As a half-Caucasian, half-Pakistani individual adopted by white, American parents as an infant and lacking any knowledge of or connection to my biological parents or their cultural backgrounds, I often feel as though I am on the outside looking in on experiences of heritage. Certainly, my personal heritage is a product of the context in which I was raised, but I lack a sense of connection to any kind of ancestral meaning, and notions of heritage that precedes one’s birth having an impact on selfhood often seem constructed or otherwise inaccessible to me. For this reason, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera was particularly meaningful among the texts that I read over the course of the semester. I had not read the book before, and while I was familiar with the idea of conflict at the Mexico-United States border, Anzaldúa illustrated for me the equally contested borders within people based on complex racial backgrounds, histories, and languages. It was strange to me, at first, to read how relevant Anzaldúa believed her Indian, Aztec, and Spanish heritages were to her. In Borderlands/La Frontera, she writes about those groups’ histories as if the people are warring inside of her. I struggled to grasp how her understanding of ancestry could mean so much, how the actions of the people she was genetically descended from could matter in her life in the present.

I still don’t think I completely understand how the connections of ancestry can bear such powerful importance in people’s lives. Perhaps it’s simply because I do not have access to that information for myself. I cannot say with any certainty who or even which groups of people I am descended from. But when people imagine their ancestry and attach meaning to it, it seems to me that they’re often working with guesswork to an extent as well. No family line is certain, and imagining that the experiences of people you have nothing more than a biological connection to are relevant to your own life seems nonsensical to me. Anzaldúa’s narration of how her past, and her ancestors’ pasts, influenced the conditions in which she grew up and the attitudes of her people, however, helped me begin to realize how the past informs the present in the context of a cultural group. Those biological ties to the past may not have direct influence on personal identity, but their cultural value and reinforcement do.

I think reading Borderlands/La Frontera has helped me be more cognizant of the complex connection between heritage and identity in other works that I read and analyze, as well as in my personal encounters with others. I will now consider the intricacies of separate, conflicting ancestral lines and the histories that inform the development of a culture to a particular moment, and I hope that my understanding of how authors represent their nations, cultures, and languages will be informed by Anzaldúa’s unmasking of the concept of unified culture. Using Anzaldúa’s vision, I will be more confident about critically assessing the concept of heritage, whereas in the past I have shied away from such an approach because the discussion of ancestry feels like territory I am not authorized to occupy.

On a personal level, I also feel that Borderlands/La Frontera has been constructive for me in that it has complicated and deepened my understanding of what it means to identify as Mexican or Chicano. I am not, to my knowledge, connected to a Latino background, but Spanish speakers often mistakenly identify me as Latino. There is something confusing and painful about being associated with a particular group identity when I can’t actually participate in that experience. Reading Anzaldúa’s text, however, has helped me see the difficulty and often painful contradictions of reconciling self, culture, and race that exist even for those who have clear cultural and ethnic associations. As a result, I find myself feeling a sense of fellowship with those diverse cultures that reach out but don’t quite connect with me, because Borderlands/La Frontera has inspired me to wonder whether the experience of being outside of stable racial identity is not something that separates me from others, but a struggle many of us share. Anzaldúa certainly makes a strong case for the prevalence of conflict within single racial and cultural groups, and throughout the semester we have learned just how significantly people all over the world experience rupture in the national, cultural, and ethnic categories that shape identity. Even the most stable narratives of identity are never simple, and never produced without the triumph of some voices and the repression of others. This recognition will contribute to the way I think about myself as well as others, both academically and personally.