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Part 2, Section 3: Crossers y otros atravesados
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 includes her own epigraph in Spanish, which is about her calling out for women and for love, seeking to conjure them up through her words.
The poems in this section focus on the psychological dimensions of Anzaldúa’s theory—and particularly the question of what it takes for people to confront their internal contradictions and embrace change.
Themes
Holy Relics. In an opening refrain, Saint Teresa of Ávila’s holy relics—her bones—say they want to be reunited. The poem describes Ávila, a fortress town in a sunny foothill region of Spain, and explain that Teresa is buried at Alba, 50 miles away. But the nuns smell a stench and hear a sound from her grave. Nine months after the burial, they dig her out, cut the moldy clothes off her skeleton, and replace them with clean cloth. The priest cuts off her hand, and the refrain from the beginning repeats.
This poem addresses the Catholic Church’s relationship to womanhood through the historical example of Saint Teresa, a prominent Spanish nun who worked to reform and consolidate the church during her life, only for her possessions and body parts to be plundered and saved as holy relics after her death. Anzaldúa imagines the grisly details behind this process and highlights the contradiction at the heart of her canonization: other church officials dismembered Saint Teresa in order to remember, worship, and—above all—profit from an association with her.
Themes
Another priest secretly opens Saint Teresa’s tomb two years later. The nuns smell the stench and rush over. The priest cuts off Saint Teresa’s arm, throws it at the nuns, then grabs the rest of her body and rides away with it on horseback. The refrain repeats. He takes the skeleton back to Ávila and shows it to a group of witnesses in the convent. The poem quotes one witness, who says the skeleton can be propped up and many of Saint Teresa’s features are still intact.
The priest’s brazen theft again suggests that corruption, selfishness, and sacrilege lurk behind the church’s moral veneer. It also represents how men turn women into instruments for their own personal gain. This story’s connection to Chicana feminism might not be immediately apparent, but readers should remember that Anzaldúa grew up in a staunchly Catholic culture that revered women like Saint Teresa—including her holy relics—while conveniently omitting the unsavory truth about where they really came from. Just as the history of the U.S.-Mexico border hangs ominously over life in the Rio Grande Valley, the church’s history hangs over the people who belong to it—although they may or may not realize it.
Themes
The Duke of Alba complains to the Pope, who orders Teresa returned to Alba. The priest takes her back, drawing attention the whole way. The nuns and priest in Alba take fingers, feet, ribs, teeth, and even pieces of her skin, some of which they auction off to the rich. They return her to her original grave, but a priest later digs her up and cuts off her head. Many years later, she is dug up again and her heart is removed, and 300 years later, doctors examine her. The poem declares that “the remains of a woman” are finally resting in Alba, and the refrain repeats one last time.
The Pope’s decision and the nuns’ and priests’ shameless plunder suggest that, for all intents and purposes, the church functions like a self-interested corporation. In turn, Anzaldúa suggests, its doctrines may be more about controlling people than guiding them to truth and morality. With the image of the Church tearing Saint Teresa apart as it claims to revere her—and after she dedicated her life to it—Anzaldúa warns her readers to forge their own paths and make their own decisions rather than simply following the church’s dictates.
Themes
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En el nombre de todas las madres que han perdido sus hijos en la guerra. This poem is in Spanish. A mother holds the corpse of her young boy, who was shot that morning. When she heard the gunshots, she ran outside holding him in her arms and found the police locked in a chaotic gun battle with a group of men outside her house. She felt three jolts in the chest and then saw her son covered in blood. She cleaned off his face and saw one of his eyes hanging out of its socket, but she was determined to try and save him. She washed him, tried to put back his eye and his intestines, and blew on his face, but he is still dead.
This poem confronts the tragedy of war and violence in Latin America, much of it imposed on the region by US imperial policies. The mother’s utter despair reflects the senselessness of this violence: she cannot make sense of her son’s death because it was random, meaningless, and sudden. She responds to the situation with denial and magical thinking, as she tries in vain to assert some control and rescue the son who is already beyond saving.
Themes
The woman decides to stay exactly where she is, without moving, until her son decays into dust. She holds his body all night and mimics breastfeeding it. In the morning, she lays the boy’s body on her legs and looks up, hoping to find his soul and bring it back down to him. The boy was innocent, she remarks as his body grows cold. She asks the mother God why her son died and laments that she has already lost her other three children, too. She says she wants to kill men who fight wars, and she asks why women—especially poor native women like her—bother to have children at all. The war has taken everything from her. She asks the mother God to kill her too, and to go retrieve her son’s soul.
The woman resigns herself to crumble along with her son, a decision that reflects her complete powerlessness and the meaningless of her suffering. Her revelation about her other children only underlines the sense of tragedy pervading the poem and helps the reader understand why self-destruction may indeed be the only form of protest left for her. Anzaldúa’s message in this poem is clear: the worst of the violence inflicted on poor countries falls on women and children, most of whom never get to speak or be heard.
Themes
Letting Go. This poem’s narrator tells the reader to pull themselves apart from the navel and let out all the animals hiding within. The reader doesn’t know what’s happening inside—like a frog growing in their throat, which will make its presence known sooner or later. The narrator repeats their request to the reader and insists that they “must let go” and dissolve in the face of their terror, so they can “cross[] over” to the other side and be “Alone. With nothingness.” The reader will have to save themselves; nobody will rescue them or give them what they yearn for. Once they enter their own darkness “twice, three times, / a hundred,” they will lose interest and return to regular life, like a fish coming to the surface between breaths.
The imagery in this poem illustrates what Anzaldúa has called the Coatlicue state. She asks the reader to confront the unknown, uncomfortable elements lurking within themselves. Those who flee from such discomfort fail to grow; those who commit to embracing it may face difficulties at first, but eventually grow to understand their deep-set fears and anxieties so that they can make the changes necessary to heal. By making this kind of deep, uncomfortable introspection a habit (“twice, three times, / a hundred”), people can eventually achieve a kind of power over the self that enables them to live the lives they truly want.
Themes
I Had to Go Down. The narrator of this poem usually doesn’t go downstairs because the furnace scares them. But one cold night, they decide to try, and it’s a mistake. They go down to the second floor with their broom and mop, remove the dusty old curtains and bedsheets, and continue down to the first floor, where they have to pry open the door. They think they hear someone, but it’s just rain. Outside, they set fire to some rotting logs, which smoke up the house.
The narrator’s basement furnace represents the uncomfortable, deep-set psychological tensions that Anzaldúa believes everyone has to confront from time to time if they truly want to grow and live autonomously. The basement is always there in the narrator’s house, whether they like it or not; they just prefer to forget about it except when absolutely necessary.
Themes
The narrator wonders if the washer and dryer are in the basement, but there are no stairs, so they jump instead and land on the dirt floor. They find a ruined brick wall, broken furniture, and an old sink with a boiler that looks like a face. They fill it, then trip over a tree shoot that is somehow growing in the darkness. They hear footsteps again, then realize they are their own.
The washer, dryer, and boiler all relate to concepts of purity and pollution, which further suggests that this poem is a metaphor for the Coatlicue state’s internal psychological struggle. The tree in the darkness could represent deep-rooted thoughts and attitudes that we prefer to ignore, and recognizing the footsteps as one’s own could represent acknowledging the unsavory unconscious parts of oneself.
Themes
Cagado abismo, quiero saber. All in Spanish, the poet asks the “cagado abismo” (damned abyss) why she puts up with freezing winters for it and why she is held prisoner to a nameless hunger. She never wanted the abyss to kiss her, but now she is stuck trying to make sense of the future. She asks why her wild soul keeps pushing her blindly through the pain of life, like a bat flying toward the abyss. She asks the abyss why she bothers to tolerate nights without it and whether she is destined to spend her life alone, turning into a stone. She asks why she is stuck on the abyss’s dirt roads, why the shadows keep expanding, why she still lives—in short, why the abyss hasn’t taken her yet.
Anzaldúa’s soliloquy to the abyss captures her frustration at how difficult it can be to forge her own path in life, making her own decisions and confronting the moral ambiguity involved in doing so. It would be far easier to merely follow the course that others have set out for her. Put differently, the Coatlicue state is really about encountering and learning from the abyss—the fact that there is no fixed, inherent meaning to life, and instead we must give it meaning through our decisions, commitments, and actions.
Themes
that dark shining thing. Anzaldúa warns a woman (“you”) that she has shut herself in a dark closet in a futile effort “to escape the darkness.” She chose Anzaldúa “to pry open a crack” of the self she is afraid to release. This has happened before—people of all sorts (“colored, poor white, latent queer”) have come to ask Anzaldúa to unmask them. But Anzaldúa keeps agreeing to do it, whether out of recklessness or a willingness to suffer, or because she is the only woman of color on the faculty.
This poem is Anzaldúa’s pep talk to one of her students, a promising young poet who struggles to do the internal work necessary to produce meaningful, authentic writing. Anzaldúa likens this struggle to queer people who must find the courage and support necessary to come out of the closet. In both cases, people cannot grow and succeed unless they develop the psychological strength necessary to accept vulnerability and uncertainty. This can be particularly difficult for women of color who have grown up under the constant threat of violence.
Themes
Anzaldúa wants to abandon the other woman but knows all too well what she is going through, pushing back against the people who push her to grow. That difficult process enabled Anzaldúa to find herself and banish her pain and fear. She wants to help the other woman do the same: unleash the “dark animal” inside her. The woman may see herself as the prey and Anzaldúa as the beast, but Anzaldúa says the woman is her own beast and prey, and it’s about life or death.
Anzaldúa’s message to the young woman offers a clear, practical example of how the Coatlicue state and mestiza consciousness can help people. The woman recoils against Anzaldúa, who asks her to do difficult personal work, but Anzaldúa argues that the woman is really afraid of confronting herself. If they want to get in touch with their true selves, people must overcome their fear of the “dark animal” inside them—and eventually embrace it, which is the first step to taming and retraining it.
Themes
Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone. Anzaldúa tells Raza (the Chicano race) that, despite its efforts to hold onto her, she has insisted on aloneness. She had to, even though it meant “cleav[ing] flesh from flesh,” because she doesn’t want anything that fears its own “hollow aloneness” to control her. By nature she always has been and will be part of the collective, but she needs to be autonomous to make her art. But her nature and her needs are no longer in conflict: now she can walk with her people only because she has already formed her own soul for herself.
After counseling the young woman to confront her deep-set fears and psychological contradictions in the last poem, Anzaldúa addresses her own such tensions in this one. The greatest of these is choosing to serve her people by leaving them, to assert her place in the world by embracing “hollow aloneness.” Rather than choosing between entirely separating herself or entirely integrating herself into the group, she holds both imperatives together and finds a balance between them: she separates enough to know who she truly is, while remaining connected enough to her people to fight on their behalf.
Themes
