{"article":{"id":127792,"heading":"Words From Gloria Anzaldua","author":"cult of anzaldua","created":"2005-05-31 08:42:36","modified":"2007-03-09 15:18:01","last_modified":"Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:18:01","article":"
\"Voyager, there\r\nare no bridges, one builds them as one walks.\"<\/span>
\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/span>
\r\n<\/span>
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\"The actual physical borderland\r\nthat I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S., Southwest\/\r\nMexican border. The\r\npsychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and spiritual\r\nborderlands are not particular to the Southwest.<\/span> In fact the Borderlands are physically\r\npresent wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of\r\ndifferent races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle\r\nand upper classes touch, where the\r\nspace between two individuals shrinks with intimacy<\/span><\/span>\"--Gloria\r\nAnzaldua. Second Edition, with a new introduction by Sonia\r\nSaldivar-Hull, author of Feminism on the Border, and an in-depth\r\ninterview with Gloria Anzaldua.<\/span>
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\r\n\"What we say and what we do\r\nultimately comes back to us so let us own our responsibility, place it\r\nin our hands and carry it with dignity and strength.\"<\/span>
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\r\n<\/span><\/span>One interviewer asks, \"So what did you have to do in order\r\nto be true to [God]?<\/span>\" Anzaldua replies, \"Believe in him, and this is the\r\ngreat rip off:<\/span> All religions impoverish life because\r\nthey renounce it.<\/span> They\r\nespecially divorce the flesh from the spirit or the mind. To me, it always seemed like this\r\ndivision is where the oppression of myself as a woman, as a lesbian, as\r\na brown woman, as a working-class woman comes in.<\/span><\/span><\/span> To me religion has always upheld\r\nthe status quo; it makes institutions rigid and dogmatic\"<\/span><\/span>
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\r\n\"Most people my age or younger have\r\nburned out and become disillusioned. It's the pits right now. Many young people of color have no\r\nhope<\/span>, do not see alliances working, do not see white people reaching out<\/span>,\r\nand do not see the possibility of\r\nwhite people changing perspectives<\/span> or allowing change to come\r\ninto their lives,<\/span> but I do<\/span>\"<\/span>
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\r\nInterviewer: Well, I think\r\nthat many people do feel a powerful connection to what you wrote. And\r\nit says a great deal about how you said it, that it has this effect on\r\npeople.<\/span>
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\r\nAnzaldua: I think what's\r\nprobably one of the riskier things that I did in Borderlands\/La\r\nFrontera was to open up the\r\nconcept of mestizaje, of the\r\nnew mestiza and hybridity,<\/span><\/span> to be non-exclusive, to be inclusive of white people<\/span><\/span> and people from other communities.<\/span>\r\nAnd the risk was in having\r\nagain Euro-Americans take over the space.<\/span> And I don't think\r\nthat's happened very much. I think it has happened with these people\r\nwith the short-term memory who forget to cite, but I think most of the\r\ncritics and the readers have been very generous with me.<\/span>
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\r\n\"I am playing with myself,<\/span>
\r\nI am playing with the world's\r\nsoul,<\/span>
\r\nI am the dialogue between myself\r\nand el espiritu del mundo.<\/span>
\r\nI change myself,<\/span>
\r\nI change the world.\"<\/span>
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\r\nAnzaldua: I think it began when I graduated from\r\nhigh school. <\/span>I went to college off and on--I would work a year\r\nor two and then drop out for a year or two so that I could save money\r\nso then I could go back to work. And I was doing my student teaching,\r\nand I was still working in the fields when I got my B.A., on weekends.\r\nI began to teach after I got my B.A. and I began to go to grad school\r\nto get my M.A. in the summertime when the public schools were closed. And I think that's when I started\r\narticulating the scholar, the philosopher,<\/span>\r\n<\/span>the breaking away--the breaking away was after high school. And\r\nI literally left south Texas<\/span>, went to Denton, which is north of\r\nDallas, eight, nine-hundred miles--to get away from the constricted,\r\ncage-like thing in my family and my community. Then I had to leave Texas completely in\r\norder to really allow myself to become who I am<\/span>, and to experience other realities\r\nand other worlds and be part of other communities.<\/span> I had to\r\nliterally leave the state and my community. In some ways I've become estranged\r\nfrom it; but in other ways I've become closer to it.<\/span><\/span>
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\r\n Interviewer: I would\r\nlike to follow up on part of what you're saying here in terms of a\r\ncomment that you made in an interview with AnnLouise Keating. You\r\nmentioned that your lesbian perspective had evolved. Can you say\r\nsomething about what that perspective means to you now, and how it\r\ninfluences your writing today?<\/span>
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\r\nAnzaldua: Yes. It has to do with the terms\r\nand labels of identity. When I was growing up in south Texas the word <\/span>\"queer\"<\/span> was very much what we called these\r\npeople. Or <\/span>\"de las otras<\/span>,\" which means \"of the others,\"\r\nthat I wrote about in Borderlands. <\/span>Marimachas and\r\nmarimachos, jotitas, jotas, tortilleras<\/span>: these were labels and terms in\r\nthe Chicano working-class community that I grew up in. When I went and\r\nleft home and became part of the women of color community and came out\r\nas a lesbian, I started not liking to use the word \"lesbian.\"<\/span> When I would dialogue\r\nwith myself or with other women of color, I would use \"dyke\"<\/span> or \"queer.\" And then with\r\nChicanas I started using the word patlache.<\/span>\r\nAnd patlache is a Nahuatl word that means \"dyke,\" \"lesbian.\" And I started seeing that what the\r\nwhite lesbian community was imposing on me was a Eurocentric view,<\/span>\r\na label that derived from Greece, Sappho, and was very white and that I\r\nwanted to articulate my queerness because it was different from their\r\nqueerness and so I needed a different kind of language. And when I came\r\nout, the only community there for me were a few Chicana dykes and the\r\nwhite lesbian community, so I embraced their books and their theories,\r\nand the way they dressed and everything. And I think all of us do this,\r\nwe go with--if you're a dyke of color and there's not enough in your\r\ncommunity, you.... So I feel very close to the white dykes, and I have\r\na love of them and their community and their art and their writing and\r\ntheir theories, but it began to\r\nbe very constrictive in that I thought I was in a cage and they were\r\ndefining the bars; and I needed to break out of that cage, just like I\r\nneeded to break out of the cage of my family and the nationalistic cage\r\nof just being a Chicana and nothing more<\/span>. I didn't want to just\r\nbe a lesbian and nothing more. In the first place, I wasn't a lesbian, because a lesbian\r\nis somebody who is white and middle class.<\/span> And so I started chafing at the boundaries\r\nand limitations<\/span> set by the white lesbian community and I\r\nparticularly started resenting the writing agenda--if you're a dyke,\r\nyou only write about this content. So I would be put into that\r\nconstraint both by heterosexual, Eurocentric society as to what a dyke\r\nwriter was, and also by the lesbian community into what a lesbian\r\nwriter was supposed to write about and be.
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\r\n<\/span><\/span>\"Voyager,\r\nthere are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.\"<\/span>
\r\n<\/div>\n","contact":"","link":"","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"the cult of anzaldua, not yet formed, is a militant study group that may put thought into action, and translate action back into thought. they may exist to recapitulate the words of anzaldua, or to repeat and reconfigure them incorrectly. you may already be a member.","numcomment":2,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2005\/05\/127792.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":127809,"heading":"yep","article":"yep, you got us, pendejo. we're all lying here in our black nikes with our copy of Borderlands\/La Frontera waiting for the spaceship Gloria to take us up into the sky. Join us...JOIN USSSSSSSS........","author":"zombie","parent_id":127792,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2005-05-31 17:50:47","modified":"2005-05-31 17:50:47","fileurl":""},{"id":127846,"heading":"?????","article":"Cult of A????? Sitting there playing with yourself?\r\nWTF? Put the f'n bong down. ","author":"Sharona Moore","parent_id":127792,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2005-06-01 02:54:20","modified":"2005-06-01 02:54:20","fileurl":""}]}