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Symbols
The border is ambiguous—it means different things to different people—but two of the most important meanings Anzaldúa gives it are historical and metaphorical. First, the border represents the history of conflict and dispossession that has shaped people in the region. Second, it comes to represent all the borders between different peoples around the world—whether political, cultural, economic, or social.
Anzaldúa describes the border as an “open wound” because it carries the weight of history. It simply was not there until the U.S. and Mexico established it through war, and then the U.S. started restricting and militarizing it. The border—and the suffering it still causes the people living around it—is thus a constant reminder of a history that Tejanos like Anzaldúa’s family neither chose nor benefited from. After all, their new country’s racial hierarchy meant that Anglo settlers could get away with stealing their land. For Anzaldúa, then, the border represents how the sum of the region’s history has shaped her people and their identity.
But Anzaldúa also sees her people’s predicament, and the border they face, as a lens into cultural conflict and exchange of all kinds. To this end, she clarifies that her book is as much about physical borders as “psychological,” “sexual,” and “spiritual” ones—including the borders between male and female, straight and queer, conscious and unconscious, life and death, human and animal, this world and the underworld, and so on. Each has its Borderlands, whose residents face the same basic problem: how to integrate both sides into a single, authentic whole. Anzaldúa’s border-crossing tactics apply to all these situations—she developed them because the U.S.-Mexico border is just one of the many that she and her community have learned how to cross.
The U.S.-Mexico Border Quotes in Borderlands / La Frontera
The Borderlands / La Frontera quotes below all refer to the symbol of The U.S.-Mexico Border. 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:
).
Part 1, Section 1: The Homeland, Aztlán / El otro México
Quotes
The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.
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Get the entire Borderlands / La Frontera LitChart as a printable PDF.
The U.S.-Mexico Border Symbol Timeline in Borderlands / La Frontera
The timeline below shows where the symbol The U.S.-Mexico Border appears in Borderlands / La Frontera. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Preface to the First Edition
This book is specifically about the U.S.-Mexico border , Gloria Anzaldúa explains, but mental and cultural Borderlands form wherever different groups come into...
(full context)
Part 1, Section 1: The Homeland, Aztlán / El otro México
...“El otro México,” which is about Chicanos building a new version of Mexico north of the border , and historian Jack D. Forbes, who describes Chicanos as the Aztecs of the north,...
(full context)
Anzaldúa argues that, in dividing one world from another, the border creates a new world altogether. As white Americans associate the border with alienness and criminality,...
(full context)
Part 2, Section 2: La pérdida
sobre piedras con lagartijos. Dedicated to people who have crossed the border , this poem in Spanish describes a man separating from a group and stopping to...
(full context)
...wages when they asked for Sunday off. One died on the cramped cross-country ride from the border to Indiana, and as soon as they arrived, the owner made them strip and hosed...
(full context)
Part 2, Section 5: Animas
...bury him in Mexico because “under the ground it doesn’t matter / which side of the border you’re in.”
(full context)
Part 2, Section 6: El Retorno
...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....
(full context)
