Borderlands / La Frontera Study Guide

Gloria Anzaldúa was born and raised in the Borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley, where her family roots went back six generations. Her parents were farmworkers, and she also worked in the fields from a young age to help make ends meet, particularly after her father died when she was just 14. She went on to study literature and education, ultimately completing her MA in 1972. She then started a PhD and taught in varied settings, ranging from a bilingual preschool to several universities. She left Texas permanently in 1977 and spent the second half of her life living primarily in Santa Cruz, California (but also lived at different times in Arkansas, Indiana, Vermont, and New York City, among other places). Aware of how both academia and the Chicano activist movement excluded women and queer people’s voices, she teamed up with fellow Chicana lesbian scholar Cherríe Moraga to put together the landmark anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 1981. Six years later, she published Borderlands / La Frontera, which is still by far her best-known work and now widely considered a foundational text in Chicana literature and cultural studies. She also edited two more anthologies of writing by women of color and wrote three children’s books as well as dozens of poems, articles, and short stories. She died of diabetes complications in 2004, leaving her PhD dissertation barely unfinished. After her death, her estate published this dissertation as the book Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015), and the University of California Santa Cruz awarded her an honorary doctorate.

Anzaldúa insists that readers must understand the Borderlands and its people in their proper historical context, as the product of bloody, centuries-long territorial disputes and colonization projects that have cut an “open wound” between the U.S. and Mexico. This is why she opens her book with an essay on U.S., Mexico, and Texas history and ends it with a reminder of the Rio Grande Valley’s history as Mexican and Indigenous territory. Indeed, her last essay and last poem both focus on the importance of teaching Chicano history to young people, and she dedicated her life to doing the same for Chicano literature. After noting that the Borderlands’ history really starts with the Aztec migration south from what is now the U.S. southwest to what is now central Mexico, she explains how the 16th-century Spanish and 19th-century American conquests of Mexico formed the Borderlands as the world knows them today. Through this latter invasion—which is often called the Mexican-American War in English—Mexico lost the majority of its land, including all of present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah. In Texas, local governments systematically backed Anglo settlers at the expense of the Spanish-speaking Tejanos, who had been there for generations. This is how thousands of families, including Anzaldúa’s, lost their land and were reduced to poverty. But Anzaldúa also emphasizes the border’s contemporary history—and particularly the way the U.S. has militarized it since the mid-20th century, spreading violence throughout the Borderlands and immiserating those who must cross to make a living. Of course, this trend has only accelerated since Anzaldúa published this book in 1987. In the 21st century, violence at and across the border has become the central issue in American immigration policy.

Borderlands / La Frontera is a foundational work of Chicana feminist literature, which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to the politically successful but male-dominated Chicano Movement. The earliest novels by Chicana writers include Berta Ornelas’s Come Down From the Mound and Isabella Ríos’s Victuum, and John Rechy’s City of Night is a notable earlier queer Chicano novel. Major early Chicana poets include Bernice Zamora, whose first major work was Restless Serpents, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, whose collection Emplumada won an American Book Award. Estela Portillo Trambley Sor Juana and Other Plays. But the best-known Chicana writer today is likely Sandra Cisneros, whose The House on Mango Street has been widely read for 40 years. Other prominent Chicana writers include Norma Elia Cantú (Canícula) and Ana Castillo (So Far From God). Chicana/o Studies was also forming as an academic discipline around the same time Anzaldúa began her career. Some of her contemporary academic Chicana feminist scholars include Norma Alarcón and Cherríe Moraga, with whom she co-edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. More recent works by Chicana scholars include Alvina Quintana’s Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices and Maylei Blackwell’s ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement. Besides Borderlands / La Frontera, Anzaldúa also published three children’s books, two more anthologies—Making Face, Making Soul and The Bridge We Call Home—and a major posthumous theoretical work, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro.