In Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderland/La Frontera, Anzaldúa mixes autobiography, poetry, mythology, historical documentation and theoretical propositions as she draws upon issues of race, sexuality, gender and the nation. In Borderlands, the concept of mestizaje, a term originating from post-revolutionary Mexico and the construction of a “Mestizo identity” that would become the foundation for the modern Mexican national identity. Cultural synthesis, and the mixed bloodlines that were a process of colonization became a national project of creating identity based on the mixed nation. The “mixed nation” was attributed to a kind of pathology, whose history and origin were timeless and unchanging. Anzaldúa reappropriates the term in order to call for a new strategy of identity formation and politics. Mestizaje, for Anzaldúa, is based on the fluidity within identity rather than a singly subject position. Anzaldúa mobilizes this term in order to use it as a means of demystifying and producing resistances against social and territorial borders. It is in the interstitial places between cultures and nations that Anzaldúa focuses on in her discussion. These spaces, Anzaldúa argues, are what the individuals living alongside the border must negotiate. This new subject, la mestiza, is one that is “cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war” (78). This text becomes a production where she speaks on behalf of Chicanos or rather, a new kind of Chicano - one that is political and who "no longer feel [the] need to beg entrance” such as the translation from English to Spanish. The mixing of Spanish and English, the refusal for a complete accordance to one or the other reflects the multiple and mixed identity that she feels is part of a new “language of the Borderlands.”
Gloria Anzaldúa has become an influential writer in the concept of mestizage and on the possibilities of Chicano politics, which makes her somewhat sacrosanct texts, according to many people actively engaged in Chicano politics, so difficult to position. On the one hand, it is important to note the contribution to identity politics that this book produced historically to the identity and political engagement of what could be called Chicano-ness. Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s contributions to the discussions of racial and cultural marginalization, but also a marginalization based on gender and sexuality, Anzaldúa herself a lesbian. Her theory of mestizaje as one that opposes stationary subject positions and one based on fluidity becomes the battle cry of Chicano studies, a text that avoided essentialism or reductiveness. Perhaps we could compare it to a kind of theorizing that Bhabha seems to construct in The Location of Culture:
“It is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence…there is a return to the performance of identity as iteration, the re-creation of the self in the world of travel, the resettlement of the borderline community of migration” (12).
Using Bhabha theory, then, we could say that in certain regards Anzaldúa’s text is an intervention into the politics of recognition as she attempts to create a new kind of identity based around the multiple and mixed traditions, culture and languages that the subjects of migration and borderlands experience. This analysis, however, is written with a certain amount of apprehension. My apprehension stems from the artifacts from which she uses to construct this new kind of identity. For example, throughout Borderlands, feelings of resistance are positioned as intrinsic or instinctual. Concerning the existential nature of her struggle, she writes:
"This book, then, speaks of my existence. My preoccupations with the inner life of the Self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial images; with the unique positioning consciousness takes at these confluent streams; and with my almost instinctive urge to communicate, to speak, to write about life on the borders, life in the shadows" (7)
Or concerning the choice to challenge dominant ideological constructions:
"I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me" (16).
The ways in which it has been regarded as a way of living or a standard of attributes that define Chicano-ness. Even if this identity is one “based on difference and hybridity,” in what ways does it still create a very defined representation of identity? Rather, in what ways has this text been used as a means to identify and define what it means to be Chicano? How does it still become folded over into an essentialist identity – one that is always politicized and as necessarily positioned as resistant to the State and “White Culture” as well as “Mexican Culture”?
What is also cause for some hesitation on my part is her use of history, or rather, the mythic historico-cultural symbols of Mexican and more specifically, indigenous identity. For example,
"My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman's history of resistance. The Aztec female rites of mourning were rites of defiance protesting the cultural changes which disrupted the equality and balance between female and male...I fear no betrayal on my part because, unlike Chicanas and other women of color who grew up white or who have only recently returned to their native cultural roots, I was totally immersed in mine...in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano is in my system. I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry 'home' on my back" (21).
This declaration brings up a series of questions. How does such a relation to symbols of a somewhat ancient and arguably, origin history, serve as a means for authentication as a Chicana? How can a break from patriarchal and machismo mindsets, as Anzaldúa argues be made through the mythic constructions of Aztec social structures and the roots from which she must return and constantly desires? How does this idea of origins, in many ways, contradict the very mestiza, that she argues for? What are the political stakes for using history and even moreso, indigenous history? What does it mean to reading meaning with the myths of Mexican national symbols and Aztec culture, even if it is, in some ways, a rereading?
No comments:
Post a Comment