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Summary
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 book is specifically about the U.S.-Mexico border, Gloria Anzaldúa explains, but mental and cultural Borderlands form wherever different groups come into contact. Living between Mexican and Anglo cultures can be uncomfortable and frustrating, but it also teaches people like Anzaldúa to adapt their identities to different settings and develop a new kind of consciousness. This book is about how she has developed this identity, and one key expression of this identity is the mixture of English, standard Spanish, northern Mexican dialect, and indigenous languages like Náhuatl she uses throughout.
Anzaldúa summarizes her book’s central idea: the unique political, historical, and psychological conditions of life in the Borderlands demonstrate how we can harness difference in order to grow, whether as individuals or in society as a whole. This explanation is important because the seven essays and 36 poems in this book can all stand alone, despite their similar subject matter, and some readers may struggle to connect the dots among them otherwise. This is particularly true for readers who are encountering Anzaldúa’s ideas and cultural references for the first time, as well as those who do not know Spanish.
Themes
