Borderlands / La Frontera: Part 2, Section 5: Animas Summary & Analysis

Anzaldúa quotes the corrido “Por una mujer ladina,” in which a man sings of losing his peace of mind over a mestiza woman who pricked him with a thorn he can’t get out.

La curandera. The narrator of “La curandera” “became a healer” after her leg “turned white.” She sent her nephew to Juan Dávila, who went to Mexico to find a healer—but never returned. Her nephew followed Juan Dávila and discovered the healer was dead. Then, the nephew’s leg turned white, too, and he died. Dávila blamed the nephew, whom he thinks accepted and even wanted death. The Border Patrol wanted to bring the nephew’s body back across to the US, but Dávila wanted to bury him in Mexico because “under the ground it doesn’t matter / which side of the border you’re in.”

Back in the US, Juan Dávila finds the narrator of “La curandera” dying, being consumed by maggots. He tries to bury her, but she disappears. A mysterious pain starts shooting through Dávila’s body, up to his heart. He blames his thoughts and tries to imagine the pain going away—but it comes back. He accepts that he will die and starts to pray. Then, the pain goes to where the narrator used to be, and the narrator rematerializes and thanks Dávila for his prayer. Dávila says he only prayed for himself, but the narrator says it was really for everyone. Dávila asks if the narrator wants to die; she says she wants to join the Virgin, whom Dávila says is already everywhere.

The narrator of “La curandera” and Juan Dávila sleep in the same bed and wake up to find serpents all over the walls, floor, and windows. One offers to guide the narrator’s spirit and tells her to gather herbs. She and Dávila go to the fields and see a rosemary plant surrounded by weeds, which starts to grow. Eventually, it tells the weeds that they are beautiful, and they turn into grass. All sorts of herbs start to grow. The narrator becomes a curandera (healer) and Juan Dávila her apprentice.

mujer cacto. In Spanish, this poem describes the desert-woman (“la mujer del desierto”) scratching people with her thorns and long, sharp claws. She watches a wasp sting a tarantula, drag it into a hole, and lay an egg on top of it. The egg hatches, and the baby wasp eats the tarantula. This is a hostile land. The desert-woman buries herself in the sand like a rat, hides her head like a turtle, and digs up roots like a peccary (similar to a pig). She lives briefly, filling the desert with trees and flowers. Like a rattlesnake, she rests during the day and awakens at night to eat a bird’s nest, babies and all. She spits blood from her eyes like a lizard but runs away and turns into sand when danger approaches. She is like the wind, forming dunes and hills as it blows.

Cuyamaca. Don Pedro Fages, an 18th-century Spanish governor of California, describes a tribe as the “most restless, stubborn, / haughty, warlike and hostile” of all the natives. The narrator drives through a canyon, sees land-for-sale signs, and notes that its original native inhabitants have been forced into ghettos and reservations. Houses dot the side of the mountain “like pimples.” Once, the narrator was sitting by a stream in this region when “a woman from a nearly extinct tribe” emerged from the bushes with yucca sandals and a cactus-prick tattoo. But now, the Cuyamaca Peaks are burning in a forest fire, the land parceled off and sold. And the woman is in a museum. 

My Black Angelos. At night, the narrator hears a lost woman’s soul whimpering, wandering among the dead, crying out for her lost child and dead lover. The woman cries out—she is following the narrator, and soon she comes to the door. The woman touches the narrator with her “taloned hand” and starts putting ideas in the narrator’s head; she pulls food out of the narrator’s teeth, smoke from her lungs, and lice from her hair. She finally crawls under the narrator’s skin. They start to wander together at night, blowing with the wind and “roam[ing] with the souls of the dead.”

Creature of Darkness. Stuck in an “underplace” of grief for three weeks, this poem’s narrator now goes out only at night, to “stay small and still in the dark.” By letting her thoughts rupture her wounds, she “starts the healing.” Part of her enjoys the scabs, the pain, the blood, even as another part begs her to stop. Grief and yearning beckon from the shadows, asking her to become a “creature of darkness” like them. She tells her friends she is traveling, so they do not come rescue her from her grief. For these three weeks she fills the hole of her loss, becoming “fat” and “numb,” until she both fears and belongs in the darkness.

Antigua, mi diosa. In this Spanish-language poem, blinded and barefoot in the vast, dark night, a woman tries to follow the path of an ancient goddess. The goddess visited her in Brooklyn, making a sound like a rattlesnake or downpour or million wings. The goddess cut the narrator down like an axe cutting a tree, consumed her by filling her body with her seeds of light (“tus semillas de luz”). That light has turned into anxiety and suffering. The woman cannot give herself back to the ancient goddess, but she is overwhelmed with desires that she feels only the goddess can satisfy. So she continues searching, looking for signs, dreaming of again getting inside the goddess’s black skin.