From the opening lines of Gloria Anzaldúa’s chapter titled “The Homeland, Aztlán: El otro México”, the reader encounters various literary discourses: a title written in both English and Spanish, a stanza from a Spanish poem, an ethnographic citation and a longer poem that transverses the discursive borders. This longer poem, which is written mostly in English, with Spanish lines used strategically throughout, offers a historical, yet not entirely nor universally accessible, account while the affective properties open the borders, at times, allowing the reader to pass through unscathed.
Before analyzing the literary and aesthetic importance of this juxtaposition, it’s important to understand how Anzaldúa defines borders: “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (3). In Global Matters, Paul Jay concludes that Anzaldúa’s “borderland” is “an improvisational space in which languages and identities hybridize and evolve” (77). Even though Anzaldúa’s definition is most explicitly referring to the geographical and physical boundaries between cultures, I want to focus specifically on her notion of “the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” and its relationship with these opening pages.
This longer poem opens with an affective description that activates not only the reader’s imagination but also produces a corporal reaction:
Wind tugging at my sleeve
feet sinking into the sand
I stand at the edge where the earth touches ocean
Where the two overlap
a gentle coming together
at other times and places a violent clash. (1)
Not only can I imagine myself standing along the water’s edge, feeling the ocean breeze, I am forewarned that this imagined translocation could end in a violent clash, which I believe occurs at the end of this poem. Over the nearly two full pages of text, Anzaldúa takes us on a historical journey that begins textually in English and at an unidentified oceanic location. One can imagine the beaches of Maryland, Florida, Mexico, Italy, among others, with which s/he has a personal connection. Immediately in the second stanza, Anzaldúa introduces the geographical domain by stating that “across the border in Mexico” (1) there are “houses gutted by waves/cliffs crumbling into the sea/silver waves marbled with spume/gashing a hole under the border fence” (1). This image, while continuing the maritime motif offers a more violent relationship between the sea and the border, which is symbolized through the materialization of the border fence. Anzaldúa references the barbwire fence multiple times throughout, with each reference becoming more personal, while interchanging between English and Spanish to narrate her personal journey.
In a way that the ocean water has eroded the border fence, Anzaldúa emphasizes its long-term effects on her culture:
1,950 mile-long open wound
dividing a pueblo, a culture,
running down the length of my body,
staking fence rods in my flesh,
splits me splits me
me raja me raja
This is my home
this thin edge of
barbwire.
Not only does she underscore the nearly two thousand mile physical and geographical boundary, she problematizes the notion that the fence only divides land by emphasizing how it has divided a pueblo and a culture. On a textual and aesthetic level, she literally splits the words with more spaces, which breaks the reader’s focus and internal pace. Ultimately, for non-Spanish speaking readers, the use of Spanish represents a fence that, without the aid of a dictionary or metaphorical ladder, can’t be crossed.
Recognizing that she lives along “this thin edge of barbwire,” Anzaldúa concludes this poem with a stanza entirely in Spanish:
Yo soy un puente tendido
del mundo gabacho al del mojado,
lo pasado me estirá pa’ ‘tras
y lo presente pa’ ‘delante.
Que la Virgen de Guadalupe me cuide
Ay ay ay, soy mexicana de este lado.
Analyzing the linguistic nature of the stanza, we find that she has expressed her artistic license by using abbreviations and regionalisms in order to fully express her authorial role, bridging the past and present from either side of the fence, which she explicitly reaffirms in the last line. She is a Mexican woman from this side. Returning to the opening imagery, this concluding stanza, in my opinion, represents a violent clash between the text and a non-Spanish speaking reader. In literary terms, beginning and ending a text in different languages represents Anzaldúa’s notion of an “emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” because the reader confronts a conclusion that clashes with his/her preconceived expectations; or rather, the unwritten contract that the text will deliver a solution or answer addressing the reader’s relationship with it. For me, the importance of Anzaldúa’s text resides in the fact that she writes in a way that invites the reader inside her borders while unexpectedly rejecting them through her language usage, which symbolizes the process of migrating and confronting the choice between assimilating into the host culture or maintaining one’s identity to their home culture.
I found your post very interesting, particularly the emphasis on Anzaldúa´s bilingualism. On the one hand, you mention two examples of the way in which Anzaldúa ´s text emerges from her particular location, in the interstices between two languages and two cultures. As you pointed out, the coporality that can be identified throughout the text and in the quotations you selected can be related to the materiality of both her body and her politics of location. The “difference” that she is articulating throughout her work refers to a material reality that can be mapped: the geopolitical location on the border between the south of the US and México where she is placed. I really liked how you always take into account the specificity of this location, as the border can assume more metaphorical meanings but it is crucial to bear in mind the context in which Anzaldúa is writing. Anzaldúa vindicates the in-betweeness, she constructs an embodied and situated knowledge, a “consciousness of the borderland”. In order to create this, she has to use her own tools and her own language, not English, not Spanish, but a combination of both, for a new consciousness requires a new language. Your post allows us to reflect on how Anzaldúa turns the border into a creative space: “Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create”. La frontera, that space in-between the two languages, allows her to write, to create and ultimately to transform her reality.
I think your discussion of the affective response to this poem is really interesting and important; Anzaldúa’s text to so viscerally potent, and yet at the same time “ambivalence and unrest reside there”(26). When I first read Borderlands/La Frontera as an undergraduate, I remember feeling the violence of the text more forcefully–I recall responding first with a very visceral anger. I think I was, in particular, feeling that “rejection” you mention (although I don’t think it was the language that made me feel it)–a feeling I was perhaps less able to cope with during those years of my life. I also recall that visceral anger slowly giving way into some combination of pleasure, frustration, guilt, and curiosity; in the end, I left the text feeling that very ambivalence and unrest that Anzaldúa prescribes.
This time, though, I experienced the text completely differently, at least viscerally. (I assume that this is at least in part because my Spanish is so much better now than it was over 7 years ago, but I’m not sure it is entirely for that reason.) I didn’t feel that violent clash with the last stanza of the poem–this, perhaps because of the language, as you mention–but rather a strong desire just to stay there, with the poem, in the language, “tendido.” Rather than feeling rejected by her words, I was drawn in by the silences–which could perhaps be compared to Julius’s dark spaces–and by the rambling, back and forth movement of the lines and stanzas. Perhaps the end feeling–the unrest–was not much different, though.