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Part 1, Section 3: Entering into the Serpent
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 begins with a poem about a woman, a “protean being,” who looks at herself in an obsidian mirror on a dark night and sees a mythical four-headed goddess. The woman has visions of human sacrifice, her own soul, and rattlesnakes, which she feels are all deeply connected.
Mirrors represent the borderlands of identity—or the limit between the self and the other. The poem’s encounter with the mirror represents all the hidden forces and potential that Anzaldúa sees inside herself (and other Chicana women).
Themes
Enfrentamientos con el alma. Anzaldúa explains how, after her father’s death, her mother covered all the mirrors in the house. To native Mesoamericans, mirrors were a portal between the world of the living and that of the dead, and they could also be used to tell the future. Mirrors remind us that we are both subjects capable of knowing and objects capable of being known. Anzaldúa calls this complex situation of being inside and outside the self the Coatlicue state.
The tension between the self as a subject (or actor) and the object (or thing acted upon) is significant because it is the key to personal evolution. To become the people we desire to be, we have to act on ourselves, serving as subject and object simultaneously. The Coatlicue state is one way to embrace this contradiction, so that that we can remake ourselves into something better.
Themes
El secreto terrible y la rajadura. Anzaldúa first felt the Coatlicue state as a toddler, when she learned that her body was not normal. When others looked at her, it felt like they were cutting her in two. She worried they would see the way her body betrayed her. In Spanish, she describes locking herself in her room for days at a time, overwhelmed with anxiety and indecision, scratching her face until she bled while her mother worried. She looks at herself in the mirror and sees a new version of her face. Her mouth is like a gash separating her two eyes—heart and mind, the magical and the rational.
Anzaldúa’s cryptic comments about her body refer to a hormone disorder that led her to develop abnormally as a child. She launched into the Coatlicue state upon recognizing this abnormality because she had to confront the duality of self-knowledge: the gap between what one imagines the self as (or wants it to be), on the one hand, and the imperfect reality that one wishes to shape in service of that ideal, on the other. Her description of her mouth as a gash recalls her image of the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound from the first section.
Themes
Nopal de castilla. Like a spineless cactus, Anzaldúa needed to develop her own “defense strategies” to survive a world that doesn’t accept her. She turned at different times to self-hatred, rage, and contempt, much of it unconscious. People often use repetitive hobbies and addictions to distract themselves from their fear and shame. Often, they get stuck in these rituals, which become barriers to true growth. But cultivating the Coatlicue state is a way to make meaning out of our suffering and embrace change. It involves connecting the past to the future and the depths of the soul to the surfaces of everyday life.
Again, Anzaldúa has built up her will by learning to cope productively with the painful realities of life in the Borderlands. Through the Coatlicue state, she learned to adapt to the violence inflicted on her and grow stronger in the process, instead of merely resigning herself to or fighting back against it (both of which mean accepting it as inevitable). In turn, the strength she has built enables her to forgive her community—even as it rejects her—and fight to make it more inclusive in the long run.
Themes
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The Coatlicue State. Coatlicue is a goddess of opposites: creation and destruction, life and death. Anzaldúa associates her with the “consuming internal whirlwind” of the unconscious. One statue depicts her with snakes for a head and hands, as well as a necklace made of human hands, hearts, and skulls. This shows that she brings together all the main Aztec religious symbols into a single, contradictory whole. The Coatlicue state involves keeping the conscious mind “occupied or immobile” so that the unconscious mind can operate freely and help our souls evolve.
The theoretical dimension of Anzaldúa’s work is essentially about how people can move beyond the binaries that imprison them. Her answer is the Coatlicue state. To overcome binaries, we must first accept the “consuming internal whirlwind” that comes with holding contradictory feelings, ideas, or principles together at the same time; only then can we process and synthesize them. Notably, Anzaldúa emphasizes that the true work of overcoming contradictions happens at the level of the unconscious, through a mode of thought that analytical Western rationality tends to dismiss.
Themes
The Coatlicue State Is a Prelude to Crossing. Anzaldúa tends to enter the Coatlicue state whenever she struggles to accept some essential truth about her life. She withdraws into herself, her spirit “sinking deeper and deeper” until she finally “confront[s] the face in the mirror” and recognizes the truth. This is a slow, painful process—almost like giving birth—because growth always requires expanding beyond “the old boundaries of the self.” Through the Coatlicue state, Anzaldúa develops an awareness of her connection with the broader spirit and natural world.
Anzaldúa cannot give her readers a formula for reproducing the Coatlicue state, as it is deeply personal and depends on each individual’s experiences and psychology. But she does offer some guidance and expectations by describing what the process looks like for her. Its critical element is running towards an essential contradiction instead of away from it—as most of us tend to do in our everyday lives. This often means threatening and breaking down the self, but this is the first step to building that self back up in a new way.
Themes
That Which Abides. By looking out her window, Anzaldúa can tell that winter is on its way. Unsure whether to trust her conscious mind or her unconscious awareness, she decides to temporarily give herself up to Coatlicue (the unconscious). She feels her body shudder and an intense light shine through her. She feels herself splitting apart, then fusing back together into “a center, a nucleus” capable of holding together all the contradictions within her. And this inner strength is getting stronger with time.
Anzaldúa’s instinct about winter is an accessible example of how unconscious perceptions can be true and powerful, even though they cannot be reduced to Western rational analysis. She then enters the Coatlicue state by making a rational, conscious decision to turn off her rationality and consciousness. In this sense, the Coatlicue state is its own kind of contradiction, which depends on crossing the border between the conscious and unconscious mind. The “center” or “nucleus” that she feels at the end of the section is the new, stronger self that emerges from the Coatlicue state.
Themes
