Gloria E. Anzaldúa A Crosser of Borders

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

A CROSSER OF BORDERS (Transcript from a 1983 Talk)

I arrived from San Diego on Saturday, or was it Friday? I have a hard time keeping track of dates. When I was in San Diego, I went to Border Field Park. That place has a fence that runs from the top of the mountains all the way to the edge of the sea, and that fence divides the United States from Mexico. I started writing a poem beside that fence. What I am going to say today is about that poem. That fence divides me. I am Mexican, a Chicana. Not on the other side but on this side. That fence runs the length of my body. The barbed wires on that fence catch my flesh. The posts, the metal posts, are buried in my body. I am a Mestiza, a person of Indian and white blood, or should I say, Indian and Spanish? My struggle has always been one of borders. There is a war going on inside my body, inside my veins. The Indio part of me, connected to the earth--the part of me that has an affinity with all life, a kinship with animals, the sky--is at war with the white Spanish part of me that is imperialistic, that is patriarchal, that is right-handed, left-brained, logical, reasoning--not that the Indian part of me is not also patriarchal. My struggle has always been una batalla de fronteras–a struggle of borders. There is another part of me that belongs on neither side, and that is the lesbian part of me. As a Chicana, I have been colonized by the Spaniard, by the white man. As a woman I have been colonized by the Indian, by the Spaniard, by the Anglo. As a lesbian, I have been colonized by the Indian, by the Spanish, by the Anglo. By all of those cultures and races, I have been relegated to the other side--el otro lado. I have no country. I go home to South Texas (I was born and raised about twenty miles from the Mexican border), and I do not fit. When I was growing up I rebelled against my culture. My culture, the Mexican culture, has very set ideas about a woman’s place. The Anglo culture that I was born along with has even more set ideas about what a brown woman’s place is. I didn’t want any of it. I left. When I was growing up, I went through a period where I wouldn’t listen to my grandmothers. (My grandmothers were very wise; one of them was a curandera.) I thought it was all superstitious nonsense–Heathens, pagans. As I grew older, I realized what the conditioning in this country had done to me and I returned to my culture; I embraced my culture.

Now I am much older and, I hope, a little wiser, and I have found that there is much good in the traditions, rituals, ceremonies, of my indigenous people. But that it is not all good for me. I have learned to take what is good and throw away the rest. There is much good that is in this society, in the technological society we live in. I would like to take that good and add it to the Indian good that I have dug up from my cultural past. And perhaps between the two, I will be able to survive in the twenty-first century. At this point, I am tired of borders. Yes, we must accept our skin color, our traditions, our culture; yes, we must accept our past; yes, we must stop being afraid or ashamed of being Chicano, Black, Indian, Asian. But we are not alone on this planet. We are a giant organism. One culture is the lungs, another culture the heart, another culture the pancreas, another culture the stomach. We cannot live without the other parts. I am tired of borders; I am tired of nationalistic thinking. Borders and nationalistic thinking have their place. I am not at that place anymore. This conference is about the struggle of borders--racial, cultural, emotional; we are going to experience ideological borders, and, above all, spiritual and religious borders. I propose that we become a crosser of borders. [Here Anzaldúa switched to Spanish, but the transcriber was unable to capture what she said.] I propose that we start within ourselves. Like me, you are mongrels. I do not think there is a single pure-blooded Anglo, Asian, Indian, Native American, Black, Japanese, Chinese--I don’t think there is a single pure anything in this room. If I’m mistaken, you can raise your hand. Within you there is that struggle because most of you were in universities in this country, learned English as a second language, if not the first. And for those of you who are third world, there is your own mother tongue, your own country’s. If you start within yourself and reconcile these borders, tear down that iron fence, if you extend that to your lovers--or should I say lover--to your lover and your family and your friends, and you treat the rest of the community, the people in this room, the way you treat your lover, your families, your friends, we will grow to have respect for one another, we will listen to each other. We rarely listen. We’re so busy wanting to put forth or defend our ideology that we don’t open ourselves up to what the other person is saying--to feel the other person’s presence. I would like us to do that in this room. I would like us to do that in this conference. I would like us to do that in this society. I would like us to do that on this planet. I know it’s hard. Feminine aspects, qualities, virtues are put down in this society, in all societies. Receptivity and listening and respect and devotion and loyalty are feminine qualities that I would like to see strengthened. Our strength, as women (and we are very strong), comes from these qualities. The half of us that is male also has good qualities, strong qualities that right now among women in the women’s movement are not very popular.

(Aggressiveness is one.) So the work that we have to do in this conference is reconciling the man inside of us with the woman inside of us--the darkskinned person with the white-skinned person inside of us. We have a lot of work to do, don’t we?

[At this point, the transcript indicates that Anzaldúa invited audience members standing in the back of the room to come forward and find chairs, as part of her attempt to connect audience members with each other.]

A Note on the Text:

Thanks in large part to her work co-editing This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color Gloria Anzaldúa did a lot of speaking engagements (or what she called “gigs”) during the early 1980s; prior to this event in Illinois, she had a series of speaking engagements in San Diego, California. “A Crosser of Borders” is the transcript of her talk, delivered at the Common Differences: Third World Women and Feminists Perspectives Conference at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, on April 10, 1983. This brief talk was part of a plenary session, “Feminism: CrossCultural Perspectives.” Anzaldúa did not prepare formal written lectures but instead relied on notes, as well as spiritual technologies such as the I Ching. (Prior to this talk, she journaled about the various lectures she planned and threw the coins, asking: “How should I conduct myself tomorrow as moderator–discussant in the plenary session: Feminism: Cross-Cultural Perspectives?” In response, she received “37 The Family.”) Typically, she requested that her talks be recorded and, whenever possible, transcribed. She then used the transcripts as material for her work, sometimes revising and expanding them into publishable essays. (See for instance “New Mestiza Nation” and “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island: Lesbians-of-Color Hacienda Alianzas.”) However, this transcript is quite rough, with only light handwritten edits. Anzaldúa would have revised it considerably before publishing it as an essay. Although she did not develop this short piece into a polished essay, she did return to and work with its ideas and images in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

–AnaLouise Keating, author of The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook

Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942 - 2004) was a Chicana-tejana-lesbian-feminist poet, theorist, and fiction writer from South Texas best known for her avantgarde exploration of identity in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, first published in 1987. She was the co-editor of the foundational anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with Cherríe Moraga. Her works also include Interviews/Entrevistas and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, edited with AnaLouise Keating, three bilingual children’s books, and the posthumously published Light in the Dark/ Luz en Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015). Anzaldúa taught Creative Writing, Feminist Studies, and Chicana/o Studies at universities across the country. Her writings and theories forever changed Chicana/o, Feminist, Queer, and Border Studies in the United States and beyond.