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A review by jesshooves
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria E. Anzaldúa
“Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. It is like a cactus needle embedded in the flesh...When I write it feels like I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart—a Nahuatl concept. My soul makes itself through the creative act. It is constantly remaking and giving birth to itself through my body. It is this learning to live with la Coatlicue that transforms living in the Borderlands from nightmare into numinous experience.”
“La gente Chicana tiene tres madres. All three are mediators: Guadalupe, the virgin-mother who has not abandoned us, la Chingada, the raped mother whom we have abandoned, and la Llorona, the mother who seeks her lost children and is a combination of the other two.”
“But they will never take that pride / of being mexicana-Chicana-tejana / nor our Indian woman’s spirit. / And when the Gringos are gone— / see how they kill one another— / here we’ll still be like the horned toad and the lizard / relics of an earlier age / survivors of the First Fire Age—el Quinto Sol.”
“La gente Chicana tiene tres madres. All three are mediators: Guadalupe, the virgin-mother who has not abandoned us, la Chingada, the raped mother whom we have abandoned, and la Llorona, the mother who seeks her lost children and is a combination of the other two.”
“But they will never take that pride / of being mexicana-Chicana-tejana / nor our Indian woman’s spirit. / And when the Gringos are gone— / see how they kill one another— / here we’ll still be like the horned toad and the lizard / relics of an earlier age / survivors of the First Fire Age—el Quinto Sol.”