Gloria E. Anzaldúa — explored intersectionality and challenged conceptions of borders through more than 30 years of writing.
“I will have my voice. Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue — my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.” — Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Written by shift7, published here with permission
“For me, writing is a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out. My feminism is grounded not on incorporeal abstraction but on corporeal realities. The material body is center, and central. The body is the ground of thought,” Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa would write during the last years of her life.¹
Born in Raymondville, Texas near the U.S.-Mexico border in 1942, Gloria was commanded by her body from a very early age. At the age of 6, she was diagnosed with a rare hormonal condition that caused her to go through puberty much younger than other children, which in turn ends bone growth early.
AnaLouise Keating, the editor of Gloria’s last book, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, shared in a conversation with shift7 that it was precisely because Gloria was marked by difference that she grew to challenge the categories of “different.”
Gloria’s articulation of intersectional realities would break paradigms for more than 30 years. Her work is captured in nine books, as well as many additional published and unpublished essays, poems, and fiction. In New York City in late 2019, a marathon reading took place of her foundational book of poems and essays, Borderlands/La Frontera, with the invitation citing that this book “established the Mexican-American border as a metaphor for different types of transgressions — racial, sexual, social, and cultural,” and that, “Anzaldúa writings are still painfully relevant as the current administration escalates violence against and incarceration of Central Americans at the U.S. border.”
Gloria wrote in Borderlands/La Frontera:
“Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity — I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex Mex, and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice. Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue — my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.”
AnaLouise Keating explained to shift7 that Gloria was raised speaking Spanish, and was punished in elementary school for not speaking English. Gloria’s decision to later focus on English and Education for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees was in part to challenge the system. She worked as a teacher in bilingual schools while studying for her Master’s Degree, which she obtained from the University of Texas at Austin in 1972.
Gloria then moved to Indiana, and “served as a liaison between migrant camps and school officials,”² and began writing. In 1974, she returned to the University of Texas at Austin to pursue a doctorate in literature.
While there, she taught a class entitled “La Mujer Chicana,” and realized how few literary works had been published by and for women of color in the U.S.³ She decided to do something about that. She collaborated with Cherrie Moraga to compile a collection of poetry, fiction and essays by women of color, and in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color was published.
Gloria also began to have her own writing published. Borderlands/La Frontera was published in 1987. She used “a unique blend of eight languages: two variations of English and six of Spanish,” which creates “a daunting task for the non-bilingual reader to decipher the full meaning of the text,”⁴ giving the reader the same challenge she had during her childhood.
Gloria described herself as “chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist.”⁵ She also said:
“I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds. Gloria, the facilitator, Gloria, the mediator, straddling the walls between abysses. “Your allegiance is to La Raza, the Chicano movement,” say the members of my race. “Your allegiance is to the Third World,” say my Black and Asian friends. “Your allegiance is to your gender, to women,” say the feminists. Then there’s my allegiance to the Gay movement, to the socialist revolution, to the New Age, to magic and the occult. And there’s my affinity to literature, to the world of the artist. What am I? A third world lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic leanings. They would chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a label.”
Gloria’s work brought a chorus of missing voices together, inspiring them to take their rightful place in history along with her. “Anzaldúa’s approach to writing was dialogic, recursive, democratic, spirit-inflected, and only partially within her conscious control,” wrote AnaLouise Keating in the introduction to Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, the last book Gloria worked on, which AnaLouise edited to have published posthumously.
Gloria was diagnosed with Type I diabetes in 1992. AnaLouise wrote, “This diagnosis altered her life on almost every level, forcing her to reexamine her self-definition, her relationship to her body, her writing process, and her worldview.”⁶ AnaLouise added during the conversation with shift7, “As a self-employed author, she died younger than she would have, had she had solid health care.” Gloria passed away in 2004 from complications due to diabetes.
AnaLouise shared that Gloria’s writing in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality explores “spiritual activism as a different way of doing politics,” and expands on challenges to borders, to include the typical division between the mind and the body, as well as psychic, and emotional borderlands.
Gloria’s perspectives continue to have wide influence, particularly on scholars — her writing is included in more than 100 anthologies, and “has helped to transform academic fields including American, Chicano/a, composition, ethnic, literary, and women’s studies.”⁷ Her book Borderlands/La Frontera and her essay La Prieta “are considered to be groundbreaking works in cultural, feminist, and queer theories.”⁸
In 1991, Gloria was invited by the University of Arizona in Tucson to “read widely from her extensive body of work” as part of their Fall Reading Series of poetry. Professor Allison Deming, in her introduction of Gloria mentioned that Borderlands/La Frontera is “used in a number of courses here and in a number of other universities across the country.”
In 2012, this book was banned in the Tucson Unified School System in Arizona, in follow up to Arizona lawmakers passing H.B. 2281 in 2010, which banned academic courses that “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group” or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” among other restrictions.
It took until 2017 for a federal judge in Arizona to rule this policy unconstitutional.⁹
Listen to Gloria read her poetry at the University of Arizona, including uncollected and unpublished poems, here.
“Why am I compelled to write?… Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger… To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit… Finally I write because I’m scared of writing, but I’m more scared of not writing.”
― Gloria Anzaldúa
Gloria Anzaldúa has been awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fiction Award, the Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award, and a Sappho Award of Distinction. The National Women’s Studies Association awards the the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize annually.
With thanks for insights to Dr. AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas Women’s University in Denton, Texas.
You can visit Gloria’s Story in person:
- Raymondville, Texas (birthplace)
- Texas Woman’s University — Denton, Texas
- Pan-American University (University of Texas, Edinburg, Texas)
- University of Texas, Austin, Texas (MA)
- University of California Santa Cruz (alter archives)
- Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin — Austin, Texas (home of the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers)
Listen
- Gloria E. Anzaldúa reading her poetry at the University of Arizona, 1991
- Remembering Gloria Anzaldua Smithsonian Latino Center for a special Hispanic Heritage Month and LGBT History Month program honoring the award-winning Chicana writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004), 70 anniversary of her birth.
Read
Gloria Anzaldua authored of several books of poetry, non-fiction, and children’s fiction including:
- Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
- This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color — Gloria Anzaldúa collaborated with Cherríe Moraga on compiling this anthology (1981)
- Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (1990)
- This Bridge We Call Home (2002) edited with AnnLouise Keating
Children’s Books:
- Friends from the Other Side/ Amigos del Otro Lado (1993)
- Prieta and the Ghost Woman/ Prieta y La Llorona (1995)
Later compilations of Gloria Anzaldua’s writings edited by AnaLouisa Keating include:
- Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality (2015) — written during the last decade of her life.
- The Gloria Anzaldua Reader (2009) — contains much of Anzaldúa’s published writing (including several pieces now out of print), more than half the material has never before been published.
- Interviews/Entrevistas (2000) — collection of interviews
Archives:
- University of Texas Nettie Lee Benson Archive Latin American Collection
- U.C. Santa Cruz Special Collections and Archives
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