Words From Gloria Anzaldua : LA IMC

"Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks."

"The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S., Southwest/ Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy"--Gloria Anzaldua. Second Edition, with a new introduction by Sonia Saldivar-Hull, author of Feminism on the Border, and an in-depth interview with Gloria Anzaldua.

"What we say and what we do ultimately comes back to us so let us own our responsibility, place it in our hands and carry it with dignity and strength."

One interviewer asks, "So what did you have to do in order to be true to [God]?" Anzaldua replies, "Believe in him, and this is the great rip off: All religions impoverish life because they renounce it. They especially divorce the flesh from the spirit or the mind. To me, it always seemed like this division is where the oppression of myself as a woman, as a lesbian, as a brown woman, as a working-class woman comes in. To me religion has always upheld the status quo; it makes institutions rigid and dogmatic"

"Most people my age or younger have burned out and become disillusioned. It's the pits right now. Many young people of color have no hope, do not see alliances working, do not see white people reaching out, and do not see the possibility of white people changing perspectives or allowing change to come into their lives, but I do"

Interviewer: Well, I think that many people do feel a powerful connection to what you wrote. And it says a great deal about how you said it, that it has this effect on people.

Anzaldua: I think what's probably one of the riskier things that I did in Borderlands/La Frontera was to open up the concept of mestizaje, of the new mestiza and hybridity, to be non-exclusive, to be inclusive of white people and people from other communities. And the risk was in having again Euro-Americans take over the space. And I don't think that's happened very much. I think it has happened with these people with the short-term memory who forget to cite, but I think most of the critics and the readers have been very generous with me.

"I am playing with myself,
I am playing with the world's soul,
I am the dialogue between myself and el espiritu del mundo.
I change myself,
I change the world."

Anzaldua: I think it began when I graduated from high school. I went to college off and on--I would work a year or two and then drop out for a year or two so that I could save money so then I could go back to work. And I was doing my student teaching, and I was still working in the fields when I got my B.A., on weekends. I began to teach after I got my B.A. and I began to go to grad school to get my M.A. in the summertime when the public schools were closed. And I think that's when I started articulating the scholar, the philosopher, the breaking away--the breaking away was after high school. And I literally left south Texas, went to Denton, which is north of Dallas, eight, nine-hundred miles--to get away from the constricted, cage-like thing in my family and my community. Then I had to leave Texas completely in order to really allow myself to become who I am, and to experience other realities and other worlds and be part of other communities. I had to literally leave the state and my community. In some ways I've become estranged from it; but in other ways I've become closer to it.

Interviewer: I would like to follow up on part of what you're saying here in terms of a comment that you made in an interview with AnnLouise Keating. You mentioned that your lesbian perspective had evolved. Can you say something about what that perspective means to you now, and how it influences your writing today?

Anzaldua: Yes. It has to do with the terms and labels of identity. When I was growing up in south Texas the word "queer" was very much what we called these people. Or "de las otras," which means "of the others," that I wrote about in Borderlands. Marimachas and marimachos, jotitas, jotas, tortilleras: these were labels and terms in the Chicano working-class community that I grew up in. When I went and left home and became part of the women of color community and came out as a lesbian, I started not liking to use the word "lesbian." When I would dialogue with myself or with other women of color, I would use "dyke" or "queer." And then with Chicanas I started using the word patlache. And patlache is a Nahuatl word that means "dyke," "lesbian." And I started seeing that what the white lesbian community was imposing on me was a Eurocentric view, a label that derived from Greece, Sappho, and was very white and that I wanted to articulate my queerness because it was different from their queerness and so I needed a different kind of language. And when I came out, the only community there for me were a few Chicana dykes and the white lesbian community, so I embraced their books and their theories, and the way they dressed and everything. And I think all of us do this, we go with--if you're a dyke of color and there's not enough in your community, you.... So I feel very close to the white dykes, and I have a love of them and their community and their art and their writing and their theories, but it began to be very constrictive in that I thought I was in a cage and they were defining the bars; and I needed to break out of that cage, just like I needed to break out of the cage of my family and the nationalistic cage of just being a Chicana and nothing more. I didn't want to just be a lesbian and nothing more. In the first place, I wasn't a lesbian, because a lesbian is somebody who is white and middle class. And so I started chafing at the boundaries and limitations set by the white lesbian community and I particularly started resenting the writing agenda--if you're a dyke, you only write about this content. So I would be put into that constraint both by heterosexual, Eurocentric society as to what a dyke writer was, and also by the lesbian community into what a lesbian writer was supposed to write about and be.

"Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks."

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