On Borderlands/La Frontera: An Interpretive Essay

Author(s): María Lugones

Source: Hypatia , Autumn, 1992, Vol. 7, No. 4, Lesbian Philosophy (Autumn, 1992), pp.
31-37
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc.

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On Borderlands/La Frontera:
An Interpretive Essay

MARIA LUGONES

Borderlands/La Frontera deals with the psychology of resistance to oppre

The possibility of resistance is revealed by perceiving the self in the process of
oppressed as another face of the self in the process of resisting oppression. Th
mestiza consciousness is bor from this interplay between oppression and resist
Resistance is understood as social, collective activity, by adding to Anzaldua's t
the distinction between the act and the process of resistance.

Borderlands has been a very important text for me. I have found compa
it. Desde el primer momento pense que eramos hermanas en pensamiento. I
carried Anzaldua's insights and metaphors with me for several years in my
ruminations and in my daily exercise of triple vision. I could say that
lost perspective on this text in making it mine, or I could say that I have
perspective in finding borderdwelling friendship in it. I find her thin
intertwined with my own. Thus this essay is highly interpretive. I will ex
what I learned from Borderlands and I will try to think my way around so
the trouble that I have with some of the living that it suggests to me.
Work on oppressed subjectivity focuses on the subject at the "momen
oppression and as oppressed. Oppression theory may have as its intent to d
the effects of oppression (alienation, ossification, arrogation, psycho
oppression, etc.), without an intention to rule out resistance. But with
logical framework of the theory, resistance to oppression appears unintell
because it lacks a theoretical base. Anzaldua's Borderlands is a work crea
theoretical space for resistance.
Anzaldua focuses on the oppressed subject at the "moment" of
oppressed. Thus she can capture both an everyday history of oppressio
an everyday history of resistance. Her culture, though oppressive, also gro
her resistance:

Hypatia vol. 7, no. 4 (Fall 1992) © by Maria Lugones

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32 Hypatia

At a very early age I had a strong sense of who I was and what
I was about and what was fair.... Every bit of self-faith I'd
painstakingly gathered took a beating daily. Nothing in my
culture approved of me. (16)

But also,

When I was seven, eight, nine, fifteen, sixteen years old, I would
read in bed with a flashlight under the covers, hiding my
self-imposed insomnia from my mother.... My sister, Hilda,
who slept in the same bed with me, would threaten to tell my
mother unless I told her a story.... Nudge a Mexican and she
or he will break out with a story. So, huddling under the covers,
I made up stories for my sister night after night .... It must have
been then that I decided to put stories on paper. (65)

Anzaldua describes two states of the self being oppressed: the state of intimate
terrorism and the Coatlicue state. These states are two sides of the experience
of being oppressed. In expressing this experience, Anzaldiia thinks of the self
as multiple. There is the self oppressed in and by the traditional Mexican world;
the self oppressed in and by the Anglo world; and the self-in-between-the
Self-herself in resistance to oppression, the self in germination in the border-
lands. If the self is being oppressed, then she can feels its limits, its capacity for
response, pushed in, constrained, denied. But she can also push back. This is
not a fantastic or metaphysical leap out of the reality of oppressed. Rather
Anzaldua knows the weight of oppressed worlds and the hard, risky work of
resistance.

In the state of intimate terror, the Self feels the oppression; she feels petrified:

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 can't respond, her face caught
between los intersticios, the space between the different worlds
she inhabits. (20)

Anzaldua sees the ability to respond as at the center of responsibility. She

connects the state of intimate terrorism with a lack of ability to respond, the
"very movement of life, swifter than lightning, frozen" (21). But as the Self is
being oppressed, she is at the crossroads of choice (21). Anzaldua

made the choice to be queer ... It's an interesting path, one

that continually slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the
Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts. In and out of my head.
It makes for loqueria, the crazies. It is a path of knowledge-one
of knowing (and of learning) the history of oppression of our
raza. It is a way of balancing, of mitigating duality. (19)

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 Maria Lugones 33

Anzalduia thinks of homophobia as "the fear of going home." The fear of being
caught in the intersticios, or the fear of being abandoned byLa Raza. Abandoned
"for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged" (20). The two fears so close, since
abandonment is a powerful weight exercised on the in-between-self to give
herself up, not to make full use of her faculties.
Anzalduia tells us that Coatlalopeuh was an early Mesoamerican creator
goddess that had two aspects: the underworld, dark aspect, Coatlicue; and
Tonantsi, the light, the upper. Coatlicue was driven underground with other
powerful female deities by the male dominated Azteca-Mexica culture, and
Tonantsi, split from her dark aspect, became the good mother (27). The Spanish
colonizers and the colonizing church continued the split when Tonantsi,
desexed, became Guadalupe, the chaste protective mother (28).

Today la Virgen de Guadalupe is the single most potent religious,

political and cultural image of the Chicano/mexicano. Because
Guadalupe took upon herself the psychological and physical
devastation of the conquered and the oppressed indio, she is our
spiritual, political and pyschological symbol. Guadalupe is the
symbol of the ethnic identity and of the tolerance for ambiguity
that Chicanos/mexicanos ..., people who cross cultures, by
necessity possess. (30)

Anzalduia embraces a decolonized Guadalupe back into her dark and light
ambiguity. She remembers the name Coatlicue and rejects the mind/body split
imposed on Tonantsi by the Catholic church as well as her desexualization.
Coatlicue is remembered in resistance to oppression, in creation.

She, the symbol of the dark sexual drive, the chthonic (under-
world), the feminine, the serpentine movement of sexuality, of
creativity, the basis of all energy and life. (35)

The Coatlicue state is a state of creation. The self being oppressed, the
self-in-between, la terca, la hocicona, the against-the-grain storyteller pushes
against the limits of oppression. Caught in-between two harmful worlds of
sense that deny her ability to respond, the self-in-between fashions herself in
a quiet state. Anzalduia recognizes here that the possibility of resistance
depends on this creation of a new identity, a new world of sense, in the borders.
The Coatlicue state is one of stasis because it is a state of making new sense.
It is a state of isolation, separation from harmful sense. This creation is a
dangerous thing. The self risks her own familiarity and her being familiar to
others. Though in intimate terror she is not safe but "a victim where someone
else is in control," the in-between-self at the moment of germination may be
unable to make new sense, and that is a terrifying possibility.

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34 Hypatia

She has this fear that she has no names that she has
many names that she doesn't know her names.... She has
this fear that if she takes off her clothes shoves her brain
aside peels off her skin... strips the flesh from the bone ...
that when she does reach herself... she won't find anyone ...
She has this fear that she won't find the way back (43)

So the self-in-between in the Coatlicue state, the resistant state, needs to

enact both strategies of defense against worlds that mark her with the inability
to respond and distractive strategies to keep at bay the fear of having no names.
The strategies of defense against harmful sense are insulating strategies: she
uses rage to drive others away and to insulate herself against exposure; she
reciprocates with contempt for those who have roused shame in her; etc. (45).1
Since she cannot respond in their terms, because in their terms she is not
responsible, she must make a space apart for creation.
Anzaldua sees repetitious activity and depression as distracting strategies:

At first I feel exposed and opened to the depth of my dissatis-

faction. Then I feel myself closing, hiding, holding myself
together rather than allowing myself to fall apart.

Sweating, with a headache, unwilling to communicate, fright-

ened by sudden noises, estoy asustada. (48)

The new mestiza, an ambiguous being, is the borderdwelling self that

emerges from the Coatlicue state:

It is this learning to live with la Coatlicue that transforms living

in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a numinous experi-
ence. It is always a path/state to something else. (73)

This path leads to a consciousness that is bor from "racial, ideological,

cultural, and biological cross-pollinization" (77). The mestiza consciousness is
characterized by the development of a tolerance for contradiction and ambi-
guity, by the transgression of rigid conceptual boundaries, and by the creative
breaking of the new unitary aspect of new and old paradigms. The mestiza
consciousness participates in the creation of a new value system through an
"uprooting of dualistic thinking" (80).
La mestiza is captive of more than one collectivity, and her dilemma is which
collectivity to listen to. She crosses from one collectivity to the other and
decides to stake herself in the border between the two, where she can take a
critical stance and take stock of her plural personality.

Pero es dificil differentiating between lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo

impuesto. (82)

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 Maria Lugones 35

She throws out what is worthless, the lies, the dulling of life, the runaways.
She effects a rupture with all oppressive traditions at the same time that she
makes herself vulnerable to foreign ways of thinking, relinquishing safety.
Anzaldua makes it clear that remaining a being in two worlds without
"cross-pollinization" is deadly for Chicanas and other women of color. It is to
become a hyphenated being, a dual personality enacted from the outside,
without the ability to fashion her own responses. She would agree with the
Pachuco speaking in Peregrinos de Aztlan by Miguel Mendez-M. When the
Pachuco asks the question "que semos ese?" (what are we?) and hears the
response "Bueno . . . pues mexico americanos," he responds:

Chale, ese, es pura pinchi madera, la de mexicano domas pa'meterlo

al surco, a las minas, nel, pos otra chinga pior. Lo de americanos,
pos ya te daras cola, camarada, pa'darnos en la madre en sus pinchis
guerras puercas.

[Roughly: Mexicanos to be put to work the land, or the mines,

or something worse. Americans to kill us in their filthy wars.]
(Mendez-M. 1979, 25)

Because I think it is important to distinguish this dual personality2 from the

plural personality and the operating in a pluralistic mode of new mestiza, I will
venture my own sense of the distinction. I think this sense fits Anzaldua's text
well. The dual, hyphenated, personality is an Anglo creation. According to
this concept, there is no hybrid cultural self. It is part of the Anglo imagination
that we can keep our culture and assimilate, a position that would be contra-
dictory if both cultures were understood as informing the "real" fabric of
everyday life. But in thinking of a Mexican-American, the Anglo imagination
construes "Mexican" as the name for a superexploitable being who is a
practitioner of a superfluous, ornamental, culture. Being "American" is what
supposedly gives us (dubious) membership in that "real" culture, the culture
of the ideally culturally-unified-through-assimilation polls illegitimately called
"America." Being American is what makes us functioning citizens.
The Mexican and the American in the dual-personality construct are both
animated from the outside; that is why there is no cultural "cross-polliniza-
tion." But the plurality of the new mestiza is anchored in the borders, in that
space where critique, rupture, and hybridization take place. Though she cannot
choose not to be read, constructed, with a logic of hyphenation, demoraliza-
tion, instrumentality, stereotyping, and devaluation, she can imbue that person
with a sense of conflicted subjectivity and ambiguity.3 So the dual, hyphenated,
personality is externally animated and characterized by an absence of the
ability to respond and create. The plural personality of the new mestiza is a
self-critical, self-animated plurality.

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36 Hypatia

A difficult question to answer in Anzaldua's text is the question of the

company that the Self-in-between, the border Self, keeps in resistant creation.

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the

emotional residue of an unnatural boundary... a constant state
of transition. Los atravesados live here ... those who cross over,
pass over, or go through the confines of the "normal.(3)

A social history of both despojamiento and resistance in the meetings

between gringos and mexicanos crisscrosses Anzaldula's understanding of the
borderdweller's situation.

iQuien estd protegiendo los ranchos de mi gente? iQuien estd

tratando de cerrar la fisura entre la india y el blanco en nuestra
sangre? El Chicano, si, el Chicano que anda como un ladron en su
propiacasa. (63)

Anzaldua also tells us of the cultural backings for her own resistance in
ancient Mesoamerican culture and in contemporary mexicano, Tejano, Chicano
cultures. Her text draws from corridos, ancient myths, dichos, cantares, contem-
porary texts by Chicano/a and Latin American writers. She draws from Los
Tigres del Norte as well as from Andres Gonzales Guerrero; from Gina Valdes
and Alfonsina Storni; from El Puma and Miguel Leon-Portilla.
In depicting the borderlands, she tells us of a "place" or state populated by
"the people who leap in the dark" (81), a people who are a new mixture of
races, "la primera raza sintesis del globo, una raza mestiza" (77).
Yet Anzaldua also depicts the crossing-over as a solitary act, an act of solitary
rebellion. Maybe because the Coatlicue state and the state of intimate terrorism
are described as states of the inner life of the self, because Anzalduia is describing
states in the psychology of oppression and liberation, she does not reveal the
sociality of resistance. Yet, unless resistance is a social activity, the resister is
doomed to failure in the creation of a new universe of meaning, a new identity,
a raza mestiza. Meaning that is not in response to and looking for a response
fails as meaning.
I see enough evidence in her text to develop an account of the sociality of
resistance. If rebellion and creation are understood as processes rather than as
acts, then each act of solitary rebellion and creation is anchored in and
responsive to a collective, even if disorganized, process of resistance.

Los Chicanos, how patient we seem, how very patient.... We

know how to survive. When other races have given up their
tongue, we've kept ours.... Stubborn, persevering, impenetra-
ble as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us
unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos will remain. (63-64)

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 Maria Lugones 37

This society places borderdwellers in profound isolation. The barriers to

creative collectivity and collective creation appear insurmountable. But that
is only if we think of the act and not of the process of creation. As we author
every act of resistance we can understand it as meaningful because it is inserted
in a process of resistance that is collective, but we can also aspire to acts of
collective resistance, breaking down our isolation against the odds prescribed
by "the confines of the normal."

NOTES

1. I have analyzed these defense strategies in "Liberatory Strategies of the Chicana

Lesbian: Active Subjectivity in the Absence of Agency," and in "Hard to Handle Anger,"
to appear in (Lugones, forthcoming).
2. For work on dual personality, see Rosaldo (1989), Madrid-Barela (1973), Chin
(1991) and my "Colonization", unpublished manuscript.
3. I have developed these ideas further in Lugones (1987).

REFERENCES

Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/la frontera. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book
Company.
Chin, Frank. 1991. Come all ye Asian American writers. In The big aiiieee! An anthology
of Chinese American and Japanese American literature, ed. Jeffrey Chan. New York:
Meridian.
Lugones, Maria. 1987. Playfulness, "world"-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia
2(2): 3-19.
.Forthcoming. Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Essays in pluralist feminism. Binghamton:
SUNY Press.
Madrid-Barela, Arturo. 1973. In search of the authentic pachuco. Aztlan 4(1): 31-60.
Mendez-M., Miguel. 1979. Peregrinos de Aztlan. Berkeley: Editorial Justa Publications.
Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture and Truth. Boston: Beacon Press.

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