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Preface to the First Edition
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Borderlands / La Frontera, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Borders, Hybridity, and Identity
History and the U.S.-Mexico Relationship
Chicana Feminism
Language, Storytelling, and Ritual
Summary
Analysis
Anzaldúa quotes the Los Tigres del Norte song “El otro México,” which is about Chicanos building a new version of Mexico north of the border, and historian Jack D. Forbes, who describes Chicanos as the Aztecs of the north, the US’s largest indigenous community. Anzaldúa begins with a bilingual poem about the border wall running into the ocean in San Diego-Tijuana. The border is an “open wound” that splits her and her people in two. But it is also her home. The US land north of it once belonged to Mexico and has always belonged to native peoples. Anzaldúa is like a bridge suspended between the two worlds of Mexico and the US, but also those of the past and the future.
Anzaldúa dedicates her first essay to critically analyzing the border’s history both because this context is necessary to understand her perspective and because most Americans only learn about it from a narrow, nationalistic perspective. Because they don’t know the border’s history, many Americans automatically view the Spanish-speaking people of the southwest as aliens, foreigners, or recent migrants—but, in reality, their communities have much deeper roots in the region than Anglo ones. By redefining white conquerors and settlers as the land’s rightful inhabitants, this intellectual sleight of hand tries to justify the dispossession and exploitation Anzaldúa’s people, who were already living there. This is why Anzaldúa calls the border an “open wound” (or “herida abierta” in Spanish): it is the physical manifestation of the violence that the US (mostly but not exclusively) has imposed on the region and on Anzaldúa’s people.
Themes
Anzaldúa argues that, in dividing one world from another, the border creates a new world altogether. As white Americans associate the border with alienness and criminality, the US government constantly tries to control and suppress its people. The border patrol deported one of Anzaldúa’s relatives to Guadalajara because they refused to believe he was really a fifth-generation American.
Ordinarily, both Americans and Mexicans learn to view the border as a negative space—the line where one world ends and another begins. But as part of the community that the border has split in half, Anzaldúa pushes her readers to view the border region as a positive space, a distinct region with its own special history and identity. This is just the first example of a move that she makes repeatedly throughout the book and that scholars associate with the modern philosophical concept of dialectics—a move that involves reconsidering binary oppositions in ways that synthesize them (or bring them together, revealing their underlying unity). Throughout the book, Anzaldúa argues that there is strength in hybridity by showing how people in the Borderlands build their lives through synthesizing such oppositions—including the US and Mexico, English and Spanish, and male and female.
Themes
The Aztecs placed their homeland, Aztlán, in what is now the US southwest, a conclusion that archeological evidence now supports. The war god Huitzilopochtli then led them south to present-day Mexico City, where Spaniards conquered them in the 1500s, decimating their population but also intermarrying with them and creating mestizos.
While conventional American narratives paint the US and Mexico as two essentially different countries that have only recently come into contact, Anzaldúa draws attention to their deep, ancestral links. Aztlán serves as an origin story for the (mestizo) Mexican nation and people, but also important background knowledge for understanding contemporary migration from Mexico to the US—which, Anzaldúa argues, is part of a long tradition of migration in both directions on the continent.
Themes
El destierro / The Lost Land. Many mestizos moved north to Texas, becoming Tejanos. Anglos then invaded Texas and incorporated it into the US. Anzaldúa quotes Chilean and Mexican songs about losing one’s land, then Anglo colonist William H. Wharton’s poem celebrating white supremacy—the idea the US used to justify stealing Tejanos’ land and lynching them if they resisted. In this period, during a drought, an Anglo lawyer swindled Anzaldúa’s family out of their land. Growing up, she watched US agribusiness companies buy up all the land and force its former owners, including her father, to work it for a pittance as sharecroppers.
Anzaldúa and her family are among the well-off Tejanos who accidentally became poor Americans after the US conquest of Texas and invasion of Mexico (also known in the US by the neutral-sounding name of the “Mexican-American War”). Again, understanding the region’s history of violence is crucial to making sense of its present-day predicaments. To Anzaldúa, this is personal: her family’s struggles are the product of white supremacist American policies that have never been remedied. Many Americans explain inequalities between white and Latino communities as race-neutral, particularly by referencing poverty in immigrants’ countries of origin and the challenges of building a new life after immigration. But Anzaldúa shows that in the Borderlands, the real problem is how centuries of US policy have systematically reallocated wealth, power, and—above all—land from the region’s native and longstanding Spanish-speaking populations to white settlers.
Themes
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El cruzar del mojado / Illegal Crossing. US business interests also expanded south, allying themselves with the Mexican government and creating the current unequal relationship between the US and Mexico, where unemployment is widespread, the peso keeps falling against the dollar, and many young people are stuck working in maquiladoras, factories owned by major US corporations.
Americans often think of the US and Mexico economies as separate—and thus attribute the US’s relative wealth to luck or hard work, but not deliberate policy choices. Yet Anzaldúa again shows that, once we pay attention to history, we will see how the US has systematically impoverished Mexico in order to systematically enrich itself.
Themes
Now, Mexicans are returning back north to their homeland—the US southwest—but Anglos view them as invaders. Desperate but courageous, they dodge bandits and Border Patrol agents as they cross the Rio Grande. If they succeed, they get to live in the shadows, working dangerous sub-minimum wage farm jobs. Uprooted from their families, migrant women face the added burden of sexual violence.
In the 21st century, decades after Anzaldúa wrote this book, undocumented crossings and border security dominate public conversations about immigration more than ever. Yet Anzaldúa encourages her readers to look at the situation from the perspective of migrants themselves, who have been impoverished in large part by centuries of US policy and who are moving to a land that, in many cases, was once theirs. Anzaldúa’s overarching message is clear: shared history creates mutual obligations between the two countries, and fulfilling those obligations and stopping the pervasive violence of life on the border requires a new mindset—a mindset that is already widespread in the Borderlands.
Themes
