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The U.S.-Mexico Border
Building on the native myth of the serpent creator goddess Tonantsi/Coatlicue, Anzaldúa associates serpents with femininity, fertility, healing, the body, the earth, and death. They serve as doubles, or foils, to Anzaldúa herself—when they appear in the book, they signify that she is crossing borders, passing from one world to another. This starts when a rattlesnake bites Anzaldúa and then returns to her in her dreams. Later, she sees serpents during “each of [her] four bouts with death,” on the border between the underworld and the world of the living. Similarly, when she finally returns home to the Rio Grande Valley in the book’s final essay, the first thing she describes is the “curving, twisting serpent” of the river—the source of the fertile lands that brought her and her family to the region and then trapped them there. The river marks her passage back to a home that does not fully accept her, and this evokes a complicated mix of comfort and fear.
In each case, encountering a serpent means not just crossing a border but also directly confronting the deep, contradictory truths of one’s life and identity in the process. One can choose to ignore those contradictions, Anzaldúa argues, or one can choose to engage with and resolve them through what she calls the Coatlicue state. Thus, serpent imagery signals moments of transition at which people have the opportunity to transform themselves. It thereby links Indigenous myth with Anzaldúa’s analysis of the border and theory of personal and social change.
Serpents Quotes in Borderlands / La Frontera
The Borderlands / La Frontera quotes below all refer to the symbol of Serpents. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1, Section 3: Entering into the Serpent
Quotes
Snakes, víboras: since that day I’ve sought and shunned them. Always when they cross my path, fear and elation flood my body. I know things older than Freud, older than gender. She—that’s how I think of la Víbora, Snake Woman. Like the ancient Olmecs, I know Earth is a coiled Serpent. Forty years it’s taken me to enter into the Serpent, to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul.
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Part 1, Section 4: La herencia de Coatlicue / The Coatlicue State
Quotes
We are not living up to our potentialities and thereby impeding the evolution of the soul—or worse, Coatlicue, the Earth, opens and plunges us into its maw, devours us. By keeping the conscious mind occupied or immobile, the germination work takes place in the deep, dark earth of the unconscious.
Frozen in stasis, she perceives a slight
movement—a thousand slithering serpent hairs,
Coatlicue. It is activity (not immobility) at its
most dynamic stage, but it is an underground
movement requiring all her energy. It brooks no
interference from the conscious mind.
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Part 2, Section 6: El Retorno
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Sí, se me hace que en unos cuantos años o siglos
la Raza se levantará, lengua intacta
cargando lo mejor de todas las culturas.
Esa víbora dormida, la rebeldía, saltará.
Como cuero viejo caerá la esclavitud
de obedecer, de callar, de aceptar.
Como víbora relampagueando nos moveremos, mujercita.
¡Ya verás!
[…]
Yes, in a few years or centuries
la Raza will rise up, tongue intact
carrying the best of all the cultures.
That sleeping serpent,
rebellion—(r)evolution, will spring up.
Like old skin will fall the slave ways of
obedience, acceptance, silence.
Like serpent lightning we’ll move, little woman.
You’ll see.
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Get the entire Borderlands / La Frontera LitChart as a printable PDF.
Serpents Symbol Timeline in Borderlands / La Frontera
The timeline below shows where the symbol Serpents appears in Borderlands / La Frontera. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1, Section 3: Entering into the Serpent
After an epigraph from Silvio Rodríguez’s song “Sueño con serpientes” (“I Dream of Serpents”), Anzaldúa describes how her mother used to warn her to watch...
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Ella tiene su tono. Anzaldúa describes getting bitten by a rattlesnake while chopping cotton on a ranch. She sucks the venom out of her own feet....
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...or the Virgin of Guadalupe. This name is actually descended from that of the Mesoamerican serpent creator goddess Coatlicue, who was also known as Tonantsi. But the patriarchal Azteca-Mexica society “split”...
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Sueño con serpientes. Anzaldúa describes how serpents’ mouths represented the womb in pre-conquest mythology and includes a poem...
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When she encounters snakeskins or feels the wind, Anzaldúa feels a deep consciousness of her connection to the natural...
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Part 1, Section 4: La herencia de Coatlicue / The Coatlicue State
...a mythical four-headed goddess. The woman has visions of human sacrifice, her own soul, and rattlesnakes, which she feels are all deeply connected.
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...associates her with the “consuming internal whirlwind” of the unconscious. One statue depicts her with snakes for a head and hands, as well as a necklace made of human hands, hearts,...
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Part 1, Section 6: Tlilli, Tlapalli / The Path of the Red and Black Ink
...a toad emerging from her brain, sapping her energy and leaving her like a dried snakeskin that blows lazily across the landscape. She implores the “musa bruja” (witch-muse) to banish her...
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Part 1, Section 7: La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness
El retorno. Anzaldúa gazes at “the curving, twisting serpent” of the Rio Grande as it meets the Gulf of Mexico. She is back home,...
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Part 2, Section 2: La pérdida
...a hole but got bitten by insects all night and woke up to find a snake stalking him. He just has to make it to Ogaquinahua, where people from his country...
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Part 2, Section 3: Crossers y otros atravesados
...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...
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Part 2, Section 5: Animas
...“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...
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...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...
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...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...
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Part 2, Section 6: El Retorno
...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...
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