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Part 2, Section 1: Más antes en los ranchos
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 opens with a verse about homesickness from the corrido “Canción mixteca.”
The poems in this section focus on how class and labor dynamics intersect with race and gender identities in segregated American agricultural communities like Anzaldúa’s hometown in the Rio Grande Valley.
Themes
sus plumas el viento. This poem describes Anzaldúa’s mother, to whom it is dedicated, working in the fields. She discovers another Chicana woman, Pepita, having sex with the Anglo boss in a ditch. She works on, weeding the field with her hoe, despite the heat and her pain. She listens to hummingbirds flying into the wind and looks at her calloused hands, which she wishes she could cut off. As she bags cotton, she feels like a mule (“como una mula”) but then remembers her alternatives: packaging produce in a freezing warehouse or cleaning white people’s houses. She hopes her children will find office jobs instead of having to do physical labor. She imagines the wind giving her feathers so she can fly away, then watches the same wind cut down a hummingbird, which falls to the ground.
In this poem, Anzaldúa pays tribute to her mother, draws attention to the terrible working conditions in the fields, and demonstrates how those conditions compound Chicanas’ oppression by driving them to accept degrading treatment from white men. Anzaldúa’s mother’s thoughts about her children’s education underlines how unusual Anzaldúa was for building a career as an educator, and the falling hummingbird represents how Anzaldúa’s mother got stuck doing thankless, grueling farmwork all her life—and never achieved the freedom that she long sought.
Themes
Cultures. Anzaldúa writes about how her mother used to send her to get an axe and dig rectangular plots in the yard, where they would bury their trash. Her brothers didn’t help because this was “women’s work.” Anzaldúa’s mother told her the trash nourished the soil, but only “thistle sage and nettle” grew there.
In addition to further underlining inequitable gender dynamics, this anecdote also shows that much of what many Americans consider basic public services—like trash pickup—was simply unavailable in the Rio Grande Valley, and this contributed to the land degrading over time. Burying trash is an apt metaphor for the way that women in particular take charge of processing the past on behalf of the community—and concealing its most unsavory details from the next generation.
Themes
sobre piedras con lagartijos. Dedicated to people who have crossed the border, this poem in Spanish describes a man separating from a group and stopping to rest on his way north across the desert. As he lies on the firm ground and struggles to rest, he remarks that he only wants to make some money and go back to his wife and six children. He’ll work like a donkey if he has to. After the family’s fields stopped producing corn, they couldn’t survive unless he left. He thinks back to all the physical labor he has done throughout his life.
Even though she was born and raised on the US side of the border, Anzaldúa also imagines the perspective of a man who has decided to risk the trip across the border. His self-talk is practical and goal-oriented: he has made a temporary financial decision, not a permanent decision to immigrate. Indeed, Anzaldúa also means to remind her readers that the undocumented people living in the US have in virtually all cases made a rational financial decision given their circumstances.
Themes
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Earlier on his trek, a truck approached the man’s group; he ran off and slept in a hole but got bitten by insects all night and woke up to find a snake stalking him. He just has to make it to Ogaquinahua, where people from his country will help him find work and papers. Then he can even bring his wife and children north to live with him. Suddenly, he sees lizards running off in all directions and hears a thumping sound that frightens him. He sees a pair of expensive-looking boots walking toward his face.
In the second half of this poem, Anzaldúa emphasizes the perils—whether natural or human-made—that migrants face on their trek across the Borderlands desert. His hope to reach the (fictional) town of Ogaquinahua may have motivated him to keep walking, but the poem appears to end with him facing arrest or vigilante violence instead. Since the poem is told from his perspective, the reader sees immigration enforcement through the lens of what it provokes in its targets: terror, vulnerability, and confusion.
Themes
El sonavabitche. A woman glances out a car window and sees “brown faces bent backs” working in the passing fields. This is a common sight, but it still enrages her. When she gets back to the farm, uniformed men are raiding it. Someone yells, “corran muchachos” (“run, boys!”) and people scatter in all directions. The narrator sprints back to the car and watches the agents round up the workers, who look empty and defeated. The narrator reveals that she is a Chicana from the Rio Grande Valley now teaching in Muncie, Indiana. She has come to repair a ditch on the farm so the kids have a place to play.
This poem suggests that the American agriculture industry’s oppressive, hierarchical racial dynamics vary little from place to place: even in Indiana, far from the border, the workers are undocumented and face government repression. The narrator is based on Anzaldúa’s experience working with farmworkers and their children in Indiana. Although she is a US citizen, her sympathy for the workers shows that she recognizes how easily she could have been in their position, too.
Themes
One of the students’ fathers, who is also a Chicano from the Rio Grande Valley, tells the narrator of “El sonavabitche” that the men are undocumented and the brutal farm owner makes them work as much as 15 hours a day and threatened to withhold their wages when they asked for Sunday off. One died on the cramped cross-country ride from the border to Indiana, and as soon as they arrived, the owner made them strip and hosed them down. The Chicano man notes that it’s payday, so it’s no coincidence that immigration came today. In fact, the farm owner probably called them to avoid paying the workers—he has done this many times before. The man gives the narrator a cup of coffee, which is mostly milk and sugar, and she downs it.
The farmworkers’ brutal conditions—perhaps not typical but surely not unheard of—again show that exploitation is the rule in US agriculture and that white supremacy is still widespread in much of rural America. Anzaldúa emphasizes that there’s a direct trade-off between the undocumented workers’ interests and the farm owner’s: he profits precisely because of the way he mistreats and steals from workers far poorer and more vulnerable than him. And he gets away with it because the US does not care if a wealthy white farmer breaks the rules—or if his workers suffer.
Themes
The narrator of “El sonavabitche” walks inside and greets the farmer, who apologizes for how “immigration / is getting so tough.” The narrator demands the workers’ two weeks’ pay for 15 hours a day at minimum wage, and she shows the farmer her business card. He protests that he hasn’t done anything wrong, and she says she knows what he has done and threatens to expose him to his neighbors and the police. This isn’t the first time she has seen this. He protests but gives her the cash, and she promises to come back and hang him if she hears about him ever doing this again.
The narrator immediately sees through the farmer’s lie and takes matters into her own hands. She negotiates on the farmworkers’ behalf, achieves a concession that they likely could not, and shows the farmer for the first time that he could face consequences for his actions. This is a reminder that marginalized people need allies with relatively more class and cultural power to fight on their behalf, too.
Themes
Mar de repollos / A Sea of Cabbages. Dedicated to “those who have worked in the fields,” this poem appears first in Spanish and then in English. It describes a worker kneeling in the fields, swinging his arms around at a dizzying speed to pick cabbage. He eats lunch under the sweltering Texas sun, curses his fate, and imagines how his life could be different. While he tears cabbages out of the ground, he looks up at the sky and feels as though the earth is attacking him. It sounds like there are feathers in his throat, and he realizes that the thing trapping him is “faith: dove made flesh” (“fe: paloma hecha carne”).
Anzaldúa honors “those who have worked in the fields” by highlighting the skill, stamina, and faith that goes into their work—which is often maligned and treated as unskilled, despite its difficulty. The poem’s last line recalls the first poem in the book, “White-wing Season,” in which a group of white men pay a Chicana woman to hunt doves on her land. The connection is clear. White domination turns Chicano people’s “faith” into “flesh”—it forces people to trade their hopes and dreams for the painful and menial drudgery of farmwork.
Themes
We Call Them Greasers. A white farmer announces that when he arrived on his land, there were already Mexicans living there, running ranches. But “they knew their betters” and deferred to the white man, who remarks that they didn’t care about “bettering themselves” or owning their land. He drove them away by waving papers at them and claiming that they had to pay taxes. The families packed their things and left, and the white man kept their cattle. Some of the locals refused to leave and went to the courts, but they couldn’t speak English. The white man “burned them out,” then raped and murdered their women. He describes how one woman whimpered as he raped her, then suffocated her to death. He then spat in her husband’s face and had him lynched.
The narrator of this poem is one of the white men who stole and settled Tejano people’s land in the Rio Grande Valley. Anzaldúa identifies the key recipe that enabled this dispossession: white supremacist ideology enabled white people to view people of color as subhuman, and in turn, white settlers used this rhetoric to justify brutally attacking Tejanos in the name of expansion and civilization. By painting war, invasion, and racial domination as unavoidable steps along the inevitable path to manifest destiny, white supremacy excuses horrific crimes and turns ordinary people into monsters. This violence has never been remedied—in fact, it is the foundation of the social, economic, and political hierarchies in the Rio Grande Valley today (like much of the US southwest).
Themes
Matriz sin tumba (o “el baño de la basura ajena”). This Spanish-language poem’s title means “Tombless Womb (or ‘The Bath of Other People’s Trash’).” It describes a sick woman laying on a bed, vomiting and talking nonsensically, her underclothes soaked with blood. An injection puts her to sleep, but she dreams that the night tears her apart violently and throws her uterus in the trash. She imagines honoring Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of filth and sin, by bathing in other people’s trash. She watches Tlazolteotl stab her womb and bury it with her. She feels she is bleeding out, burning, her organs being prodded by a finger fallen from heaven. She prepares to accept death, dreams of the sky being torn apart, and feels herself breaking apart from within.
In line with the theory of literature that Anzaldúa developed in “Tlilli, Tlapalli,” this poem centers on images (not narratives) and condenses metaphors about the border, the supernatural, and the female body into a broader commentary about life, death, the inevitability of change, and humans’ powerlessness before greater forces of the universe. The border turns Chicanos into “other people’s trash,” as white people deem them valueless; Tlazolteotl puts the woman back in touch with the more unsavory aspects of existence that Christianity and modern life shy away from; and the woman dies by losing her womb—her ability to create new life—which may suggest that we are only truly alive so long as we can still change, adapt, and reshape the future in our image.
Themes
