Borderlands La Frontera

Anzaldúa opens her text with contradictions, describing the borderland as an “open wound” and “thin edge of barbwire” that is her home (24-25). The borderland is a place defined by strict borders, but it is also vague, fluid, and evolving: Whether one is on the Mexican or US side of it has dramatic material repercussions, and yet this distinction is largely arbitrary in terms of Chicano or mestizo identity. As Anzaldúa delves into the history of the region, similar paradoxes emerge. Coatlapueh, the Indigenous precursor to Guadalupe, is the product of multiplicity, with the serpent, the eagle, and the human infusing her with meaning; Anzaldúa describes the dual dark and light, masculine and feminine energies residing in the Indigenous goddess, emphasizing that the goddess’s power comes from her contradictory energy. Those tensions and ambiguities only multiplied as Coatlicue fused with the Virgin de Guadalupe, despite (if not because of) colonialism’s attempts to erase all traces of the Indigenous goddess. Language, too, becomes a source of contradictory information, as Chicano people meld English and Spanish, crafting a patois of “Tex-Mex.”

Anzaldúa suggests that this cultural, political, and geographical landscape necessarily imprints on the psyche. For the Chicano or mestizo people, the borderland is an unwelcoming homeland, an oxymoron that causes deep schisms both within the community and within the individual. The experience of alienation or divided consciousness is especially acute for those multiply oppressed—hence Anzaldúa’s assertion that the mestiza in particular exists in a state of contradiction, as she also faces the burden of misogyny within her community. Anzaldúa applies this to her own life: She teases out the ways she is attached to her homeland as a Chicana woman and yet is not accepted at home as a queer woman, especially as Mexican culture has delineated certain acceptable roles for women that Anzaldúa rejects.

Anzaldúa uses the figure of Coatlicue, in all her contradictions, to encapsulate this element of mestiza experience. However, as Anzaldúa explains her experience of what she calls the Coatlicue state, another contradiction emerges: The pain caused by Coatlicue is also a source of healing—the wound caused by the serpent is healed by the serpent. Though the fractures and tensions of mestiza life are real, they teach the mestiza to tolerate multiplicity and ambiguity in the self. For Anzaldúa, this has significant implications not only for the mestiza but for society at large, as it positions the mestiza to develop a new perspective on the world, a new consciousness that is inclusive, alien, and plural. Because the mestiza literally lives dualities—Spanish and English, Indigenous and white—she is able to disrupt binaries, transcending them to heal divides of culture, gender, class, and race both within herself and in the outside world.