . . . as a means of social change (130) which operates differentially. This coalitional
consciousness must be able to shift to recognize the similarities and the differences
between fields of study (131). Sandoval demonstrates how Fanon and Barthes can be traced as possible precursors to
feminist theory and ethnic studies. She highlights the necessity of mapping out these fluid intersections in
order to avoid the danger of one field appropriating and denying the insights of
another, as Barthes and much academic work in the West unfortunately do (132). A major
difference that Sandoval foregrounds between Barthes and U.S.Third World feminism is that whereas Barthes felt alienated by the
mixture of oppositionality and complicity that his theory of semiology entailed, U.S. Third World feminism embraces this mixture as a
necessary standpoint for ensur ing survival and social evolution (133).
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Link: Western Academics

Western academics are preserved and preferred with the constant prevalence of Englishonly literature
The presence of multilingualism opens up the question of the ethics and politics of
translation, which scholars such as Gayatri Spivak (1993), Emily Apter (2001), and E. Anthony Hurley (2005) have
developed at length. Spivak argues that postcolonial studies is more accurately positioned in an interdisciplinary and/or crossdisciplinary framework rather than solely in English, and that the
graduate curriculum should include the indepth study of at least one language indigenous to the postcolonial world in order to
contravene the very imperium of English (1993, 277). This is equally true of the status
of French for francophone studies. In this context, it is important for scholars versed in
indigenous languages to publish studies of literature written in these non-dominant
languages, as well as studies analyzing the use of indigenous languages within works
written in English, Spanish, or French. While some writers present texts whose linguistic otherness is sutured
over through the use of translation of words and the presence of glossaries, others use multilingualism in order to destabilize the
dominant linguistic power position. Interesting comparisons can be drawn between writers making use of multilingualism in different
languages, such as the Berber and Arabic- inflected French of Algerian writer Assia Djebar, the Shona-inflected English of Zimbabwean
Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Spanish and Nahuatl-inflected English of Chicana thinker Anzalda. The
presence of
indigenous, national, or ethnic languages defamiliarizes dominant languages for a
native reader of English or French and makes those languages more hospitable to
native speakers
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Impacts: Feminism Turns

Through the process of naturalization the state selects bodies to produce as citizens in a
sexualized process of belonging. All the plan does is expand the net of desirability while
enforcing the states ability to choose desirable sexuality
If Carbado's essay fills one important gap in studies of naturalization, Siobhan Somerville's "Notes toward a Queer History of
Naturalization" addresses another. Somerville
usefully divides the concept of citizenship in the nation

from citizenship in the state; the former could be considered citizenship as a matter of
identitythe kinship, belonging, or bond that joins a people and differentiates them from
others. Citizenship in the state is also called formal citizenship, namely the processes that
determine legal membership in a territorial community. As she indicates, work on citizenship
and sexuality has attended much more closely to citizenship in the nation than to
citizenship in the state. But rules of formal citizenship must be understood also as
sexualized.
National borders are not only material and territorial; they are also rhetorical.
Conventional renderings of our national narrative cast the immigrant as the desiring
subject, longing to come to and belong to America. Somerville examines how the state
also functions as a site of affective power, whereby it selects objects of desire and
produces them as citizens. Naturalization is presumed to function as a salutary
corrective to birthright citizenship, as modeled along the lines of contract and choice
rather than ascriptive, accidental characteristics based upon blood. This essay casts a powerful
challenge to that presumption, in discerning how, at the inception of the American nation, naturalization
did not escape a sexualized logic of belonging. Rather, in the early national period,
naturalization depended upon the transmission of citizenship through biological
reproduction and presumed only certain subjects as "naturalizable," as capable of
"surviving or reproducing as if native." Thus, sexuality has stood at the core of
determining which bodies can be incorporated into belonging.
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The women of the borderlands are in constant danger caught in a double-bind of violence
and patriarchal protection
Anzaldua , former professor at SFSU, 87
Gloria Anzaldua, former Professor at San Francisco State University and leading scholar in
Chicano cultural theory and Queer theory. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza DJL
The world is not a safe place to live in. We shiver in separate cells in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the
panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking shock along with our morning coffee, fearing the torches being set to our buildings, the attacks
in the streets. Shutting down. Woman
does not feel safe when her own culture, and white culture, are
critical of her; when the males of all races hunt her as prey. Alienated from her mother culture, alien in the
dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self.
Petrified, she cant respond, her face caught between los in tersticios, the spaces between the different
worlds she inhabits. The ability to respond is what is meant by responsibility, yet our cultures
take away our ability to act-shackle us in the name of protection. Blocked, immobilized, we cant
move forward, cant move backwards. That writhing serpent movement, the very movement of life, swifter than lightning,
frozen.
Not me sold out my people but they me. So yes, though home permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I too am afraid of going home.
Though Ill defend my race and culture when they are attacked by non-mexicanos, conozco el malestarples its women, como burras, our strengths
used against us, lowly burras bearing humility with dignity The ability to serve, claim the males, is our highest virtue. I wonder how my culture
makes macho caricatures of its men.
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Impacts: Imperialism
US imperialism enacts violence necessary to maintaining colonial rule shrouded within a
romantic narrative of progress.
The belief in American exceptionalism has been fueled by the failure of the United States
to claim sovereignty over other nations to the extent that Western European powers did.
But imperial powers have also disclaimed sovereignty in the service of imperialism, as
contradictory as this might seem. Christina Duffy Burnett, in her essay "The Edges of Empire and the Limits of
Sovereignty: American Guano Islands," persuasively shows how American imperialism has, in part, consisted of
efforts to impose limits upon expansion. While, as she writes, we tend to associate
imperialism with "the expansion of territory, the projection of power, and the
imposition of sovereignty," American imperialism has also involved the
circumscribing of power to reduce the responsibilities that come with sovereignty .
Burnett mines the history of the American Guano Islands, as "seemingly insignificant" places in the history of American expansion, to
show the wide range of formal, legal practices of boundary management that attended territorial expansion. The Guano Islands
uninhabited but rich with fertilizer that led to a nineteenth-century craze for guanowere legally categorized as appertaining to the
United States, belonging to yet not a part of the United States. The uncertainty of the status of appurtenance created a flexibility to
implement control without responsibility. As with Guantnamo, the limiting of federal power, by reducing the responsibility of the
federal government to protect those on annexed territory, is no less an imperialist move than the extension of sovereignty to that territory.
If Burnett shows us that imperialism can be not just about expansion but about limits , Andrew
Hebard, in his essay "Romantic Sovereignty: Popular Romances and the American Imperial State in the Philippines," reminds us that
imperialism was also about mundane legal and bureaucratic work. As he notes, other scholars have
linked imperialism to the literary aesthetic of the romance, aligning the imaginary of an imperial nation to the imaginary of the romance.
But Hebard argues that conventions
of both romance and realism were reflected in the work of

imperialism, which involved both extraordinary and undemocratic acts of violence as
well as seemingly ordinary norms of colonial administration. Imperial administration
involved a necessary contradiction, an ambivalence between bureaucratic governance
and violence. Violence, says Hebard, was seen paradoxically as both incongruous to
civil governance and necessary for [End Page 603] its instantiation in the U.S. colony of the Philippines, apparent
through the simultaneous existence of both military and civil rule. The Philippines could be independent only when there was no longer
a need for tutelage and intervention; the narrative of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines explained violence through a story of progress
and benevolence. Thus, the
violence necessary to maintaining colonial rule became a

convention within a romantic narrative of progress. This was the common sense of
U.S. imperialism.
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The use of informal imperialism allows concealment of true motives, fueling dozens of
regional conflicts around the world which can grow into major world wars
Mooers 6, (Collin, THE NEW IMPERIALISTS: IDEOLOGIES OF EMPIRE, Chapter 6, Chair of the Department
of Politics and School of Public Adminstration at Ryerson University, Toronto)
The demise of the formal territorial empires in the second half of the twentieth century and the consequent decoupling of political power
from the extensive reach of capital accumulation has posed special advantages and problems of its own. For the American empire, from
The
lack of a formal empire has allowed the American state to present itself to the world
as a non- or even anti-imperialist power. It has been able to conceal its imperial
ambition in an abstract universalism . . . to deny the significance of territory and
geography altogether in the articulation of imperial power.6 But policing U.S. interests has had its
own costs and perils. The dogma of economic openness7 was dependent on either the
cooperation of compliant local regimes or, failing that, an increasing number of
small wars which, as one recent champion of such conflicts admits, might as well
be called imperial wars.8 In the twentieth century alone, it is estimated that the
United States sent troops or sponsored local forces to fight in sixty such small wars.
The hazard of small wars of empire is that they can turn into major ones, resulting
in the perennial danger of imperial overreach as happened most spectacularly for
the U.S. in Vietnam. American defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese famously established the conditions for the Vietnam
syndrome the belief that the U.S.A. could not and should not fight wars it could not
guarantee it would win. And winning in military terms meant the deployment of
overwhelming force, preferably against much weaker enemies as in the Grenada or
Panama invasions. The same guiding principle was in force in the 1991 Gulf War. It may have been premature for George
Woodrow Wilson onward, it was taken for granted that economic prosperity could be secured without territorial aggrandizement.5
Bush Sr. to declare an end to the Vietnam syndrome after that conflict since the very small number of allied deaths had not yet
sufficiently tested the American publics willingness to accept a larger number of casualties. The Vietnam syndrome proved alive and
well in the aftermath of the Somalian debacle of 1993 where 1,200 U.S. troops were routed by local warlords and forced to withdraw.
The Clinton Doctrine, which dominated military policy for the rest of the 1990s, sought to avoid U.S. casualties at all costs. Economic
openness, now enshrined under the equally euphemistic ideology of globalization, would be secured by means of a modern
equivalent of old-fashioned gunboats in cruise missiles and aircraft armed with precision-guided munitions.9
The Aff Policies are rooted in Anglo terrorism this creates conflict, war and death.
Mestiza DJL
The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority seized complete political power,
stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el
exillo fuimos desuiiados, destmncados, destripados-we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled,
dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history. Many, under the threat of Anglo
terrorism, abandoned homes and ranches and went to Mexico. Some stayed and protested. But as the courts, law
enforcement officials, and government officials not only ignored their pleas but penalized them for their efforts, tejanos had no other recourse but
armed retaliation. After Mexican-American resisters robbed a train in Brownsville, Texas on October 18, 1915, Anglo vigilante groups began
lynching Chicanos. Texas Rangers would take them into the brush and shoot them. One hundred Chicanos were killed in a matter of months,
whole families lynched. Seven thousand fled to Mexico, leaving their small ranches and farms. The Anglos, afraid that the maclcanosw would
seek independence from the U.S., brought in 20,000 army troops to put ( an end to the social protest movement in South Texas.
had finally fomented into an all out war."
Race hatred
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The boarder creates a third country, filled with ten million human lives that are faceless,
nameless, invisible, and taunted, this is the borderland, were its thought of nothing more
than a war zone.
Mestiza DJL
We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks. Today we are witnessing la migration de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odyssey to
the historical/mythological Aztln. This time, the traffic is from south to north.El retomo to the promised land first began with the Indians from
Immigration continued in the next

three centuries, and, in this century, it continued with the braceros who helped to build our
railroads and who picked our fruit. Today thousands of Mexicans are crossing the border legally
and illegally; ten million people without documents have returned to the Southwest. Faceless,
nameless, invisible, taunted with Hey cucaracho(cockroach). Trembling with fear, yet filled
with courage, a courage born of desperation. Barefoot and uneducated, Mexicans with hands like
boot soles gather at night by the river where two worlds merge creating what Reagan calls a
frontline, a war zone. The convergence has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third
country, a closed country.
the interior of Mexico and the rnestizos that came with the conquistadores in the 1500s.
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State power proceeds from but is not limited by the geographic space mapped as
America wherein law does not provide a boundary around the powers of sovereignty, but
instead provides a language through which state power is invoked. The way American law
is imagined and understood outside of its borders allows western colonialism to a
borderless imperialism.
If state power proceeds from, but is not limited by, the geographic space mapped as
"America," how are boundaries of American power drawn? Are there boundaries, or has
the globe itself become an American space? Does law play a role in negotiating the terms
of American power in the world? Long before the idea of "preemptive war" entered American political discourse and
before the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to define a new level of depravity in global perceptions [End Page 604] of Americans, there
Law does
not provide a boundary around the powers of sovereignty, but instead provides a
language within which state power is invoked. The essays in this section engage the question of where in the
was little faith in the idea that law and legal institutions served as an enforceable brake in the arena of global politics.
world American legal ideas and institutions operate, and examine how legal categories play a role in constructing an American sphere in
the world and in defining the terms of entry to that sphere.
Empire is usually thought of as the ultimate expression of a nation's power in other regions of the world. The essence of empire is the
conquest of foreign territory, and imperial power is exercised through control of that territory. The essays on borders of territory show
that American exercise of imperial power has also involved a disclaiming of sovereign power over territory that it in fact controls. In this
section, Teemu Ruskola, in "Canton Is Not Boston: The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty," introduces a third way of
conceptualizing empire, and along the way reframes the way we might think of nations themselves.
The role of American law outside of U.S. territory depends on how other regions of
the world are imagined and understood. In the nineteenth century, suggests Ruskola, the world was not divided
only into the categories of sovereign and "savage." Although this binary categorization constituted the
primary justification for Western colonialismthe physical occupation and control of
"savage" territoriesthere was a third category of "semicivilized" peoples. Such
peoples might possess a degree of sovereignty, yet they could not impose their laws on
the "civilized," even when the "civilized" came within the borders of their territory.
This practice of Western extraterritorial jurisdiction constituted a form of borderless,
nonterritorial imperialism.
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Impacts: Biopower
We need to decolonize all relations of power that are constructed by a white colonial
heteronormative gaze that biopolitically controls and regulates populations.
The
borderlands have been [End Page 122] imprinted by bodies that traverse the region, just as
bodies have been transformed by the laws and customs in the regions we call
borderlands. In the History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault challenges us to look closely at bodies
and how they are engraved and transformed through laws, customs, and moralities
imposed upon them through centuries. 2 He is not as direct about coloniality, but we can still borrow from a
I began with this passage in order to inscribe a gaze on the borderlands that is geographic and spatial, mobile and impermanent.
critique that exemplifies how land is imprinted and policed by those traversing and claiming it as they would claim a bodyboth
becoming property for the colonizers. Native Americans became as much the property of the Spanish as did the land that came to be
known as the Spanish borderlands.
To unravel colonialist ideology, I put forth my notion of decolonizing history

embedded in a theoretical construct that I name the decolonial imaginary. This new
category can help us rethink history in a way that makes agency for those on the
margins transformative. Colonial, for my purposes here, can be defined simply as the rulers
versus the ruled, without forgetting that those colonized may also become like the
rulers and assimilate into a colonial mind-set. This colonial mind-set believes in a
normative language, race, culture, gender, class, and sexuality. The colonial
imaginary is a way of thinking about national histories and identities that must be
disputed if contradictions are ever to be understood, much less resolved. When
conceptualized in certain ways, the naming of things already leaves something out,
leaves something unsaid, leaves silences and gaps that must be uncovered. The history of the United States has been
circumscribed by an imagination steeped in unchallenged notions. This means that even the most radical of histories
are influenced by the very colonial imaginary against which they rebel. 3 I argue that the
colonial imaginary still determines many of our efforts to revise the past, to reinscribe
the nation with fresh stories in which so many new voices unite to carve new
disidentities, to quote Deena Gonzlez and Jos Esteban Munoz. 4 If we are dividing the stories from our past into categories
such as colonial relations, postcolonial relations, and so on, then I propose a decolonial imaginary as a
rupturing space, the alternative to that which is written in history. 5 How do we contest the past
to revise it in a manner that tells more of our stories? In other words, how do we decolonize our history? To decolonize our
history and our historical imaginations, we must uncover the voices from the past
that honor multiple experiences, instead of falling prey to that which is easy
allowing the white colonial heteronormative gaze to reconstruct and interpret our
past.
In my own work, I have attempted to address colonial relations, of land and bodies, particularly of women, particularly of Chicanas in
the Southwest. I argue that a colonial imaginary hovers above us always as we interpret our past and present. I argue that we
must
move into the decolonial imaginary to decolonize [End Page 123] all relations of power,
whether gendered or sexual or racial or classed.
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Impacts: Dehumanization
The acts of policing borders structures a border binary that stabilizes parochialism,
patriarchy, and patriotism which dehumanizes each mestiza.
David Wojnarowicz's Mobility Machines, MELUS, Volume: 31(3), Fall, p. 175176. DAP)
the mestiza consciousness is born out of exclusion, out of the inaccessibility of both
sides of the border to queers of all sorts. "We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or
Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one
cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one" (Borderlands 63). The borderlands
are, of course, policed on "this side" by la migra, the INS, and an ever increasing
deployment of military resources and surveillance. Del otro lado is policed by a dominant
cultural logic intolerant of physical and sexual differences. As Anzaldua asserts: "I abhor my
culture's ways, how it cripples its women, como burras, our strengths used against us, lowly
burras bearing humility with dignity. ... I abhor how my culture makes macho caricatures of its men"
(Borderlands 21-22). These normalizing discourses are not, of course, unique to either side of this binary; they are
ordering principles that structure both. Parochialism, patriotism, and patriarchy
make up a trinity of exclusion and exploitation . In between these exclusions are the
borderlands, a physical and abstract space conditioned by the policing of bodily and
sexual difference.
In the borderlands
The Aff has condemned women and homosexuals to order, anything outside of the norm
leads to a lesser, non-human life, or death.
Mestiza DJL pg 40
My culture, selfishness is condemned, especially in women; humility and selflessness, the
absence of selfishness, is considered a virtue. In the past, acting humble with members outside the family ensured that you
would make no one envidioso (envious); therefore he or she would not use witch- craft against you. If you get above yourself, youre an
envidiosa. If
you dont behave like everyone else, la gente will say that you think youre better than
others, que te owes grande. With ambition (condemned in the Mexican culture and valued in the Anglo) comes envy nesprro carries
with it a set of rules so that social categories and hierarchies will be kept in order: respect is
reserved for la abuelq papd, elpatrn, those with power in the community. Women are at the bottom of the ladder one
rung above the deviants. The Chicano, mextcano, and some Indian cultures have no tolerance for deviance. Deviance is
whatever is condemned by the community. Most societies try to get rid of their deviants. Most
cultures have burned and beaten their homosexuals and others who deviate from the sexual
common. The queer are the mirror reflecting the heterosexual tribes fear: being different, being
other and therefore lesser, therefore sub-human, in-human, non-human.
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Impacts: Gender Violence

Women immigrants are raped, prostituted, starved and she leaves everything behind to
cross the borderlands, only to be deported or live a life of heartache and physical
helplessness.
Mestiza DJL
The Mexican woman is especially at risk. Often the coyote (smuggler) doesnt feed her for days
or let her go to the bathroom. Often he rapes her or sells her into prostitution. She cannot call on
county or state health or economic resources because she doesn't know English and she fears
deportation. American employers are quick to take advantage of her helplessness. She cant go
home. Shes sold her house, her furniture, borrowed from friends in order to pay the coyote who
charges her four or Have thousand dollars to smuggle her to Chicago. She may work as a live-in
maid for white, Chicano or Latino households for as little as $15 a week. Or working the
garment industry, do hotel work. Isolated and worried about her family back home, afraid of
getting caught and deported, living with as many as fifteen people in one room, the mexicana
suffers serious health problems. Se enferma de los nervios, de alta pres. La mojada, la mujer
lndocumentada, is doubly threatened in this country. Not only does she have to contend with
sexual violence, but like all women, she is prey to a sense of physical helplessness. As a refugee,
she leaves the familiar and all home-ground to venture into unknown and possibly dangerous
territory. This is her home this thin edge of barbwire.
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Impacts: Poverty
The otherness created by the physical separation of the borders causes poverty and
institutionalized violence
David Wojnarowicz's Mobility Machines, MELUS, Volume: 31(3), Fall, p. 178.
DAP)
Throughout Wojnarowicz's travels, the same outcasts and queers who occupy Anzaldfia's la frontera populate his shadowy borderlands.
Driving through the American southwest, Wojnarowicz draws our attention to the many Navajo
men, Native American families, and Chicano teenagers who live in these borderlands,
and whose lives are seemingly invisible to the normate culture that surrounds them . For these
mestizaje, poverty and human misery are the spoils of their Otherness, and they are as
close to and far from the normate as the "real world" is from the inside of one's car. Imagining the normate
subject's response to scenes of abjection, Wojnarowicz asserts the norm's refusal to see the
misery it causes, or to recognize its own role in that abjection.
Owning a vehicle, you could drive by and with the pressure of your foot on the accelerator and with your eyes on the road you could
pass it quickly .... The
images of poverty would lift and float and recede quickly like the gray
shades of memory so that these images were in the past before you came upon them .
(Close 31) Wojnarowicz, of course, cannot make such a refusal, because he has himself experienced the violence and scorn of the
normate. Elsewhere Wojnarowicz identifies with a Native Americanteenager who had disrupted the morning rush hour in an unnamed
southwest city by turning into oncoming traffic and running down a white college student. While he doesn't necessarily condone such
institutionally validated
murderous violence routinely perpetrated against cripples, queers, and mestiza/os : "I
murderous violence, Wojnarowicz empathizes with the Native American boy's reaction to the
wondered why any of these things, like the kid in his camaro, are
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Impacts: Colonization
Granting citizenship today still practices colonial mindsets where
immigrants, whether colonized or entering a border, give up their
political autonomy, which ultimately justifies oppression and
disposable labor.
and State University, April 24, p. 8-9. DAP)
This mechanism was crucial to sustain colonization since colonized
people were, obviously, not considered

citizens of the imperial government; thereby they should not have access to rights
since they were not considered citizens in the first place. Castro-Gomez gives us a similar argument that is worth
transcribing at length:
Citizenship was not only restricted to men who were married, literate, heterosexual,
and proprietors, but also, and especially, to men who were white. In turn, the individuals that
fell outside the space of citizenship were not only the homosexuals, prisoners, mental
patients and political dissidents Foucault had in mind, but also blacks Indians, mestizos,
gypsies, Jews, and now, in terms of globalization, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and Auslandern
(foreigners) (Castro-Gomez and Johnson, 2000: 513).
To be sure, Europeans not only denied colonized people a citizen status but they also
classified native people as inhuman, devilish, or even animals, as inscribed in the philosophies
predicated by Kant (1764), Hegel (1822), and others who considered that underdevelopment was a characteristic proper of nonEuropeans (Natter, 2008). Thus, since
colonized people could not be treated as equals, it was

quite acceptable to use their labor and land to benefit the colonizers, a belief that has
been extended to the present-day, as Mignolo and Tlostanova explain:
[T]he rhetoric of modernity (and globalization) of salvation continues to be implemented on the
assumption of the inferiority or devilish intentions of the other and, therefore, continues to
justify oppression and exploitation as well as the eradication of the difference (Mignolo
and Tlostanova, 2006: 206).
Change, in the European view, consisted of turning savages into "gentlemen" and of bringing them into civilization. However, until
the moment when that change actually happened, Europeans
did not need to take into account the voice,

contributions, and knowledge of the colonized . In that way, the epistemologies of indigenous peoples were
shadowed in obscurantism, and reason was considered a characteristic exclusively associated with whiteness, where epistemologies of
colored people were denied as such. Accounts of this have been recorded by researchers such as Dwight Conquergood who explains,
[s]ince the enlightenment project of modernity, the first way of knowing has been preeminent. Marching under the banner of science
and reason, it has disqualified and repressed other ways of knowing that are rooted inembodied experience, orality and local
contingencies (Conquergood, 2002: 146). On similar lines, we find Mignolo and Tlostanova (2006), who complain that the
epistemologies of the colonized were erased from world history, since they held no
value in the eyes of Europeans. Thus, the following step in colonization consisted of imposing
assimilation into European settler cultures; that is how the Nahuatl and Maya
languages were changed into Spanish, the Congolese, Kituba, or Lingala into French,
or the Dahomeyan into English. This was also the reason why millions of people were forced to
abandon their religion in order to be converted into Christianity. In sum, the culture,
traditions, and religion of colonized people were used against them to justify
oppression. For instance, the art and writing of the Maya civilization was destroyed under
the justification that Maya texts were considered pagan. Similarly, the religious rites and
human sacrifices of the Aztec culture were used as a justification for the destruction
and subjugation of the Aztec people.
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US colonial imperialism threatens global conflict

Kuang et al 5 (Xinnian, teaches modern Chinese literature at Tsinghua University, Preemptive
War and a World Out of Control http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v013/13.1kuang.html)
The existing world order was constructed under the leadership of the United States following World War II. The United Nations, the
representative of this order, is certainly not an entirely democratic organization. Since its inception, the United Nations has been
controlled by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. These two superpowers used the United Nations as a stage on
which to vie for power. But it is important to note that [End Page 159] neither the United States nor the Soviet Union doubted the
significance or efficacy of the United Nationsand the United States, in particular, used the United Nations to export its values to the
rest of the world. Both their confrontations and their mutual hold on power gave the second half of the twentieth century a long peace.
However, after
the collapse of the U.S.S.R., the surviving hegemon, the United States, no
longer had the patience to use the United Nations to put forward its own values, but
rather pursued what might be referred to as peace under imperial domination (diguo
tongzhi xia de heping). America's invasion of Iraq has damaged the authority of the United
Nations and the principle of the inviolability of national sovereignty. Before the war broke out, Bush repeatedly sent out warnings in
which he stated that if the Security Council refused to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force, the United Nations would become
irrelevant. Some hawks in the administration and conservative newspapers even threatened that the United States could withdraw from
The strategy of preemption as espoused by

American neoconservatism, along with new interpretations of sovereignty, will bring about a revolution
in the twenty-first century, and the war in Iraq will serve as a model. The United States will use its
neo-imperialist imagination in an attempt to recreate the so-called rogue states and
restore world order. The strategy of preemption is a sign of America's abandonment
of both traditional Western international regulatory systems and the principle of rule by law as established
under the U.N. charter. Instead, America is bringing about the return to an era where naked
power takes preeminence. At a press conference held June 27, 2003, after talks with the French minister of foreign
the United Nations, bringing it to an ignominious end.
affairs, Dominique de Villepin, Nelson Mandela commented on this shift: "Since the establishment of the U.N., there have been no world
wars; therefore, anybody, and particularly the leaders of the superpowers, who takes unilateral action outside the frame of the U.N. must
receive the condemnation of all who love peace." On a visit to Ireland on June 20, 2003, he went on to say, "Any organization, any
country, any movement that now decides to sideline the United Nations, that country and its leader are a danger to the world. We cannot
allow the world to again degenerate into a place where the will of the powerful dominates over all other considerations ."4 [End Page
The strategy of preemption is not simply a military strategy, but is, in fact, a kind
of barbaric politics, a serious attack against civilized humanity. It is ultimately tied to the question
160]
of whether the world is seeking civilization and order, or whether it is entering into a period of violence and chaos. The United States'
adoption of this strategy provoked the intense opposition of Europe and, indeed, the entire world because many believe that a strategy of
preemption would take the world in the latter direction. As a result of the Iraq War, a deep rift was opened up between America and its
Modern history, beginning in 1492,

has been a Eurocentric history of colonialism, imperialism, and expansion. However, the
United States has replaced Europe as imperialist colonizer. The imagination of
American neoconservative politics has inspired the United States to become a
tyrannical and self-appointed hegemon, willfully changing global boundaries, and a
particularly intense force for the destruction of world order. Europe, on the other hand, has become a
western European allies, to which the media now frequently affix the label "Old Europe."
force for rationality and civilization. The dispute that arose between Europe and America during the Iraq War was both a conflict of
potential profit and a sign of civilizational disparity.
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Alternative: Mestiza Consciousness

A liberating culture must contain the mestizo which prioritizes solidarity with oppressed
groups and resolves the oppressive relationship immigrants have with the US
In a 1998 interview with Andrea Lunsford, Anzalda described herself as a
kind of international citizen whose

life and privileges are not equal to the rights and privileges of ordinary, Anglo, White,
Euro-American people [Lunsford 5]. In calling for an awareness of an international
perspective, Anzaldas immediate concerns are the colonial situation of Chicanas and Chicanos, the
neocolonial relationship between the United States and Mexico, and Mexican
immigration to the United States. In an oft-cited passage, she writes that the U.S.-Mexican border es
una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first
and bleeds [Borderlands 3]. She recounts an anecdote in which a young boy who is a fifth-generation US citizen is deported for
not having papers [4]. A bit later, she describes the conditions of migration and immigration,
noting that for many the choice is to stay in Mexico and starve or move north and
live [10]. US economic exploitation in Mexico and military intervention and covert
action in other regions of Central America have been major causes of continued
Latino immigration to the United States, where Latinos have become a highly
exploited reserve labor force. A liberating Chicano culture must be able to imagine
itself within a space that contains not only mestizo Mexican Americans, but pure
blooded (nonmestizo) indigenous Mexican peasants, Salvadoran Americans, and exploited workers for
Du Pont, whether in the United States, Mexico, or India. She expands on this notion of solidarity (or critical
universalism) in a 1993 interview with AnaLouise Keating. There she posits as a goal a notion of solidarity in which
there are connections, commonalities as well as differences. And the differences dont get erased,
and the commonalities dont become all-important; they dont become more important than the differences or vice versa [Keating 111].
In other words, solidarity
with other oppressed groups cannot be merely a secondary goal,

as it was with Chicano cultural nationalism. Anzalda has learned from life in the
Borderlands that exploitation and oppression do not recognize cultural or national
borders [Borderlands 77, 195]. As she notes, Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the
inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens whether they possess
documents or not, whether theyre Chicanos, Indians or Blacks
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The destructive effects of nationalism appropriate the concepts of identity whereas

Anzalduas mestiza consciousness opens the possibility to liberate beyond those identities
Hames-Garca 00 (Michael, Asst. Prof. English and of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at
Binghamton University - Diacritics (30.4 102-103)
One of the most crucial questions facing leftist activists and intellectuals today is the question of nationalism and its relation to liberation
1
struggles. A century ago, the period [End Page 102] of nation-state consolidation in Europe seemed to come to an end with the
unification of Germany and Italy. European leftists of the era tended to address "the national question" primarily with regard to those
European nations that were shut out or suppressed by nation-state formation. Debates about national culture resurfaced in a
revolutionary context when independence movements swept Africa and Asia during and after World War II, and a substantial body of
literature attempting to integrate anticolonial struggle, national liberation, and socialism arose from the capitalist "periphery." Much of
this literature, and the wars for independence out of which it grew, adapted the language of nationalism to its own purposes. These
movements gave new hope that national liberation struggles would prove compatible with greater human freedom and equality. Despite
that hope, the destructive effects of nationalism are today visible everywhere: for example, the
devastating wars in the Balkans, the repression of indigenous peoples by national bourgeoisie throughout the Americas, religiousnational strife between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, the vertiginous intensification of national chauvinism in the United States,
Western Europe, and Australia. Simultaneously,
and in the context of feminist criticisms of

nationalism [see, for example, Chatterjee, Nation; Lutz et al.; Mosse], attempts to unite the struggle to
liberate "the nation" from colonial or neocolonial domination with progressive
struggles against capitalist exploitation and against sexual- and gender-based
domination continue [see, for example, Trask]. In Latin America, anticapitalist struggles
lauded by Western socialists regularly take the form of national liberation struggles ,
such as the EZLN (Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional [Zapatist National Liberation Army]) in Mexico and the FSLN (Frente
Sandinista de Liberacin Nacional [Sandinist National Liberation Front]) in Nicaragua. Additionally,
lesbian and gay

activists and theorists in the United States have frequently sought to appropriate
nationalist rhetoric even as black and Chicano nationalist movements have been on
the decline [see, for example, Berlant and Freeman; Moraga 145-74].
Debates about anticolonial struggle and "Third World" nationalism may seem at first to be an odd context into which to introduce the
work of Gloria Anzalda. Critical writing on Anzalda's work has tended not to consider its relevance to debates on the relations among
2
capitalism, colonialism, and national culture. Instead, her major work, Borderlands/La Frontera, is usually discussed (or, more often
than not, simply cited) as a contribution to feminist and antiracist discussions about the construction of the self within multiple contexts
3
of domination and about that self's resistance to oppression and struggle for recognition. While acknowledging the importance of
Anzalda's contributions to these discussions, this essay examines Borderlands as offering a forward-looking alternative to nationalism,
4
specifically, to Chicano cultural nationalist positions articulated during the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the Chicano Movement. I
argue that central
to this project is a critical, non-Eurocentric reconceptualization of the

Marxist project of human emancipation. In exploring Anzalda's alternative, I
analyze the mythic symbolism and appropriation of cultural nationalist tropes in her
theoretical elaboration [End Page 103] of "mestiza 5 consciousness" and look at some
objections that have been raised to her theories. This project contends that valuable
contributions would be lost if we were to relegate the work of feminist, queer, and/or
Chicana and Chicano thinkers to questions strictly and directly related to their
identities. In other words, I believe that writers like Anzalda have something to say in addition to what it is like to be a Chicana
lesbian.
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We need to examine this apartheid in more detail before we investigate its remedy, la
conciencia de la mestiza is the first commitment to solvency.
Sandoval 00 (Chela, Assistant Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory for the
Department of Chicano Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, ... p. 18. DL
More obvious for contemporary cultural theorists in the human and social sciences, though, is
the commitment to this mode of differential and oppositional consciousness that has emerged in the writings of a diverse array of
scholars, including Stuart Hall, Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Gloria Anzalda, Gayatri Spivak, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Hayden White, Patricia Hill Collins, Jos Este- ban Muoz,
Emma Prez, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. They
all have developed separate terminologies for a theory and

method of oppositional consciousness, or at least ex plored and specified the varying
dimensions of its differential form. It is no accident that over the last twenty years of the
twentieth century new terms such as hybrid ity, nomad thought, marginalization, la
conciencia de la mestiza, trickster consciousness, masquerade, eccentric subjectivity, situated knowledges,
schizo- phrenia, la facultad, signifin, the outsider/within, strategic essentialism, diffrance, rasquache, performativity,
coatlicue, and the third meaning entered into intellectual currency as terminological inventions meant to specify and reinforce
particular forms of resistance to dominant social hierarchy. 2 Taken
together, such often seemingly contending

terms indicate the existence of what can be understood as a cross-disciplinary and
contemporary vocabulary, lexicon, and grammar for thinking about oppositional
consciousness and social movements under globalizing postmodern cultural conditions.
Oddly, however, the similar conceptual undergirding that unifies these terminologies has not become intellectual ground in the academy
for recognizing new forms of theory and method capable of advancing interdisciplinary study. 3 This divisive and debilitating
phenomenon plagues intellectual production, and it is not unlike the division that plagues the rest of the social world, the academic
manifestation of which can be recognized as a racialization of theoretical domains, itself another symptom of the twenty-first century
biopolitical race and gender wars predicted by Foucault. Let
us examine this apartheid in more detail before

we investigate its remedy, which the subsequent chapters begin to unravel in the works of Roland Barthes and Frantz
Fanon, among many others.
The mestiza consciousness solves for rape, violence and war

Mestiza DJL pg 102
The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object dueling that keeps
her a prisoner and to show in, the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is
transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between
males and females, lies in healing the split", that originates in the very foundation of our
lives, our culture our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in
the individual and collective consciousness' is the beginning of a long struggle, but one
could, in our hopes bring us to the end of rape, of violence of war.
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Alternative Solvency
Binary struggles cause struggles in the consciousness. Each act from each witness compiles
a stronger resistance to the binary illusion which is key to dismantling institutional
oppressions.
Both Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz see observation
and witnessing as a key to challenging and

transforming the experience of oppression within the borderlands, and the tyranny of
binaries and dualism. Images, imagery, and vision play a central part in their textual
worlds. They bear witness to the social, psychological, and physical effects of
exclusion, binarism, and violence. Anzaldia and Wojnarowicz are engaged in what Norma Alarcon has called a
"re-vision[ing]" that might "topple the traditional patriarchal mythology" and
structures of power (182). Of course, Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz topple not only patriarchy, but also
heteronormativity, compulsory able-bodiedness, and institutional racism (mutually
constitutive discourses and institutions). Both are aware of the double bind of the gaze and the dangers of
looking, the danger that the looking back might be turned into the objectifying gaze of dominant power. Anzaldfa remarks that there
is "[s]eeing and being seen. Subject and object, I and she. The glance can freeze us in place; it can 'possess'
us. It can erect a barrier against the world . But in a glance also lies awareness, knowledge" (Borderlands 42). These
"contradictory aspects" of seeing are settled for Anzaldua in the difference she asserts between viewing and witnessing: " The
'witness' is a participant in the enactment of the work in a ritual, and not a member
of the privileged classes" (Borderlands 68). The witness is acted upon by power and sees that
power acting in similar ways upon others, which is the basis for strategic alliance or
bridging in/of the borderlands.Similarly, for Wojnarowicz witnessing and disclosure are
the tools that will dismantle binarism and its ordering of society. Close to the Knives is
Wojnarowicz's account of his life and of the effects of AIDS on him, his friends, his subculture(s), and the nation at large. It also
serves as rumination on Self/Other politics and government in an age of AIDS. On the politics of his
art and writing Wojnarowicz remarks, "I'm not so much interested in creating literature as I am in trying to convey the pressure of what
I've witnessed or experienced" (In the Shadow of the American Dream 235). He further states: " Each
public disclosure of
a private reality becomes something of a magnet that can attract others with a similar
frame of reference; thus each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves
as a dismantling tool against the illusion of ONE-TRIBE NATION; it lifts the curtains
for a brief peek and reveals the probable existence of literally millions of tribes" (Close
121). Wojnarowicz's eye/I witnessing describes the limits and violence of binarism, the structure upon which the
authority and consciousness of the dominant is imagined and maintained. What he
uncovers is multiplicity, both individual and collective, and the possibility of
connection and alliance.
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We must confront white heteronormative ways of seeing and knowing through a strategy of
disidentification and reinterpret them with a decolonial queer gaze
In my study of Chicanas, I've put forth the notion of the decolonial imaginary as a means not only of finding women who have been so
hidden from history, but also as a way of honoring their agency, which is often lost. The premise that Mexican women are passive wives
who follow their men had to be contested. Now, I'm asking, how is the decolonial imaginary useful for lesbian history and queer
studies?
If we have inherited a colonial white heteronormative way of seeing and

knowing, then we must retrain ourselves to confront and rearrange a mind-set that
privileges certain relationships. A colonial white heteronormative gaze, for example, will interpret widows only as
heterosexual women mourning husbands. In his book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Munoz
argues that queers
of color are left out of representation in a space "colonized by the logics

of white normativity and heteronormativity." For Munoz, disidentification is the third mode of dealing with
dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy.
7
For me, disidentification
is that strategy of survival that occurs within a decolonial

imaginary. In other words, the queer-of-color gaze is a gaze that sees, acts,
reinterprets, and mocks all at once in order to survive and to reconstitute a world
where s/he is not seen by the white colonial heteronormative mind. As my queer vaquera baby
butch gazes upon the land that her family settled upon, she is refashioning that space, re-establishing her relationship to that land as a
tejana and as a queer who will no longer have rights to land and history. She will be erased by the white colonial heteronormative mind.
And so, we will make her up or locate documents to uncover a history of sexuality on the borderlands that is hidden from the untrained
eye.
How do we train the eye to see with a decolonial queer gaze that disidentifies from the normative in order to survive? The history of
sexuality on and in the borderlands looks heteronormative to many historians who scrutinize marriage records, divorce records, and even
court cases on adultery. To
disidentify is to look beyond white colonial heteronormativity to

interpret documents differently. Historians have explored race, class, gender, ethnicity, and nation, region; however,
sexuality, and more specifically, queer history, has only recently joined the ranks of serious scrutiny. Generally, historians of sexuality in
the United States and Europe have offered key books and articles that examine the lives of women and men in New York, Buffalo,
London, San Francisco, and even the South. For example, historians like Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, [End Page 124] George
Chauncy Jr., Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline D. Davis, Lillian Faderman, Randolph Trumbach, Lisa Duggan, and John Howard
uncover queer histories in the United States and Britain while the Southwest borderlands is quite nearly untouched. 8 Historical studies
that focus upon Chicanas/os and Mexicans of the Southwest primarily highlight immigrant and labor studies, social histories of
communities, and biographies of heroes or heroines. The study of gender and sexuality, however, are central in works by Deena
Gonzlez, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820-1880 ; Ramn Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn
Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 ; and Antonia Castaneda, "Sexual Violence in the
Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian Women and the Spanish Conquest of Alta California." 9 Queer histories of the Southwest
and of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are that much more marginal; however, there are as many questions as there are sources for
interrogation. Cultural
and literary texts, newspapers, police records, widows' wills, court dockets, medical
of these and more must be reinterpreted
with a decolonial queer gaze so we may interrogate representations of sexual deviants
and track ideologies about sex and sexuality.
records, texts by sexologists, religious tracts, as well as corridos all
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Seeing through a decolonial queer gaze allows for different interpretations of what is
beyond a heteronormative imaginary that doesnt dismiss what is unfamiliar but instead
honors the differences between and among us.
Historical research on and of borderland queers is not as abundant. Part of the problem is that the queer gaze has only recently become
sanctioned. Queer history, after all, is a new, growing field. Despite
the practice of queering our daily lives,

academic institutions and disciplines have discouraged that "oh so disturbing" queer
gaze. Our epistemological shift, however, has already begun to challenge rhetoric and
ideologies about racialized sexualities. To queer the border is to look at the usual
documents with another critical eye, a nonwhite, noncolonial, nonheteronormative
eye. A decolonial queer gaze would permit scholars to interrogate medical texts,
newspapers, court records, wills, novels, and corridos with that fresh critical eye. Graduate students at
the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) are scrutinizing some of these records in order to construct the queer history of the border. In
the History Department, I offered for the first time a graduate seminar on "Gender and Sexuality on the Border," in which queer history
was explored. In the seminar, graduate students conducted research on El Paso/Jurez, tracking gay, lesbian, and queer histories through
the centuries. Because the majority of historical studies on gender and sexuality ignore the geographic border between the
United States and Mexico, these graduate students and I realized that it is difficult to assess how to pursue research on queers
in this region. We also concluded that "queer" history included anyone who was considered "deviant," therefore we expanded whom
we studied and how we conducted our studies. We found ourselves "queering" the documents. This was a daunting task; however, the
students were creative as they challenged white heteronormative sexualities in studies that explored, for example, Jurez transvestites in
their work place, prostitution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lesbian oral histories of the El Paso community, gay
and lesbian activists of El Paso, and Mexican American women's agency in the colonias of El Paso. Some of these studies are ongoing.
UTEP's Ph.D. program in Borderlands History, the only one of its kind in the nation, is regionally specific to the United States and
Mexico, and therefore is drawing students of color who are Chicana/o and Mexican nationals. A core faculty in the department is
training students whose research interests include gender/sexuality/race/ethnicity in the borderlands, the Mexican Revolution, histories
of Colonial Mexico, the Southwest, Latin America and Spain, as well as comparative world borders. But what about the gaps and
silences? I know that nineteenth-century tejanas lived and roamed the "wild West" and probably knew how to handle a [End Page 128]
six-shooter and ride a horse, and I'm sure there were those who passed as men and those who loved women. As much as I would love to
stumble upon diaries, journals, and letters written by queer vaqueras of the nineteenth century, I must challenge my own desire for the
usual archival material and the usual way of seeing, as well as honor that which women scholars before me have uncovered. While I'll
not always find the voices of the subaltern, the women, the queers of color, I will have access to a world of documents rich with
ideologies that enforce white, colonial heteronormativity. A white
heteronormative imaginary has defined

how researchers and historians as well as cultural critics have chosen to ignore or
negate the populations who are on the margins, outside of normative behavior,
outside of twentieth-century nuclear white heterosexual family systems. I am arguing
for a decolonial queer gaze that allows for different possibilities and interpretations of
what exists in the gaps and silences but is often not seen or heard. I am arguing for
decolonial queer interpretations that obligate us to see and hear beyond a
heteronormative imaginary. I am arguing for decolonial gendered history to take us
into our future studies with perspectives that do not deny, dismiss, or negate what is
unfamiliar, but instead honors the differences between and among us.
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The Coatlicue goddess serves as the Chicano-feminist representation of practice and

implementation of the mestiza consciousness, proving that it solves for the feminist and
anticolonial struggle.
Borderlands, Diacritics, Volume: 30(4), p. 110-111. DAP)
The topography of the psychological and mythic terrain she describes is the key, because it is a place filled with contradiction, pain, and
discomfort. Growth of the self and transformation of consciousness, Anzalda wants us to be sure, cannot happen when one is
comfortable. Her theorization
of the Borderlands makes struggle, particularly feminist and

anticolonial struggle, a foremost aspect of her mestiza culture. Its not a comfortable
territory to live in, this place of contradictions, she writes in her preface. Anzaldas Borderlands
expose hatred, anger, and exploitation as prominent features of this landscape in
order to recognize and overcome the contradictions of exploitation and domination. In
other words, part of what Anzalda seeks in a resistant ambiguity (or hybridity, or contradiction) is a
foregrounding, rather than an occlusion, of relations of oppression. Some
contradictions, like that between nationalism and feminism, some hybrids, like the
racially or sexually impure, have a potential (under the right circumstances) for revealing certain
instances of domination, thereby enabling resistance. The mythology of the Borderlands is one that
celebrates such moments and such possibilities, encouraging their creation and development. The Coatlicue State that
figures prominently in the mythology of Borderlands and that enables mestiza
consciousness emphasizes the possibility for resolution of contradictions that have
caused choques in the mind of the individual and in the consciousness of the
community. The Coatlicue State is always a prelude to crossing, an opportunity for
release and change, and is brought on by choques and the repression of the Shadow-Beast. The Meso-American
goddess Coatlicue gains significance here as a force of change; Anzalda implicitly
contrasts this force to cultural nationalisms rigidity and cultural conservatism
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The coatlicue state, the Chicano-feminist representation of practice and implementation of

the mestiza consciousness, is an inner sensibility that allows us to see through the static
perspectives of identity and instead consciously experience a cultural identity that is always
transforming ambiguously
Prez 5 (Emma, Assoc. Prof. of history at the University of Texas, El Paso, NWSA Journal 17.2
(2005) 1-10) ALM
The coatlicue state is a psychic sensibility, one that we ignore or dismiss in our postEnlightenment Western European training. I have to admit I never permitted myself to quite grasp what she
meant by the coatlicue state. I was, after all, trained in the 1970s and 1980s when a feminist and Marxist materialist critique superseded
all others. Not until now as I read and reread Borderlands/La Frontera did I realize, of course, the battle within. She had always been
referring to that
inner struggle in which cultural identity is inextricably enmeshed with

ambiguity. But an ambiguity that allows for degrees of differences, for shifting and
moving around inside another perspectivea third perspectivenot a static one
but a mobile cultural identity that is always already transforming. For me, the coatlicue state
allows me to tap into an intuitiveness that helps me survive daily. Like la facultad, which is the interpretive tool, the coatlicue state is
that space in which we dwell when we plunge into the abyss of self-pity, of borracheras without alcohol or drugs. The
coatlicue
state is the alternate consciousness that we delve into, feeling sorry for ourselves until
coatlicue kicks our butt and says, "Ya. Parale." Time to move on, to get through this,
to learn from all you have experienced in your material and psychic worlds. It's that
crucial time when we're haunted by the shadow beast, our inner selves, that part that won't let us rest,
that part that says, you're never going to meet the ideal expected of you. I call my own
shadow beast that ego-driven, maniacal, Eurocentric-minded part of me immersed in
inner battle. When I'm so exhausted by my own inner demons, I call upon la facultad to
assist me so that I may delve into the coatlicue state to recover a sense of humility, to
recover a sense of cultural, psychic identity. There is a kind of self-therapy that is so much
a part of Gloria's concepts, but her theories are more than self-therapy. Gloria's theories,
when applied, call upon us to transform not only ourselves but also our many
communities.
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Past philosophers prove that the idea of the mestiza consciousness is the only way to solve
the inner struggle while addressing the communal struggle simultaneously.
Tamdgidi 8 (Mohammad, Assistant Professor Department of Sociology at University of
Massachusetts Boston, I Change Myself, I Changethe World: Anzalduas Sociological
Imagination in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Annual Meeting, Sheraton Boston, July 31, p. 15-16. DAP)
Anzalduas notion of simultaneity of self and global transformation also has close affinities with the ideas of the Caucasian
philosopher, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1872?1949). A man of GreekArmenain ancestry born in Kars
(at the borders of Tsarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey) and raised in the borderlands
of diverse ethnic, cultural and religious traditions, Gurdjieff expressed quite similar
considerations for bridging diverse modes of knowing and being in the world. Although
he was raised in patriarchal culture that to a considerable conceptual influenced
spiritual worldview and practice, his teaching nevertheless provides useful conceptual
insights that can further enrich Anzalduas liberatory strategy of global transformation
via selfknowledge and change. Reminiscing about his life as a boy living in Gurdjieffs Institute for Harmonious
Deelopment of Man in Priere, France, a young Fritz Peters notes (as quoted above) how central to Gurdjieff was the conviction that the
only for humanity as a whole lies in the distinct and unique (self)development of each individual. Gurdjieffs thought found reception
among a generation of contemporary artists, including those gathered in he The Rope, a group of Lesbian artists who drew inspiration
from his teaching (Patterson 1998).
Gurdieff characterized the ordinary human individual as a multiplicity,

fundamentally structured by her or his more or less separately functioning (unless
consciously/intentionall cultivated and integrated) threebrained physical,
intellectual, and emotional centers. For him, the individual as conditioned by ordinary
life is actually a legion of Is or selves acting independently from one another.
Conditions of ordinary life prevent the automatic formation of an actual individual
characterized by the presence of a master self, and ultimately a soul, in the human
being; the attainment of these qualities can only be a result of conscious and
intentional acts on the part of the person her/himself. The journey of selfunderstanding and
change must therefore begin with the conscious labor of selfknowledge. Through
selfremembering-a quality of experiencing the self involving a simultaneous awareness of oneself as both an observer and the observedamid selfobservation (of ones everyday physical, intellectual, and emotional habits), and external considering (of ones interactions with
others in or outside the work/school) the
actual reality and the complex dynamics of ones inner

multiplicity, fragmentation, disharmony, sleep, mechanicalness, and slavery are
increasingly revealed to oneself and brought under ones immediate attention. The terror
of the situation of realizing such an inner slavery in terms of a shock to the organism is a
necessary prerequisite for efforts toward self and broader liberation.
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The oppressed develop a sixth sense, its a survival tactic, its in all of us, it is needed to be
able to break away from dualities of the borderland.
Mestiza DJL pg 60-61
La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the
deep structure below the surface. It is an instant sensing, a quick perception arrived at without
conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not
speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind
which feelings reside/hide. The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the
world. Those who are pushed out of the tribe for being different are likely to become more
sensitized (when not brutalized into insensitivity). those who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in
the world are more apt to develop this sense. Those who are pounced on the most have it the
strongest-the females me homosexuals of all races the dark skinned, the outcast the persecuted,
the marginalized, the foreign. When were up against the wall, when we have all sorts of
oppressions coming at us, we are forced to develop this faculty so that well know when the next person is going
to slap us or lock us away. Well sense the rapist when hes five blocks down the street. Pain makes us acutely anxious to avoid more of it, so we
have that radar.
Its a kind of survival tactic that people, caught between the worlds, unknowingly
cultivate. It is latent in all of us
La facultad, allows us to break away from an everyday mode of consciousness and that
thrusts us into a less literal and more psychic sense of reality increases awareness
Mestiza DJL
I walk into a house and I know whether it is empty or occupied. I feel the lingering charge in the air of a recent fight or love-making or
depression. I sense the emotions someone near is emitting-whether friendly or threatening. Hate and fear-the more intense the emotion, the
greater my reception of it. I feel a tingling on my skin when someone is staring at me or thinking about me. I can tell how others feel by the way
they smell, where others are by the air pressure on my skin. I can spot the love or greed or generosity lodged in the tissues of another. Often I
sense the direction of and my distance from people or objects-in the dark, or with my eyes closed, without looking. It must be a vestige of a
proximity sense, a sixth sense thats lain dormant from long ago times.
Fear develops the proximity sense aspect of la facultad. But there is a deeper sensing that is
another aspect of this faculty. It is anything that breaks into ones everyday mode of perception,
that causes a break in ones defenses and resistance, anything that takes one from ones habitual
grounding, causes the depths to open up, causes a shift in perception. This shift in perception
deepens the way we see concrete objects and people; the senses become so acute and piercing
that we can see through things, view events in depth, a piercing that reaches the underworld (the realm of
the soul). As we plunge vertically, the break, with its accompanying new seeing, makes us pay
attention to the soul, we are thus into awareness-an experiencing of soul self.
We lose something in this mode of initiation, something is taken from us: our innocence, our unknowing ways, our safe and easy ignorance.
There is a prejudice and a fear of the dark, chthonic (underworld), material such as depression, illness, death and the violations that can bring on
this break. Confronting
anything that tears the fabric of our everyday mode of consciousness and
that thrusts us into a less literal and more psychic sense of reality increases awareness and la
facultad.
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We solve for duality, that is the rooted in white rationality, this is the cause of all violence.
Mestiza DJL Pg 58
Four years ago a red snake crossed my path as I walked through the woods. The direction of its
movement, its pace, its colors, the mood of the trees and the wind and the snake--they all spoke to me, told me things. I look for omens
everywhere, everywhere catch glimpses of the patterns and cycles of my life. Stones speak to Luisah Teish, a Santera; trees whisper their
secrets to Chrystos, a Native American. I remember listening to the voices of the wind as a child and understanding its messages, Los espiritus
that ride the back of the south wind. I remember their exhalation blowing in through the slits in the door during those hot Texas afternoons. A gust
of wind raising the linoleum under my feet, buffeting the house. Everything trembling. Were not supposed to remember such otherworldly
events. were supposed to ignore, forget, kill those fleeting images of the souls presence and of the spirits presence. weve been taught then that
the spirit is outside our bodies or above our heads somewhere up in the sky with god. We're supposed to forget every cell in our bodies, every
bone and bird and worm has spirit in it.
Like many Indians and Mexicans, I did not deem my psychic experiences real. I denied their occurrences and let my inner senses atrophy. I
White rationality to tell me that the existence of the other world was mere pagan
superstition I accepted their reality, the official" reality of the rational, reasoning mode which is
connected with external reality the upper World, and is considered the most developed
consciousness-the consciousness of duality.
The other mode of consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through
dreams and the imagination. Its work is labeled fiction, make-believe, wish-fulfillment. White
anthropologists claim that Indians have primitive and therefore deficient minds that we cannot
think in the higher mode of consciousness-rationality. They are fascinated by what they call the magical mind, the
allowed
savage mind, the participation mystique of the mind that says the World of the imagination-the world of the soul-and of the spirit is just as real
as physical reality.
In trying to become objective, Western culture made objects, of things and

people when it distanced itself from them thereby losing touch with them. This
dichotomy is the root of all violence.
The Alt represents duality and is the only step into the true conscious light
Mestiza DJL pg 68
Coatlicue is one of the powerful images, or archetypes that inhabits, or passes through, my
psyche. For me, la Coatlicue is the consuming internal whirlwind/ the symbol of the underground
aspects of the psyche. Coatlicue is the mountain the Earth Mother who conceived all celestial beings out of the cavernous
womb.3 Goddess of birth and death, Coatlicue gives and takes away life; she is the incarnation of cosmic processes Simultaneously depending
represents duality in life, a synthesis of duality, and a third perspective: something

more than mere duality or a synthesis of duality. Every increment of consciousness, every step
forward is a travesia, a crossing. I am again an alien in new territory. And again, and again. But
if I escape conscious awareness, escape knowing, I wont be moving. Knowledge makes me
more aware, it makes me more conscious. Knowing is painful because after it happens I cant stay in the same place
and be " comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before .
on the person, she
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The alt is the only way to step out of the constricting boundaries of society.
Mestiza DJL
Why does she have to go and try to make 'sense' or it all? Every time she makes sense of
something, she has to cross over, kicking a hole out of the old boundaries of the self and slipping under or over, dragging the old skin along, stumbling over lt. it hampers her movement in
the new territory, dragging the ghost of the past with her. It is a dry birth, a breech birth, a
screaming birth, one that Fights her every inch of the way. It is only when she is on the other side
and the shell Cracks Open and the lid from her eyes lifts that she sees things in a different
perspective. It is only then that she makes the connections, formulates the insights. it is only then
that her consciousness expands at tiny notch, another rattle appears on the rattlesnake tail and the
added growth slightly alters the sounds she makes. Suddenly the repressed energy rises, makes
decisions, connects with conscious energy and a new life begins. it is her chance to crossover, to
make a hole in the fence and walk across, to cross the river, to take that flying leap into the dark,
that drives her to escape, that forces her into the fecuna cave of her imagination when she is
cradled in the arms of Coatlicue who will never let her go. If she doesnt change her ways, she
will remain a stone forever.
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The Alt creates a fifth race, this racial, ideological, cultural and biological crosspolinization, an alien consciousness is presently in the making-a new Mestiza
consciousness
Mestiza DJL
Jos Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, envisaged una raza mestlza, una mezcla de razas afines,
una raza de color-la primera mza sfntesis del globo. He called it a cosmic race, la raza csmica, a
fifth race embracing the four major races of the World? Opposite to the theory of the pure
Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices, his theory is one of
inclusivity At the confluence of two or more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly
crossing over, this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid
progeny a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological,
cultural and biological cross- pollinization, an alien consciousness is presently in the making-a
new Mestiza consciousness, una conctencia de mujer: It is a consciousness of the Borderlands.
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we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates, Subconsciously we see an
attack on ourselves and our behalfs as a threat and we attempt to block with a counter
stance, we need a mestiza of consciousness to get out of this cycle.
Mestiza DJL
The ambivalence from the clash of voices results in mental and emotional states of perplexity.
Internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness. The mestizas dual or multiple personality
is plagued by psychic restlessness. In a constant state of mental neantilism, an Aztec World
meaning torn between ways, la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and
spiritual values of one group to another Being tricultural, monolingual, bilingual, or
multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the
dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the daughter of a dark skinned mother
listen to? El cboque de un alma atrapado entre el mundo del, espiritu y el mundo de la tcnica a
veces la deja entullada Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, stradling all
three cultures and their value systems la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of
borders, an inner war. Like all people we perceive the version of reality that our culture
communicates Like others having or living in more than one culture we get multiple often
opposing messages The coming together of two self consistent but habitually incompatible
frames of reference causes un choque a cultural collision Within us and within la Cultura
chicana commonly held Mexican culture and both attack commonly held beliefs of the
indigenous culture Subconsciously we see an attack on ourselves and our behalves as a threat
and we attempt to block with a counter stance
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Alternative Solvency: Gender/Intersectionality

The mestiza consiouness decolonizes bodies through recognition of different intersecting
cultural identities of gender, sexuality, racism, etc. which makes it the most revolutionary
approach to eliminating binaries.
each culture that which is useful and beneficial in her struggle for liberation
as a woman, as a Chicana, as a lesbian, the new mestiza demonstrates the possibilities
for realizing the vision of a non-nationalist, liberating culture. This liberating culture
of the new mestiza can in turn be one among many to be nourished by and to nourish
other dynamic and progressive cultures.22 It is therefore in the process of making
distinctions within the realm of the particular that a critical universalism, a relating
to others across differences, becomes possible. The most revolutionary claim in
Anzaldas work, then, is that the struggle to physically, spiritually, and psychologically
decolonize bodies and land within the Borderlands is perhaps a truer concept of
liberation than traditional struggle to liberate the nation.
Taking from
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Answer To: Perm

The permuation exercises biopolitical dominance over the mestizas. Saying no to the
perm is the negative resisting the dominant power structure of the Affirmative.
Both Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz craft images
of life in the borderlands and envision modes of being

outside of Self/Other dichotomies. These images have real resistant power, power that
is produced along with the exercise of dominant bio-power that would subjugate
individuals and groups. As Michel Foucault has shown us, "[w]here there is power, there is
resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of
exteriority in relation to power" (95). Wojnarowicz asserts that public disclosure may function as
a "dismantling tool" against hetero-, ethno-, and bodily normativity. Anzaldua remarks
similarly, "[a]n image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge;
words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate
than words, and closer to the unconscious" (Borderlands 69). Images for both writers are the bridges and tools
that can bring knowledge of the workings of power, the constitution of current orders,
and the possibility of resistance to the foreground. The images and imagery of Anzaldia and
Wojnarowicz embody, deploy, and multiply "mobile and transitory points of resistance "
(Foucault 96) that are produced out of their variable experiences within the borderlands, but also by their
mobility within dominant structures of power. This mobility is central to their resistance,
as they perpetually elude surveillance and show off for it, as they negotiate power and its induction on multiple levels, in multiple
spaces, and as they demonstrate the breadth of their multiple bridges/alliances. We find this mobility figured literally in Wojnarowicz's
incessant traveling of the "canyon" streets of New York, the alien landscapes of suburban New Jersey, and the arid expanses of the
American southwest. More abstractly
this mobility is seen in Anzaldaia's traveling in and out of

colonial histories, American ideologies, Latino/a cultural traditions, and in her
slipping in and out of multiple tongues and multiple registers of intelligibility . For
Anzaldfia and Wojnarowicz the images in their work and their mobility are practices of freedom, of bridging and making connections in
the creation of new social and political orders. Wojnarowicz's diaries make clear this alliance of freedom and mobility: "I absolutely
have never been able to put myself in a position where I deny chance and other ways of movement, whether over distances and
landscapes or in lovemaking. It's the settling down that is so difficult; choosing one form excludes all others, the only answer is not
choosing at all but merely moving under one's own will" (In the Shadow 104). This notion of movement as freedom from binarism, and
access to transformations and multiplicity, is echoed by Anzaldfa: Every
increment of consciousness, every

step forward is a travesia, a crossing. I am again an alien in new territory. And again, and
again. But if I escape conscious awareness, escape 'knowing,' I won't be moving . Knowledge
makes me more aware, it makes me more conscious. 'Knowing' is painful because after 'it' happens I can't stay in the same place and be
comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before. (Borderlands 48) This increase
of consciousness and
knowing is then also a process of individual and collective becoming, and through Anzaldua,
Wojnarowicz, Deleuze and Guattari, and the critical lens of disability studies, we can understand how subjectivity
becomes multiple.
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Rejection is an essential part of the mestiza consciousness. Stopping is a survival

mechanism
Mestiza DJL pg 68
An addiction (a repetitious act) is a ritual to help one through a trying time; its repetition safeguards the passage, it becomes ones talisman, ones
we need to be
arrested. Some past experience or condition has created this need. This stopping is a survival mechanism, but one
which must vanish when its no longer needed if growth is to occur. We need Coatlicue to slow
us up so that the psyche can assimilate previous experiences and process the changes. If we
dont take the time, shell lay us low with an illness, forcing us to rest. Come, little green snake. Let the
wound caused by the serpent be cured by the serpent. The soul uses everything" to further its own making. Those activities or
Coatlicue state which disrupt the smooth flow (complacency) of life are exactly what propel the
soul to do its work: make soul, increase consciousness of itself. Our greatest disappointments and
painful experiences--if we can make meaning out of them--can lead toward becoming more of
who we are. Or they can remake meaningless. The Coatlicue state can be a way station or it can
be a way of life.
touchstone. lf it sticks around after having outlived its usefulness, we become stuck in it and it takes possession of us. But
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Legalized borderlands can be both a physical space of transition between territories as well
as contact zone between ideas, as spaces of ideological ambiguity than can open new
possibilities of both repression and liberation.
What, then, is a legal borderland? We might start with the role of law in borderlands that are geographic places. Borderlands can
can constitute spaces

that challenge paradigms and that therefore reveal the [End Page 595] criteria that
determine what fits in those paradigms. Borderlands can also function not as literal
physical spaces but as contact zones between ideas, as spaces of ideological ambiguity
that can open up new possibilities of both repression and liberation. 8
Legal borderlands can be physical territories with an ambiguous legal identity, such as
be contact zones between distinct physical spaces; they can be interstitial zones of hybridization. They
U.S. territories where the Constitution does not follow the flag, or Guantnamo. Their ambiguity seems to render them sites of abnormal
placing them on the edge of the law. But we can also draw upon the idea of
legal borderlands to demarcate ideological spaces or gaps, holes in the imagining of America, where
America is felt to be "out of place," contexts in which, in spite of American ideals of
democracy and rights, violations of the law are routinized, such as in the space of the prison. The
supposition that these spaces are exceptional, rather than the norm, enables the
continued belief that "the story of America is the story of the rule of law," for stories
of the violation of the rule of law are explained through their location in those
physical spaces or their placement in those ideological gaps.9
Law also helps define the boundaries of American national identity. That American identity and
law are conflated is indisputable. But American ideology incorporates a particular vision of law,
which is law as the rule of law, and law as the guarantor of democracy, equality, and
freedom. Americans believe that their law is the rule of law. U.S. history most often
renders America as the guarantor of freedoms and rights. Thus, Americanization
projects are understood as projects of democratization. And yet sovereign power
includes the power to suspend the rule of law. To harmonize suspension with the idea
of law, suspension is characterized as a state of exception, and is rationalized in the
name of national security.10 This volume develops the concept of legal borderlands in part to consider spaces of
legal regulation,
exception that illustrate disjunctures between American identity and the rule of law. The essays in this volume demonstrate that there is a
necessary outside to this notion of the United States as the embodiment of the rule of law. American
history is marked
by episodes that can be simultaneously conceptualized as violations of the law and as
actions sanctioned by law; violations of law are as fully a part of America as what we consider to be its democratic
inside. Ruptures in the guarantees of rights have been as central to actual practice as the guarantees have been to American ideology.
American national mythology has continued through safeguarding borders of

American identity; maintaining the center as mainstream, acceptable, and normal;
and differentiating the edge, through marking out the wild and uncultivated .11 But, as
these essays illustrate, we also must acknowledge that slavery, the living dead in prison [End Page
596] camps, and a nation in a multiracial hierarchy are a product of America's
relationship to the law.
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The permutation is a privileged tool of neutrality which masks colonization because it

claims similar struggles as the mestizas. Claiming neutrality is ultimately the creation of
violence onto bodies in the borderlands.
Anzaldua's Latina
women figuratively are "crippled" by sexism and patriarchy, and the

mestiza consciousness is intimately shaped by the experience of physical and sexual
differences. The mestizaje are all those variously embodied individuals who share a
common marking as "other," who are kicked out, disavowed, and disallowed. This
shared experience establishes the conditions for connectivity and alliance. "Los
atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the
mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over,
pass over, or go through the confines of the 'normal'" (Borderlands 3). Similarly, disability studies scholar
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has noted, in the context of historical and ongoing dominant
"management" of disabled bodies, how "those bodies deemed inferior become
spectacles of otherness while the unmarked are sheltered in the neutral space of
normalcy" (Extraordinary 8). The borderlands are no such "neutral space." Its inhabitants
are simultaneously outside and in between the various spaces of "normalcy," they are the
"taxonomical [and] ideological products" that shore-up the limits of embodiment and
secure the "superiority" of the normate (Garland-Thomson 8).13 The mestiza consciousness of the borderlands
condenses and allies "the squint- eyed, the perverse, the queer, the mongrel, and the half-breed" of Anzaldua, to "the cripple, the
quadroon, the queer, the outsider [and] the whore" of Garland-Thomson (8). Disability studies broadens an understanding of border
theory by allowing us to see that these cast-offs are brought together, despite their differences (or perhaps because of them), by the
common experience of oppression and their literal and metaphorical abjection from the "neutral" spaces of normalcy and the body
politic. Indeed, might not the freak shows and institutions to which disabled people were "confined" for much of modem history, sitting
outside of the edges of towns, be a similar if not exactly correlative liminal space as Anzaldfia's borderlands? Might these spaces also be
connected to closeted living? Here is one example of how we might find in the borderlands a multiple subjectivity and assert the
connected crip- queer-mestiza/o consciousness.
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Answer To: Framework

Their framework arguments construct citizen-subject binaries that create colonial violence
through political activity seeking to transform the meanings of categories so that they fit
within the constructs of ideal divisions.
Sandoval00(Chela,AssistantProfessorofCriticalandCulturalTheoryfortheDepartmentofChicanoStudies
atUniversityofCalifornia,SantaBarbara, ...p.18.ALM)
it is the violence of colonial invasion and subjugation by race that opens this border
between skin and mask, where faces shatter into the wretchedness of insanity,
capitulation, or death. But this location, which is neither inside nor outside, neither good
nor evil, is an interstitial site out of which new, undecidable forms of being and original
theories and practices for emancipation, are produced. For example, the concept of split
consciousness articulated by third world thinkers including W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Fanon, Audre Lorde,
Gloria Anzalda, Paula Gunn Allen, and Trinh T. Minh-ha arises out of this location. These theorists see
what they do as they do it from the dominant viewpoint as well as from their own,
shuttling between realities, their identities reformatting out of another, third site. In this
True,
formulation, both the limits of insanity and the possibilities of emancipation are born out of the same horrors of subjugation. In both cases,
movementdifferential
movementis recognized as fundamental to advancing survival (or, as

Bob Marley puts it, exodus,the way out, liberationis movement of the people). It is on such movement that the
technologies that comprise the methodology of the oppressed depend: Fanons 1951 imposition of the
image black skin/white masks on a white colonizing culture provided one means by which to interfere with and move the colonial relations
between the races; his aim was to
de- construct the kinds of citizen-subjects that colonialism

produced. Indeed, the title Black Skin, White Masks suggests a meta-ideological operation: a political activity that
builds on old categories of meaning in order to transform those same racialized divisions
by suggesting something else, something beyond them. Fanons metaphor also enacts and is driven by a moral
code that demands equality where none exists (black white, skins masks). And all these operations of meaningwhich are identified in this
chapter as the technologies of (1) deconstruction, (2) meta-ideologizing, and (3) democraticsthese combined efforts to press upon
consciousness, are accomplished by depending on the profound capacities of consciousness to enact another technology of the method, (4)
differential movement through perceptual domains...which
enact these meanings.
is required in order to both understand and to
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Answer To: Borderlands only applies to the Latino/a Popn

The borderlands exists wherever two or more cultures collide whether along physical
border cities or psychological and spacially.
Additionally, whereas a
strict, territory-based nationalism can be an obstacle when trying to

work, for example, with Filipino workers to unionize vineyards (what does one do with an Asian in
Aztln?), Anzaldas Borderlands, present wherever two or more cultures edge each other,
allow for a framework of cooperation between los atravesados (border crossers).
The oppressed, whether citizens of Aztln or not, are all inhabitants of the
Borderlands. In Borderlands, mestiza consciousness ties itself through various referents to the knowledge of Chicana and
Mexican women. In this way, as with the borderlands, there always remains an original source for Anzaldas work in
the material existence of a specific population. For Anzalda, it has always been important
to address an audience beyond a single national, ethnic, sexual, or gender group , yet she
notes in a 1982 interview that she finds the best way to do this is to write very concretely about
particulars [Interviews 60]. She alternates this concrete, particular writing with a more prophetic, mythic mode. In these other
passages, she elaborates a mythology that can be tailored to concrete existence , however, as she
describes in a later interview: A lot of times I will start with a cultural figure from the
precolonial: Coatlicue, or la Llorona. Then I look at the experience in 1997 that
Chicanos and Chicanas are going through, and I try to see a connection to what was
going on then [Lunsford 17].
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Answer To: Utopian Alternative

Utopianism is not mutually exclusive to science, real world applications, and mysticism.
These frameworks functionally work together to cross disciplines and cross movements.
Tamdgidi 8 (Mohammad, Assistant Professor Department of Sociology at University of
Massachusetts Boston, I Change Myself, I Changethe World: Anzalduas Sociological
Imagination in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Annual Meeting, Sheraton Boston, July 31, p. 11-12. DAP)
InAnzalda,utopianism,
mysticism, and science are mixed, and integral to on

another.Hercrossmovement vision and strategy allow herto draw upon the rich reservoi
r of a multitude of cultural, spiritual, and intellectual traditions to pursue her work o
n the self and the world.She is highly conscious of her inheritance from and a
ffinities with diverse social and cultural movements. She identifies with the
m for they provide distinctly different elements to her humanist project.Especi
ally,shemakessignificanteffort to critically break down the dualisms of mystical and utopian
movements, and both in the context of the intellectual movementssheseeksto build wit
hin and outside the academy.Hersisautopystic(cf.Tamdgidi2007b,Forthcoming)agenda, transgressing
the borderlands of utopianism, mysticism, and scientific discourse. Anzalduas sociological
imagination is not only intentionally crossdisciplinary, but as well cross movement. She
is not just critical of disciplinary boundaries and of (class, race, gender, ) movement boundaries of the status quo. In the very fabric of
her writing, therefore, she
constructs and integrates multiple disciplinary and practical modes

of knowing and movement allegiance, being quite weary of being fragmented into this
or that movement:I am windswayed bridge, a crossraods inhabited by whirlwinds. Gloria, the facilitator,
Gloria the mediator, straddling the walls between abysses. Your allegiance is to La
Raza, the Chicano movement, say my Black and Asian friends. Your allegiance is to
your gender, to women, say the feminists. The theres my allegiance to the Gay
movement, to the socialist revolution, to the New Age, to magic and the occult. And
theres my affinity to literature, to the world of the artist. What am I? A third world
lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic learnings. They would chop me up into little
fragments and tag each piece with a label. (Anzaldua, in Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981:205)
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***Aff: A2 Borderlands***
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Borderlands Ignores Mexican Perspective

Metaphorical readings of the borderlands displace the cultural reality of the site in favor
a particular vision that silences the Mexican perspective
Vaquera-Vsquez 98 (Santiago, Texas A&M - Latin American Issues 14(6).
http://webpub.allegheny.edu/group/LAS/LatinAmIssues/Articles/Vol14/LAI_vol_14_section_VI.
html - ALM
In contemporary cultural theory, the metaphor of the Borderlands has become a
repository in which all manners of cultural Otherness is contained. The assumption is
that "border thinking" posits a contestatory space for emerging cultures; it shapes
the concepts of national and cultural authenticity and promotes global and
transnational processes. The border has become referred to so often, as Trinh T. Minh-ha
notes, that "it already runs the risk of being reduced to yet another harmless
catchword expropriated and popularized among progressive thinkers" (2). And yet,
the Borderlands metaphor resonates even more at the end of the century, when
borders are continually crossed and recrossed.
In focusing on geographic borderlands, more specifically, the borderlands between
Mexico and the United States, metaphorical readings often displace the cultural
reality of the site in favor of a particular border vision. In cultural discourse on the
US/Mexico Borderlands, the dominant inscriptions are most often that of the Chicano and
that of a global communal space. The region has been variously encoded as Aztln--the
pre-Columbian mythic past which is the cornerstone of the Chicano movement--and more
recently as "Borderlands," the universal cultural construct representing the encounter of
diverse cultures, genders, social classes, and world-views. As observed by Claire Fox, the
Borderlands has come to replace Aztln as "the metaphor of choice to designate a
communal space" (61). This favoring of a universal reading of the Borderlands in
contemporary criticism tends towards the collapsing of the distinct geographic
differences between border regions and the abrogation of the cultural production of
writers and critics in that region for an authentication of the border "reality"
through a small number of primarily Chicano critics and writers. In this
appropriation of the border, the Mexican perspective is largely silenced; there has
been little interest in promoting the vision of the border as viewed from the northern
Mexican border provinces.1 As a result, the image of the borderlands that is generally
preferred is far removed from the multi-faceted reality of the site, a fact which puts
into question the validity of the Borderlands metaphor: To what degree does current
discourse on the Borderlands illuminate the border region, and to what degree does it
obscure the very region to which much of this discourse is addressed? The present
work aims to redress this oversight by focusing on the diverse "imaginative geographies"
which arise from the Borderlands. In so doing, the work contributes to the formulation of a
more extensive and complete account of border culture in general, and of the US/Mexico
border in particular.
Viewing the border as metaphor for a hybrid communal zone displaces the borderlands
reality through discourse that ignores the Mexican perspective and creates a conception of
Mexico as a zone of poverty, lawlessness, and corruption.
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html -ALM
While the vision of the border as a metaphor for a hybrid, communal zone may be
appealing, it has further advanced the displacement and "invisibilation" of the
borderlands reality, and particularly, of northern Mexico. As noted at the outset, and
corroborated throughout the present discussion, much of the Chicano cultural
discourse has ignored the Mexican perspective.6 If there is a conception of Mexico at all,
it is as an echo, a cultural tie in the past-such a trace is evident in the works of Anzalda
and Mora-or as a zone of poverty and lawlessness, as in much of the media portrayals,
the political discourse out of Washington D.C. and Mexico City, and such works as Luis
Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire, in which the author documents the hardships of Tijuana's
lower classes. While the latter work is a powerful testimonial, exposing the terrible
conditions of the poor on the border, it also maintains the stereotypical image of
Tijuana--and on a larger scale, the perception of the border region--as a zone of
corruption.7 A necessary component of the present Borderlands project. then, is the indepth study of northern Mexican border perspective.
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Borderlands are Homogenizing

The Borderlands has been appropriated into contemporary cultural that makes large
generalization leaving the impression region of the borders of Mexico and the US are
homogenous
html - ALM
This reconfiguration of the border region into the Borderlands is a projection through which
various cultural positions are staked out. It is used to invoke hybrid identities as well as
configure a sense of home for the Chicano. With the metaphor of the Borderlands, the
position of Chicanos in the United States, not just in the Southwest, can also be ventured.
Sergio Elizondo asserts: We understand now the Border between the United States of
America and the Estados Unidos Mexicanos; now we would well to consider that
Borderlands might be a more appropriate term to designate the entire area over which the
Chicano people are spread in this country. In so doing, we would come also to understand
that the mere physical extension between the U.S.-Mexico border and, let us say, Chicago, is
a fact of human dispersion, and not a diaspora of the Chicano people.... Our migrations north
of the old historical border have extended the geography and social fabric of Aztln
northward in all directions; we have been able to expand our communal life and fantasies.
(205-206) There are a number of issues that arise in this citation which inform contemporary
Chicano culture: the Borderlands as a region of movement that extends the geography of
Aztln, the relationship to other cultures, and the connection to a fixed place, a home.
Chicano culture is posited as a migrant culture, no different from other cultures, Aztln
is not a fixed site, and the Chicano experience is multiple and dynamic. In this position,
there is a motioning towards the universal, that is, the negation of a geographic
specificity. The citation also lays bare the ways in which the Borderlands has been
appropriated in contemporary cultural theory. A reading of recent works on the
US/Mexican border leaves the impression that the borderlands of Mexico and the
United States are a homogenous region and that it is primarily a Chicano space. This
reading most often results in works which promote the borderlands in generalities and
encapsulate the border experience into a category of hybrid and largely Chicano acts.
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Orientalism Turn
The borderlands criticism creates a discursive practice similair to Orientalism in the way
it displaces the geographic differences of the area into one vast imagined territory.
html - ALM
Cultural criticism on the Borderlands has created a discursive practice which arises
from the meeting of the so-called "First World" with a geographic "Other," the "Third
World." This type of project, in which a critical field is marked out through a
geographic region, is similar to the practice of "Orientalism" critically reviewed by
Edward Said. However, where Orientalism becomes a colonialist project by the West to
control the East-through a discourse which displaces the geographic differences between the
East and West into one single vast imagined territory- Borderlands criticism, and its
controlling forces, arises from within the area in question.2 Just as Said reads Orientalist
works through the "imagined geographies" that the works construct, so too can the
borderlands be subjected to a topographical reading. The region that is now the
southwestern United States, and formerly Spanish and then Mexican territory, comprises the
largest body of work in what we can term a "Borderlands project," a project which is a
discursive field made up of historical chronicles, linguistic documents, artistic and literary
works, and distinct political and social realities. This is an ongoing work that has been under
construction since the 16th century Spanish chronicles describing the region. However, rather
than map the history of this area-such a historical review extends well beyond the purview
of this study3 --the present work presses forward to the twentieth century to note recent
formulations of the border as the Borderlands.
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Globalization Turn
TURN-Blurring the lines of identity can give a false sense of tolerance to violence caused by
globalization and therefore create a corporate multiculturalism.
At times, Anzalda is clearly in line with theorists like the Cuban linguist and philosopher
Roberto Fernndez Retamar, who argues that Latin Americans should choose cultural
identification with the most oppressed sectors of their societies [Fernndez Retamar 27]. At
other times, however, Anzaldas argument loses the specificity it needs, and there is
little to distinguish the new mestiza from the Enchirito of late capitalism. This
happens, for example, when she describes the importance of gay men and lesbians as
border crossers: homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian,
Native American, Latino, and with the queer in Italy, Australia and the rest of the
planet. ... Our role is to link people with each otherthe Blacks with Jews with
Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials [Borderlands 8485]. The
juggling of cultures, blurring of cultural boundaries, and appropriation of modes of
living characteristic of profit-motivated corporate multiculturalism seem at times to
resemble the practice of the new mestiza:
The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for
ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo
point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in
a pluralistic modenothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected,
nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence
into something else. [79]
Anzalda is developing a new epistemology here, but one needs to be careful to ask,
what makes this new, what makes it different from capitalist contradiction and flux?
Surely a late capitalist epistemology also needs to sustain contradictions, to be plural,
to juggle cultures, and to tolerate ambiguity, and, although it does not ground itself in
the resistance of the oppressed, it has proved remarkably successful in adapting that
resistance to its own purposes. Anzalda has acknowledged this aspect of capitalist
culture in the Keating interview, characterizing it, similarly to Amin, as a homogenizing
unity [Keating 110]. I will return to her response to this capitalist homogenization in the
next section. First, I want to engage seriously with objections that some have raised to the
ways Borderlands figures the new mestiza epistemology
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Cultural Identity Turn

The adoption of the mestiza identity erases all cultural traditions and history where it
becomes one disembodied metaphor anyone can claim.
In an important essay on the centrality of Anzaldas work, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano

cautions against universalizing the theor y of mestiza or border consciousness, which
the text painstakingly grounds in specific historical and cultural experiences (1998, 13) in
order to preclude [a]ppropriative readings in which everyone becomes a mestiza and
difference and specificity are erased (14; see also Phelan 1997; Castillo 2006). While I
agree with Yarbro-Bejarano that what Emma Prez (1999) would call Anzaldas
decolonial imaginary should not be flattened out by a post-modern translation of
the concept of borderlands that would erase its historical and cultural grounding by
turning it into a disembodied metaphor that all can come to claim, it is also important
to remember that Anzaldas Borderlands/La Frontera has at least two levels of address:
one deals with the specificity of the Chicana/o history in the U.S./Mexican borderlands; the
other seeks to make a space for Chicanas/os and others whose identities cannot be reduced
to binaries in a variety of locations, including the academy. Anzaldas first words in
Borderlands/La Frontera emphasize this very multiplicity of addresses: The actual
physical borderland that Im dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S.
Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the
spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. (1999, 19). Thinking of
academic fields of study through the model of borders and borderlands is, I believe, a
way to follow up on an important insight of Anzaldas, rather than an appropriation
of her work.
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Immigration Reform Turn

TURN- Federal Immigration reform is necessary to stop crime in the borderlands caused
by human trafficking smugglers.
Brunet-Jailly, 7(Emmanuel, Director, EuropeanStudiesProgram andEuropeanUnionCenterof
Excellence,UniversityofVictoria,Borderlands:ComparingBorderSecurityinNorthAmericaandEurope,p.
4344.DAP)
The failure of the federal government to establish a guest-worker program to regulate the
border crossing of migrant labourers has rendered current federal border-control policies
both crime inducing and self-defeating. As long as the federal government fails to establish
such a program, it will continue to undermine its ability to define border security in terms
of a single national interest: stopping violent and organized criminals and terrorists.
Without a federal immigration policy that distinguishes migrant workers from criminal
and terrorists, informal organizations involved in mediating life and movement through the
borderlands will raise political polarizing questions about whose security is being protected
by US government border policy.
For example, although Mom and Pop small-scale human smugglers and migrant
assistance networks claim to provide individual security and human rights protection for
undocumented migrants who supply inexpensive labour to American companies and
households, these networks are unable to ensure a steady flow of migrant labourers to
Arizona business. In a climate of Arizona-Sonora border crackdowns, small scale smugglers
are often intercepted by the federal border patrol, which makes organized criminal
networks and gangs. Thus human traffickers in organized criminal networks essentially
secure flow of inexpensive labour, which is in high demand by the agricultural,
construction, and restaurant industries. In direct opposition to human traffickers and migrantassistance networks, US civilian militia volunteers claim to secure the southern border of the
United States from any and all undocumented corssers, ranging from terrorists to illegal aliens,
of whom the latter are said to run up US health-care costs and steal jobs from Americans.
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Alt Cant Solve

The Alt cant solve. To have a mestiza consciousness requires privileges and is idealist
because there are limitations to the individuals ability to be able to do and think what they
want for material change.
Moreover, one might worry that Anzalda sometimes seems to relegate the
possibilities for change to vague, unspecified subconscious processes. She writes,
for example, that the new mestiza can move beyond choques by an event which
inverts or resolves the ambivalence, but she is not sure exactly how. The work
takes place undergroundsubconsciously. It is work that the soul performs [79].
She adds that this entails a massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the
individual and collective consciousness [80]. I do not deny that change needs to
take place in the way we think and how we conceptualize ourselves and the world
around us. However, exploitation and dualistic thinking are not necessarily linked.
Consider, for example, the orgy of indigenismo, mestizofilia, and hybridity which
constitutes much of consumer culture in Mexico (and, increasingly, in the
United States under the rubrics of diversity and multiculturalism), even as
actual indigenous peasants and mestizo workers are kept in wretched poverty. She
writes, for example, that [t]he struggle is inner. . . . The struggle has always
been inner. . . . Nothing happens in the real world unless it first happens in the
images in our head [87, emphasis mine]. Passages like these make her
description of the new mestiza seem at times overly voluntarist and
idealist, insofar as such moments contradict other places in her work that
describe the limitations placed on peoples ability to do and think what they want and
the need for material change in their conditions of existence.14 Elsewhere, she has
stressed the point that we cant just escape and say, Oh this is just a
play on some kind of stage and it doesnt really matter. . . . its a matter
of life and death. So these things can only be worked out in physical
reality [Keating 118]. Additionally, she has cited activism as her
primary motivation in her cultural work, writing that it wasnt enough
just to sit and write and work on my computer. I had to connect the reallife, bodily experiences of people who were suffering because of some
kind of oppression [Lunsford 25]. She has also written, I cant discount
the fact of the thousands that go to bed hungry every night. The thousands that do
numbing shitwork eight hours a day each day of their lives. . . . I cant reconcile the
sight of a battered child with the belief that we choose what happens to us, that we
create our own world [La Prieta 208].
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Perm
Every step toward consciousness is a step forward
Mestiza DJL
Every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a travesia, a crossing. I am again an
alien in new territory. And again, and again. But if I escape conscious awareness, escape
knowing, I wont be moving. Knowledge makes me more aware, it makes me more
conscious. Knowing is painful because after it Happens I can't stay in the same
place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before. I am a member of a conquered people who are
taught to believe they are Inferior because they have indigenous blood, believe in the supernatural and speak al deficient language. Now
she beats herself over the head for her inactivity, a stage that is as necessary as breathing. But that means being Mexican. All her life
shes been told that Mexicans are lazy. She has had to work twice as hard as others to meet the standards of the dominant culture which
have, in part, become her standards. Why does she have to go and try to make sense of it all? livery time she makes sense of
something, she has to "Cross over, kicking a hole out of the old boundaries of the self and slipping under or over, dragging the old
skin along, stumbling over.
The attempt to exclude the aff creates new borderland zones of knowledge.
Discrete fields of knowledge can be seen as being separated by disciplinary borders;

the interdisciplinary and comparative areas where they meet and are brought
together can be viewed as borderland zones in which new knowledge is created,
sometimes remaining in the borderland, sometimes becoming institutionalized into a
different field of knowledge with its own borders. For example, the borderland between postcolonial and
feminist studies has created a new, recognized field, postcolonial feminist studies. Similarly, in the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. feminists of
color found that they inhabited a borderland that was rendered invisible by the boundaries erected by various fields of knowledge such
as ethnic and womens studies, and they proceeded to carve out an intellectual borderland in which the interconnections of race, class,
and gender could be attended to (Anzalda was a vital participant in that project). In so doing, they created a now central field of
knowledge that encompasses womens studies and ethnic studies and has influenced postcolonial and francophone studies. This U.S.
Third World feminism, as Sandoval (2000, 41) names it, was
instrumental in initiating and sustaining a

paradigm shift in feminist studies, away from a monist frame of analysis focusing solely on gender (or
gender and sexuality) to an intersectional theoretical framework taking into account the multiple ways
in which race, gender, and class serve as interlocking systems of domination (Sandoval 2000; King 1990; Crenshaw
1989; Combahee 2003). This framework is multiplicative rather than additive: for instance, it allows for sophisticated analyses of how
gender is raced and classed rather than focusing on gender, race, and class as discrete f actors that can be layered upon one another. This
paradigm shift was then expanded to include other f actors such as colonialism, national origin and sexuality into the analysis.
Postcolonial and francophone studies scholars often refer to this body of work in their analyses, as many concepts are relevant to these
various domains. For instance, the concept of hybridity as a result of colonial encounters has been theorized in convergent and divergent
ways in U.S. ethnic studies (particularly Anzaldas mestizaje), anglophone postcolonial studies (Homi Bhabhas hybr idity 1994),
francoph-one studies (Edouard Glissants mtissage and crolisation 1981), and comparative studies (Lionnets mtissage 1989).
Anzaldas and Lionnets concepts, in particular, are rooted in an intersectional feminist perspective (for a comparative analysis of some
of these theor ies, see Prabhu and Quayson 2005). U.S. Third World feminism is one of the major areas of study in which postcolonial,
feminist, francophone, and U.S. ethnic studies intersect.

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ADI 2010

at the California-Mexico border, a rusted sheath of metal extends from the

boundaries around U.S.

we view the United States in a global

(B) IMPACT - The narrative of the American identity as the nation of

bodies can enter and which bodies are expelled,

granting of formal citizenship through the Fourteenth

comprehended what many of us spend our lives attempting to graspthat

said: The work of mestiza

consciousness will guide us toward "the creation of yet

an intense desire to contain and fix social boundaries

assumption of America as an ever

Link: Immigration Law

creates opportunities, new identities that

produces categories that then are seen as social

problems in need of legal regulation.

The transnational labor market at the U.S.Mexico border appears, not as a

legal and policy developments, the problem of "illegal"

plays a key role in

Clemency, as a legal borderland, helps to illuminate what might be at the center of

The history of US immigration restrictions is wrought with American exceptionalism that

complex origins of U.S.

locating, defining, and outlawing of "coolies"

allocation of trust and risk proves to be

Link: US/Mexico Border

Link: Marriage Visas

1990 when Congress amended

double subordination put pressure on Congress to include in the

Link: Temporary Workers

for inter-American friendship

Link: Gender Advantages

Link: Ecology/Environments Advantages

Link: Economy Advantages

spatial borderlands has to do with the economic

program was supposedly

must look to the specific historical

than confronting or challenging

Link: Heteronormativity Advantages

is not historical coincidence that the

borders become more and more

the ideologies constructed around

Link: Terrorism Advantages

argues that conflicting

Link: Drug Trafficking

Link: Critical Affs (Non- Transnational Feminism)

is crucial to map out

Link: Western Academics

Impacts: Feminism Turns

usefully divides the concept of citizenship in the nation

of both romance and realism were reflected in the work of

violence necessary to maintaining colonial rule became a

had finally fomented into an all out war."

Immigration continued in the next

To unravel colonialist ideology, I put forth my notion of decolonizing history

Impacts: Gender Violence

people were, obviously, not considered

colonized people could not be treated as equals, it was

did not need to take into account the voice,

US colonial imperialism threatens global conflict

The strategy of preemption as espoused by

Modern history, beginning in 1492,

Alternative: Mestiza Consciousness

kind of international citizen whose

with other oppressed groups cannot be merely a secondary goal,