La Frontera (the Borderlands) By Gloria Anzaldua

The follow text is ripped straight from my notes from lecture at UCLA, under Professor Limon, as well as some of my own observations from the text. I hope you can use these notes in your studies, and as suggestions of what to look for as you read La Frontera By Gloria Anzaldua.

The text is a manifesto of feminism, chicana-ry, written as poetry, reworked history and personal essay. Anzaldua asserts that the border is the place where the “third world grates against the first and bleeds.”

The border is an arbitrary line, it “crossed her” meaning that she never came here, her people were here already. She traces the lineage of the indigenous people of North and South America to Aztlan, a place historians think may have existed somewhere near Mexico city.

She often writes in Spanish, sometimes offering a side-by-side translation or lines that follow and explain what she’s written in English, but she writes in Spanish because she is refusing to subjugate her own language. Essentially she’s arguing that Spanish is not a “deficient language.”

She talks about the various forms of language that spring up on the borders, being a pocho, she speaks a sort of polluted Spanish unique to Chicanos. She further assesses that Chicanos speak no fewer than eight versions total of English and Spanish in their daily lives, however she refuses to believe that she speaks Spanish poorly. This type of idea is a distinction often made along class lines, coming from the more landed or wealthy folks in Mexico, down to the working poor there allowing them to feel better than the Chicanos across the border. There is a solid ideological link between Ethnic identity and language for Anzaldua.

Anzaldua was audacious in her time, blasting the patriarchy and writing openly about the acquisition of Mexican gods, like Coatlicue, and their transformation into the Virgin de Guadeloupe, La Lorena and Malinche (the raped mother). Before the Spanish, the people of South America passed property through maternal lines, this included royal power.

She exposes the underbelly of the culture, the tendency to treat women as disposable articles. Beating a woman is a behavior in line with tradition; it is the responsibility of the man of the house to punish a wayward female.

She asserts that women have three places in her culture, nun, prostitute or mother. The ability to serve a man is a woman’s highest virtue; however the Anglo culture prizes ambition in both men and women.

The imagery of snakes: used as phallic symbols by Anzaldua, but also utilized to highlight the difference between an Anglo interpretation of the symbol and an Aztec one. Snakes in the OG tradition of South America were animals of the earth and the underworld, symbols of infinity and linked with Shamanism and magic. Anzaldua links the magic of the snake to the magical creation process of writing.