Content area
Full Text
In 1987, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera offered a radical reimagining of the borderlands as a physical and metaphorical space, forcing scholars inside and outside of the academy to consider how sex and gender structured power relations and historically shaped struggles for dignity and survival. Inspired by Anzaldúa's path breaking analysis, a generation of students in Chicana/o studies pushed borderlands research in new directions, putting women's bodies at the forefront. This brief article examines how scholars studying the Chicana/o experience have pioneered work that explores sexuality, colonization, marriage, labor, and transnational communities. This scholarship has invigorated borderlands studies to reveal the deep structures of conquest and social power in the region, and illuminates the wide range of experiences of borderlands residents in all of their humanity.
One of my first academic experiences with the borderlands was the Chi- cana writer, poet, and cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/ La Frontera. Published in 1987, it has influenced a generation of scholars across many fields, but holds a special place in Chicana/o Studies as one of the foundational works of Chicana feminist writing. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa offers a personal and brutally honest account of her own life spent between and across borders: as a woman of color, as a lesbian, as a Tejana, and as someone confronting daily the legacy of conquest. For her, the borderlands are only in part geographic; instead, the borderlands must be understood metaphorically, as a state of being and consciousness, continually being redefined. While borders are finite, she writes that "a borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary."2 Most striking to me as a student just embarking on my academic career was her use of language evoking physi- cal pain-grating, bleeding, hemorrhaging-to convey the brutality and the humanity at the core of borderlands identities. For Anzaldúa, 'The U.S.-Mexican border [is] una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of the two worlds merging to form a third country-a border culture."3
I always imagined myself a product of this border culture, having spent my entire life in the Southwest, but her words powerfully articulated a deeper...