It is increasingly easy to see evidence in daily life of transnationalism, and encounter people whose lives have followed transnational patterns.  As Appadurai states in the introduction of Modernity at Large, “…few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or coworker who is not on the road to somewhere else or already coming back home, bearing stories and possibilities (4).”  The most visible transnationalism comes from movement.  However, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera offers a look at a very different sort of transnationalism.  Rather than focus on the act of moving across borders, she focuses on the lived experience of those who exist between and are caught up in constantly shifting borders.  Because the experience of living in this Borderland is so deeply personal, and has had such a profound impact on those who experience it, I feel that the greatest strength in Anzaldúa’s project is how effectively she uses herself as an example.  She engages her audience in such a profoundly personal level and allows us to take part in the space in which she’s lived.  Thus, in responding to the first prompt for examining this text, Anzaldúa’s idiosyncratic approach to presenting the material is crucial to the effectiveness of the work.  Her use of language, cultural memory and biographical elements help allow readers to experience life between borders, between binaries.

Much of the transnational readings we have discussed this semester focuses on the movement of people, objects or ideas across borders.  Borderlands is unique in this regard for focusing on people who have had borders move across them.  Rafael Pérez-Torres highlights the unique circumstances of Anzaldúa’s community by explaining “Their transnationalism is not one borne of the movement from a national context to another.  Rather, it is one that is produced by the historical realities of shifting borders in the southwestern United States.  The borders here are linguistic, social, and economic borders negotiated and crossed by Chicano subjectivities working through multilingual cultural identities and dissident practices (Minor Transnationalism 318).”  The history of these people exists between national, cultural or linguistic borders.  The personal narrative offered in Borderlands shows the way in which people can exist without being defined by a clear border.

Borderlands begins by offering a historical context for the tejano people.  The narrative differs from what one is likely to hear in the United States, with people first immigrating south, into Mexican territory, before appropriating the land and becoming a republic.  As Anzaldúa puts it, “Tejanos lost their land and, overnight, became the foreigners (28).”  The border was imposed onto the people, creating a divide between those who remain in Mexico and those who stayed in the territory of what would become the state of Texas.  Despite the divide, the people remain tejano, and their identity is defined by elements that have no regard for the border.

Anzaldúa explains that “Culture forms our beliefs.  We perceive the version of reality that it communicates.  Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture (38).”  The culture of the tejanos play a much larger role in giving identity than the border that separates Texan from Mexican.  The people that Anzaldúa describes are, in a sense, outside of the border.  In giving us this personal account, she shows to us the fallacy of relying on binary concepts to analyze the world.  It is not a complete picture to only consider Texan and Mexican, as these people are at once both and neither.  Her personal accounts continue to bring attention to the insufficiency of using the binary.

Borderlands frequently switches between English and Spanish, but this too is not a binary.  Anzaldúa points out that her language is fluid, influenced by English and Spanish yet being fully neither.  She lists the various languages that she is required to know in order to exist between communities.  Chicano Spanish, her Spanish, is a “border tongue which developed naturally (77).”  For people that live in the border, language must be flexible enough to accommodate all sides.  She also uses another element of her life, her lesbianism, to highlight other false binaries.  Sexuality and gender are not binary, and she brings attention to the danger in viewing them as such.  She sees her culture as an inherently misogynistic one, with harmful norms for what constitutes masculinity.  The rigid binary between masculine and feminine continues these harmful practices.  For her it is, again, those who are between the binary that are able to push for change.  She says “Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity (106).”

It is easy, in examining transnational action and events defined by borders, to think of binaries.  Immigrant and native, English and Spanish, us and them.  Anzaldúa’s work shows the error in resting in a binary view of the world.  Neither English nor Spanish, neither prose nor poem, Borderlands is proof that life exists between the borders.