Borderlands / La Frontera: Part 2, Section 6: El Retorno Summary & Analysis

The epigraph comes from a well-known Silvio Rodríguez song about his unending love, which will continue even after death or abandonment.

Arriba mi gente. This poem is actually the lyrics to a song. The chorus calls for “mi gente” (my people) to rise up and fight for a “Mundo Zurdo”—a left-handed world. In this quest, Chicanas will set the fields alight and rush into the purple flames, avenge their native ancestors and enable the earth’s spirit to be reborn. They will unite to revive their ancient faith, free their people, and build their new world.

To live in the Borderlands means you. The women of the Borderlands are not just “hispana india negra española [o] gabacha”—Hispanic, Indigenous, Black, Spanish, or Anglo—but caught among all five. Yet many women deny part of this composite identity, particularly the Indigenous one. Life on “la frontera” (the border) means constantly being misperceived, but also creating new kinds of race, gender, and culture. People from elsewhere fight their battles in the Borderlands, creating pressure and temptation for locals, who too often get caught in the crossfire. To evade the mill that tries to crush them into kernels and bake them into white bread, Chicanas must “live sin fronteras”—without borders—and “be a crossroads.”

Canción de la diosa de la noche. The poem’s narrator describes herself as “a vine / creeping down the moon” to earth, where “The Mother” gives her human form. She reaches a crumbling temple and nearly gets overwhelmed by its music, but “shake[s] earth, air, fire, and water” to escape. She passes a gate and reaches a crossroads between worlds, but then declares that she is this gate, which divides the underworld from the world of the living. Hidden in her shawl, she walks on and “return[s] to [her]self.” The narrator has chosen to be mad: “the godhead” has rejected her, so she rejects her “kinship / with the whole and all its parts.”

The narrator wakes up to a rooster call and remembers the unity of beginning and end: she was all-powerful and “filled the sky,” but then she died. Now she presides over “the filth you relegate to Satan.” She looks for the spirits like her, who live with the dark goddess. With her knife, she keeps the moon and sun in place, but she feels death approaching and calls out for night. She shakes “the watchers” out of their sleep with a chant, and the audience becomes the gate, not her. She goes down into the “dark primordial slime” of the world to find her “kindred spirits,” and during an eclipse, the goddess raises all these spirits up. They don “the feathered mantle / and change [their] fate.”

No se raje, chicanita / Don’t Give In, Chicanita. Printed in both Spanish and English versions, this poem tells a young dark-skinned girl (“mi prietita”) to endure her suffering. Her ancient lineage goes back to long before the Anglos came to Texas, and “strong women reared [her].” The Anglos stole her family land, including the cemetery, but the women in her family will never lose their “mexicana-Chicana-tejana” pride or “Indian woman’s spirit.” They will be around long after the Anglos have fought each other out of existence. Chicanos will create a “new species” that incorporates “the best of all the cultures.” Like a snake waking from its slumber, they will shed their old skin of “obedience, acceptance, silence” and turn into “serpent lightning.”