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Part 1, Section 7: La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness
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
Six sections of poetry make up the second half of Borderlands / La Frontera. The first of these sections opens with an epigraph from the well-known Mexican song “La Llorona.”
Anzaldúa sought to split her book between complementary nonfiction and poetry sections of roughly equal length. The poems that follow reflect and embody the concepts from her essays, as well as giving readers deeper insight into her life as a working-class Chicana lesbian feminist. This first section focuses on the relationship between humans and the natural world, and particularly how this relationship becomes contested in the Rio Grande Valley as Anglo and Chicano norms come into conflict.
Themes
White-wing Season. White men with guns arrive at a woman’s house while she is washing her bedsheets. They pay her, and she remembers once shooting a dove with her brother’s gun. The men hunt, filling the woman’s land with fallen doves. They take most home but leave her two, which she boils for dinner.
This poem is a metaphor for past and ongoing land dispossession in the Rio Grande Valley. To make a living, the woman in this poem is forced to sacrifice her doves—which, of course, carry their classic symbolism of love, harmony, and innocence.
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Cervicide. A family keeps a fawn as a pet, which is illegal, and the game warden is coming to fine or arrest them. The family’s young dark-skinned daughter, who raised the fawn after a hunter killed its mother, now has to kill it. She bashes its head in with a hammer, then buries it in the yard. The game warden finds nothing and leaves empty-handed.
Like the previous poem, “Cervicide” also focuses on the contrast between two competing approaches to nature. Whereas the Chicano family tries to preserve and harmonize with nature by saving the fawn, the warden enforces an extractive Anglo approach to nature, which assumes that humans ought to dominate and squeeze profit out of it. This is why it becomes legal to murder the fawn but not save its life.
Themes
horse. Anzaldúa dedicates this poem to the people of her hometown, Hargill, Texas. A horse runs up to kids who are offering it corn but secretly carrying knives. The next day, the townspeople hear that some “gringo” kids have mutilated someone’s horse—but they know the sheriff won’t intervene. The owner shot the horse, putting an end to its misery, and one of the kids’ parents tried to pay him back, “as if green could staunch red.” The gringo kids dream of the horse and scream, but the Mexicans know that “if you’re Mexican / you are born old.”
As with the doves and the fawn in the previous poems, the horse in this poem dies because South Texas’s Anglo settler minority comes to dominate the region. The kids take pleasure in violence and cruelty, and their parents try to compensate for their actions through money, not a true apology. In contrast, the horse’s owner truly values its life. The sheriff’s refusal to stop the children—in a situation where Chicana/o kids clearly would have been punished—makes it clear that an alliance between settlers and the law maintains white rule over the Rio Grande Valley.
Themes
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Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella. Anzaldúa describes a visit from her grandmother, who offers Anzaldúa money, then rolls and smokes a cigarette, even though she avoids fires. (She burned herself cooking as a young woman.) Widowed and too old to live alone, Anzaldúa’s grandmother stayed with other family members for a few weeks at a time instead. She never stopped wearing widow’s clothes, and Anzaldúa cherished hearing her old stories.
Anzaldúa’s grandmother links Anzaldúa to her culture and past, but she also represents many of the regressive traditions that she seeks to overturn. For instance, her grandmother’s permanent widow’s clothes show that she defines her identity in relation to her husband. Moreover, her grandmother’s stories reflect the oral literary tradition that Anzaldúa takes as the model for her theory of literature.
Themes
But when Anzaldúa asks her grandmother if she has ever had an orgasm, her grandmother describes letting her husband do what he wanted with her while praying for him to finish fast. Women in Anzaldúa’s family avoid talking about sex. Her grandfather eventually left her grandmother for another woman—and took their sons with him. Anzaldúa almost sees the signs of anguish on her grandmother’s face—but her grandmother always maintains her dignity.
Anzaldúa’s conversation with her grandmother demonstrates how traditional Chicana/o gender dynamics tend to oppress women, teaching them to ignore their own needs and associate sexuality with shame. Because she loves her grandmother, Anzaldúa wishes she could have had better, more equitable relationships with men; more generally, this is a clear example of why Anzaldúa views critiquing her culture as a means to express her great love for it.
Themes
Nopalitos. It’s evening in the Rio Grande Valley. Dogs lay in the yard and a neighbor cooks menudo while Anzaldúa picks a nopalito (cactus pad), slowly removes its spines, and tosses it in a pan. A rooster chases a hen, Anzaldúa’s uncle starts his hose across the street, and the neighbor women chat on their porches up and down the block, laughing. As the only one who left home, Anzaldúa feels she understands her people in a way they cannot.
This poem focuses on the sights, smells, and sounds that Anzaldúa associates with home. It demonstrates that identity and belonging are not just abstract ideas, but also embodied, sensory, and even unconscious experiences that the rational mind cannot fully capture. Still, Anzaldúa’s varied life experience also allows her to appreciate and value her culture in a way she would not have been able to if she had never left Texas.
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