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Part 2, Section 2: La pérdida
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
This section’s epigraph, from Chilean singer Isabel Parra’s “En la frontera,” describes being stuck between a river and a sea, but unable to cross either.
The poems in this section focus on encounters with the borders of human life—death, love, violence, motherhood, cannibalism, and in the last poem (“Interface”), arguably all of these at once.
Themes
Poets have strange eating habits. On a moonless night, the narrator leads a wounded mare “to the edge” and considers letting herself fall “down the steps of the temple.” The mare tumbles off the side of the cliff into the cold wind—which stops the narrator’s tears—and the abyss below (“el abismo”). The narrator feeds herself to the hungry mare “till it’s pregnant with me,” because “wounding is a deeper healing.” She flies through the sky like an “eagle fetus” or a feathered serpent, dives into the emptiness of her own self, and finally hits the ground. Then she “peer[s] over the edge” and does it all again, for “jumping off cliffs [is] an addiction.” She enters the dark night sky’s jaws and lets it swallow her.
As with most of Anzaldúa’s work, there are many valid ways to interpret this poem, which centers on the salient image of the mare—a foil for the narrator’s femininity—tumbling off the cliff into an abyss. The “steps of the temple” imagery recalls the place of human sacrifice in Mexica-Azteca culture, which used it to regulate the relationship between the physical and supernatural worlds. The images of the feathered serpent (a prominent Mesoamerican deity) and “eagle fetus” associate the narrator with Indigenous mythology and Mexican national identity. Still, this poem is primarily about an encounter with death, solitude, and meaninglessness. It suggests that giving oneself up to the abyss (or resigning oneself to powerlessness in the face of life’s challenges) is sometimes a necessary first step towards healing.
Themes
Yo no fui, fue Teté (I Didn’t Go, It Was Teté). In this Spanish-language poem, a Chicano man who works as a sex worker goes out at night, and a group of Chicano men pick him up and take him to the scrapyard. They attack him “piel a piel [skin to skin],” spit in his face, and insult him, calling gay men “locas.” He feels ashamed that they’re of “mi misma raza” (the same race). They leave him on the pavement, soiled and feeling alone “como huérfano” (like an orphan), and he rushes back home.
Anzaldúa addresses queerness—and the violence that queer people experience in Chicano communities—from a new perspective. For monolingual English speakers, the subtleties and extent of the men’s homophobia may not be readily apparent—for instance, the aggressors refer to gay men with the feminine form “loca,” which implies that they are really women (and not men at all). (Such language can be a form of affirmation within queer communities today, but it is still deeply insulting when straight people direct it at queer people.) Other elements of the poem, like the term “piel a piel,” associate the violence it describes with queer sex—and suggest that the two are closely linked, perhaps because queer Chicana/o people face the constant threat of physical violence and perhaps because many of them and the people they love still try to violently repress their queerness instead of accepting it.
Themes
The Cannibal’s Canción. The poet calls eating someone’s “taboo flesh” a customary part of love, then explains how they will make their lover’s bones and hair into jewelry. “Sundays there’s Mass and communion,” the poem concludes, “and I’ll put your relics to rest.”
Anzaldúa explores a key contradiction: cannibalistic acts are simultaneously taboo and, in some ways, forms of sacred intimacy. Metaphorically, then, cannibalism comes to stand for the ways in which lovers consume each other and, in doing so, exalt each other.
Themes
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En mi corazón se incuba. The narrator of this Spanish-language poem explains that she has felt a profound loneliness since the day her love ended. Her life is agonizing; she buries her grief deep—and, with it, an unspoken dream. Something that has been loved in secret (“Algo secretamente amado”) is now hidden in her, and an otherworldly love (“un amor que no es de este mundo”) is growing in her heart.
On the most literal level, this poem is about romantic love, but it could also be read as a story about coming out, developing self-love, finding spiritual connection and love for the universe, learning to love one’s people and community, or even embracing motherhood (particularly because of the final line).
Themes
Corner of 50th St. and Fifth Av. Walking in New York City, this poem’s narrator witnesses the police brutalizing a young queer Puerto Rican man in front of a rowdy crowd. The police pull down the man’s pants, hit him over and over again on the buttocks, and then get bored and let him put his pants back on. The narrator remarks that this is the closest the policemen “let themselves get” to sex with other men.
Like the poem “Yo no fui, fue Teté,” this poem uses a violent assault to explore the distinctive, marginalized social position that queer Latina/o people occupied in the 1970s and 1980s. It particularly focuses on the constant entanglement between sex and violence in their lives. Here, while the central message is similar, the context is very different—the narrator witnesses the attack in New York City, which is public and committed by the state (rather than secret and committed by vigilantes), and its victim is Puerto Rican rather than Chicano.
Themes
Compañera, cuando amábamos. In this poem in Spanish, a woman asks her compañera (woman partner or companion) if they will ever love each other like they used to on autumn afternoons, when they would gaze at each other and walk through town holding hands, attracting subtle looks of recognition from passers-by. They would discover each other’s tongues and flesh in their embraces, walk on the beach and give themselves up to the waves, lay in the park and gaze at the river. They would stay out all afternoon, until nightfall. But, the narrator asks, will those afternoons ever return?
This poem fondly looks back on the unique, border-crossing experience of young love between Chicana lesbians—a kind of romance that, to Anzaldúa, arguably feels more like home than her real home ever could. The positive, nostalgic tone of this poem generally contrasts with the rest of Anzaldúa’s poetry. Indeed, whereas her other poems about sexuality focus on what is particular about queerness, this one focuses on the universal aspect of queer love: the sense of fulfillment, yearning, and loss that it shares with all other kinds of love. That said, it still does reference the suspicion and exclusion that lesbians face in Chicano communities.
Themes
Interface. When the narrator of "Interface" looks closely at an empty room in her house, she can feel that a woman is inside—and has always been there. One day, the narrator accidentally walked through this woman and felt the warmth of her body. Afterwards, the woman said she “wanted to be flesh” but the narrator wanted to join the woman in the “noumenal” (spirit) world. Lying in bed, the narrator sends the woman her thoughts and receives the woman’s in return.
This section’s last and longest poem integrates much of the imagery from the previous ones into a narrative about a woman crossing different kinds of borders and finding different kinds of communion through a relationship with a spirit. She discovers the Borderlands of life and death, self and other, motherhood and daughterhood, and the noumenal and phenomenal worlds (the world of spirits that comprise true reality, on the one hand, and the world of mere appearances that humans can access in what we call the “real” world, on the other).
Themes
The narrator of "Interface" names the spirit Leyla. After some time, Leyla starts glowing faintly and becoming more perceptible; meanwhile, the narrator starts trying to become immaterial. One day, they start touching each other. Leyla feels like fog. Leyla enters the narrator’s body and emerges, with fragile, transparent skin. She’s hungry, so the narrator feeds Leyla milk and baby food. Increasingly worried, the narrator’s roommate confronts the narrator, then leaves town.
This poem is a parable about the personal transformation that people can achieve by engaging with the Borderlands of human life in a gradual, sustained way. Anzaldúa draws a clear parallel between this process and motherhood. The narrator’s effort to communicate across the seemingly impenetrable border between life and death eventually pays off: she and Leyla grow into new kinds of beings, who are capable of crossing back and forth at will. But they also scare off people who do not understand their relationship or mystical powers.
Themes
The narrator of "Interface" teaches Leyla to clean herself, to imitate people outside, to say “I love you.” But their lovemaking isn’t as satisfying as it was before, when Leyla was just a spirit. When the narrator says she prefers winter, Leyla turns the temperature down; when the narrator can’t reach something on a high shelf, Leyla can. Leyla’s species evolves faster, through thought alone. Leyla follows the narrator on the subway, on a plane to Los Angeles, and back home, where the narrator’s brother asks if Leyla is a lesbian and the narrator says, “No, just an alien.”
Leyla’s power eventually outgrows the narrator’s, but the narrator doesn’t view this as a failure or a threat. Instead, she adapts to the circumstances and loves Leyla by unselfishly encouraging her to keep growing. This offers an alternative to the conventional, possessive vision of love that dominates society—particularly in heterosexual relationships and institutions like marriage. Of course, readers can also interpret Leyla’s story through any of several different metaphors—for instance, she could stand for self-love and self-reliance, spiritual development, reconnecting with one’s culture and identity, or any other process of personal transformation that depends on confronting deep contradictions within the self.
Themes
