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Part 1, Section 2: Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan
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
After an epigraph from Silvio Rodríguez’s song “Sueño con serpientes” (“I Dream of Serpents”), Anzaldúa describes how her mother used to warn her to watch out for snakes when she used the outhouse.
Anzaldúa introduces the snake imagery that pervades this section, as well as the rest of the book (particularly the poems in the second half). The anecdote about her mother shows how snakes serve as a euphemism for the threat that men and patriarchy pose to women. Put differently, rather than holding men responsible for attacking women, Chicano culture holds women responsible for being attacked.
Themes
Ella tiene su tono. Anzaldúa describes getting bitten by a rattlesnake while chopping cotton on a ranch. She sucks the venom out of her own feet. That night, she dreams of becoming a rattlesnake, her “animal counterpart.” Noting that the Olmecs considered the earth to be a coiled-up serpent, she explains that “enter[ing] into the Serpent” has enabled her to understand her own body.
Much like her poems in the second half of the book, Anzaldúa’s story about the rattlesnake has no single, determinate meaning—rather, it brings together several different symbols and meanings into a more complex whole. She cites Indigenous tradition, the constant risk of sexual violence in Chicano communities (as represented by her mother’s story), and the concept of self-knowledge (linked specifically to the struggle of living in a nonnormative body). This foreshadows the rest of the section, and her strategy reflects her broader approach to narrative as ritualistic—a way of calling forth ideas, images, and spirits.
Themes
Recalling the altar her grandmother kept in the kitchen, Anzaldúa describes the Mexican and Chicano “folk Catholicism” that predominates today and centers on Coatlalopeuh, or the Virgin of Guadalupe. This name is actually descended from that of the Mesoamerican serpent creator goddess Coatlicue, who was also known as Tonantsi. But the patriarchal Azteca-Mexica society “split” the goddess into two, Tonantsi the good and Coatlicue the evil.
The Virgin represents the way Mexican and Chicano cultures weave together Indigenous and Catholic traditions—but not in a neutral or equal way. Rather, in a longstanding process of mental and spiritual colonialism, Indigenous religion has been subjugated to Catholicism. Anzaldúa hopes to help reverse this process and show her readers the power in Indigenous traditions—which specifically can show Chicana women a path out of their subjugation in their communities.
Themes
The Spaniards then replaced Tonantsi with the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose famous story Anzaldúa recounts in Spanish: the Virgin appeared to a poor native man, Juan Diego, at the site of an old Tonantsi temple on Tepeyac hill and told him in Aztec to preach to his people that she is the mother of God. She quickly became Mexicans’ patron saint and has since turned into a symbol of popular rebellion and mestizaje.
The well-known story of Juan Diego and the Virgin presents one vision of the mestizaje at the core of Mexican and Chicano identity. But again, it is not a neutral story. By showing Indigenous people finding and accepting Catholicism, particularly on the site of a Tonantsi temple, the story repaints the Christianization of Mexico—the forcible overthrow of one system by another—as the product of popular consent.
Themes
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Anzaldúa argues that Chicano people have three mothers: Coatlalopeuh, la Llorona, and la Chingada (Malintzín). The church has used all three to disempower and control women, but Anzaldúa wants to reclaim the power of all three as native goddesses.
Many Mexicans and Chicanos know these three famous maternal figures—although often by their Spanish names rather than their original ones. Anzaldúa takes them as a window into Mexican and Chicano visions of womanhood—and a grounds upon which to transform those visions.
Themes
For Waging War Is My Cosmic Duty: The Loss of the Balanced Oppositions and the Change to Male Dominance. Anzaldúa quotes the sun-god Huitzilopochtli telling the Mexica and Azteca tribes that he will help them unite the peoples of the earth through war. She explains that there was a “balanced opposition between the sexes” in Mesoamerica until the powerful Azteca-Mexica alliance formed and started dominating the region. The Azteca-Mexica fought constant ritualized battles with the tribes they ruled and suppressed their longstanding matrilineal traditions and female deities. The Spanish defeated the Aztecs so easily in part because most of the common people hated and wouldn’t defend them.
The Spanish weren’t the first ones to establish rule by violence and the patriarchal domination of women by men in Mexico; this started long before, with the Azteca-Mexica, who alienated their own people in the process. Clearly, Anzaldúa doesn’t believe in defending Indigenous cultures merely for their own sake—she only does so where it can show the path to a better, more equitable future. Early Mesoamerican religion’s “balanced opposition between the sexes” is an example: it illustrates that other ways of organizing society, thought, and gender dynamics are possible.
Themes
Sueño con serpientes. Anzaldúa describes how serpents’ mouths represented the womb in pre-conquest mythology and includes a poem comparing dying to passing through a serpent’s mouth and into its body. She reveals that, on “each of [her] four bouts with death,” she has had a vision of serpents.
Serpents continue to represent how Anzaldúa has overcome the binaries that constrain her life: human versus animal, male versus female, mind versus body, and now, life versus death. While readers may link these visions of serpents to the rattlesnake bite she suffered as a child, they also represent her entry into an older, Indigenous spiritual world—the same world she hopes can help liberate women from male domination.
Themes
The Presences. In Anzaldúa’s hometown of Hargill, the spirit of a woman in white supposedly appears at night in an abandoned church. Some locals think she is la Llorona, but Anzaldúa thinks she’s the Aztec earth goddess Cihuacoatl, who is also said to wail in the night. Anzaldúa suggests that such stories are in part ways to stop young women leaving the house.
Again, Anzaldúa offers her readers the choice between two narratives: a conventional explanation rooted in degrading narratives about femininity and violence (La Llorona), or a long-overlooked Indigenous story that emphasizes women’s power instead (Cihuacoatl).
Themes
When she encounters snakeskins or feels the wind, Anzaldúa feels a deep consciousness of her connection to the natural and supernatural world. But few take this kind of consciousness seriously. “White rationality” treats it as unscientific, while religious institutions associate it with witchcraft. Both insist on separating the body from the mind, but in reality, much of our intelligence resides in the body, outside our conscious awareness. As a child, Anzaldúa didn’t know whether or not to believe in the world of spirits, but now she does.
Restoring Indigenous culture and spirituality to its rightful place also means seriously reconsidering what kinds of information and perception count as legitimate knowledge. For Anzaldúa, then, the separation between the body and mind, and the visible and the supernatural, are also important borders that a feminist Chicana worldview must overcome. Western thought subjugates the body to the mind, treating rational analysis as the only valid kind of knowledge and embodied and spiritual perception as illegitimate.
Themes
La facultad. Marginalized people often learn to instinctively recognize the “deep structure” behind social realities. Anzaldúa calls this special sensitivity la facultad and argues that it develops out of fear as a way to stay vigilant about possible threats. She argues that the more life overwhelms us and forces us out of our habits, the more acute our perception gets. In turn, we also lose our innocence, overcome our ignorance, and become more aware of our souls and connection to the spirit world.
La facultad is one mechanism through which the violent contradictions of life on the border ultimately strengthen the people who live there, leaving them more flexible, perceptive, and resilient. Anyone can study and analyze social inequalities, but those who actually experience them learn to perceive them in a uniquely immediate, instinctual way. This isn’t just a mechanism for surviving such inequalities—it’s also an invaluable tool for addressing and reversing them.
Themes
