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Part 1, Section 1: The Homeland, Aztlán / El otro México
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
In Spanish, Anzaldúa describes how her people’s history of rebellion has taught her to be a rebel in her personal life. Specifically, she rebels against the entrenched values of authority in order to build a new set of norms that centers respect for women instead.
Anzaldúa transitions from discussing the history of her people in the last section to talking about feminism in the Borderlands and Chicano communities in this one. These ideas are connected because they are both about asserting individual and collective freedom against repressive authority. But there is also friction between them, as Anzaldúa will explain, because Chicanas and Chicanos often view feminism as incompatible with their culture.
Themes
The Strength of My Rebellion. Recalling a childhood photograph, Anzaldúa explains that she was the only person in six generations of her family who left the Rio Grande Valley. Perhaps this is because she has always been stubborn and rebellious.
Anzaldúa pivots into the more personal, reflective tone that pervades the rest of her book. This story explains the deep ambivalence at the heart of her book: she loved and dedicated her life to her Chicano community in the Rio Grande Valley, yet she chose to live away from them because they were not yet ready to accept her as a lesbian.
Themes
Cultural Tyranny. Anzaldúa describes how Chicano culture teaches women to obey men. For most women, there are only three options: nun, sex worker, or mother. But Anzaldúa chose a different path—higher education, which most in her working-class community can’t afford. Because her culture accepts male domination over women, it also obsesses about protecting women from men. But protection often becomes an excuse to control women. Ambition and deviance from the norm—including queerness—are automatically seen as threats to the family and community hierarchy.
In critiquing Chicano culture, Anzaldúa by no means rejects it. Rather, her education has shown her how things could be otherwise, and she wants to use what she has learned to help her people. Thus, her critique is really an expression of her love: she wants to improve Chicano culture, and most of all to unleash Chicana women’s suppressed potential. This means determining where Chicano culture’s misogyny comes from and excising it without sacrificing the rest of the culture in the process.
Themes
Half and Half. One of Anzaldúa’s neighbors was rumored to be half man and half woman, switching back and forth every six months. Myth often associates supernatural powers with deviance and deformity, and Anzaldúa does think that “being both male and female” is powerful. But this is not a deformity; the real problem is that society forces queer people—including herself—“to be only one or the other.”
The “half and half” myth is another kind of Borderlands: Anzaldúa’s neighbor lived across the border between male and female. In doing so, they challenge stereotypical concepts of gender—but also liberate this kind of thinking from the gender binary by showing that such a binary is neither natural nor inevitable. As Anzaldúa remarks here, this dynamic is the core element in her theory of identity and change: the border-crossers whom others view as deviant actually point the way to freedom.
Themes
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Fear of Going Home: Homophobia. In Anzaldúa’s Catholic community, women are raised with “two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality.” So being a lesbian is automatically rebellious. Like many lesbians of color, Anzaldúa came to fear going home and being rejected by her culture or else forced to hide her sexuality and suppress what she calls “the Shadow-Beast”—the secret rebellious force that lives within all women.
The conflict between Chicano and queer culture left Anzaldúa with yet another false binary to traverse—much like male/female, US/Mexico, and English/Spanish. Again, the solution is not to accept the either-or choice, but rather to find a new space beyond it, in which people like Anzaldúa can be their whole, authentic selves.
Themes
Intimate Terrorism: Life in the Borderlands. Anzaldúa describes the fear that many women of color feel as they straddle two worlds: their mother culture, which subjects them to men’s control, and the dominant culture, which does the same in addition to treating them as unwelcome “aliens.” Women must choose whether to accept this treatment or rebel, and native people’s history of resisting colonization inspires Anzaldúa to choose rebellion. While many Chicanas who grow up less immersed in the culture feel they have to defend its faults, Anzaldúa was raised in a deep-rooted, all-Chicano community and doesn’t fear that she would ever betray her culture. She deplores machismo and refuses to glorify it; instead of adapting herself to fit others’ expectations, she insists that others accept her on her own terms.
Anzaldúa’s analysis of Chicana women’s predicament suggests that, despite experiencing additional layers of oppression, she is also lucky to be able to escape misogyny through queer culture. Otherwise, Chicana women must choose between two cultures that both oppress them. Again, this shows how unruly, amorphous border identities actually point the way toward liberation: Anzaldúa’s identity has shown her what Chicana women must do to escape male domination, and she hopes to pass this knowledge on to them. She emphasizes that this does not mean abandoning or rejecting her culture.
Themes
The Wounding of the india-Mestiza. The story of Malintzín (or La Malinche), the native woman who helped the Spaniards conquer Mexico, is an archetype for treason in Mexican and Chicano culture. But this story is also used to blame the community’s problems on Indigenous women, who in reality have been the most subjugated of all. Instead, Anzaldúa prefers to highlight indigenous women’s strength and patience, as they have waited 300 years for the chance to build a world where they can truly be free.
By recounting the story of Malintzín, Anzaldúa shows how misogynist and anti-Indigenous ideas work together to place white men at the top of the social hierarchy. It’s no mere coincidence that this brings Chicano communities’ values in line with Anglo culture’s—in fact, Anzaldúa will explore this alliance between Chicano and Anglo forms of oppression in the next section.
Themes
