Abstract
In writing about her childhood along the Texas-Mexico border, Gloria Anzaldua describes the experience of being caught between two cultures, as being an alien in both. The actual physical borderland that Anzaldua describes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border, but the "borderlands" she refers to are something more psychological, sexual, and spiritual. These Borderlands are present wherever two or more cultures confront each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where all socio-economic classes touch, and where the confusion of sexual and gender identity exists. Her preoccupations with the inner life of the Self, and with the struggle of that Self in the borderlands provide the unique positioning consciousness. The quest for one's identity based on race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, etc., ends up in the system of binary oppositions. In my view, in this book Anzaldua criticizes an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other and insists that the Self is plural, transformative, and performative. She searches for a way of balancing, and mitigating the system of binary oppositions through knowing and learning the history of oppression. Anzaldua suggests that we should accept our differences and that our differences should open political lines of affiliation with other groups to challenge the specific forms of domination that we share in common.
