Borderlands / La Frontera Themes

In Borderlands / La Frontera, a book of seven essays and three dozen poems, Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa explores what it means to live on and across borders of all sorts. While she focuses on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, where her family has lived for six generations, she also emphasizes the way she straddles other cultural and psychological borders—like male and female, the English and Spanish languages, the self and the other…

Borderlands / La Frontera isn’t just about the psychological and spiritual dimensions of identity: it is also distinctly historical. Gloria Anzaldúa grounds her analysis in the broad history of US-Mexico relations and the specific fate of the Rio Grande Valley, her home, which has always been native land and which the US stole from Mexico in the 1840s. She explains how the US government never honored its treaties promising the land to the 100,000…

As a multilingual poet and literary scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa pays special attention to the power of language and storytelling throughout Borderlands / La Frontera. As the book’s title forewarns, Anzaldúa mixes English and Spanish throughout, usually without translations. Monolingual readers are likely to find this frustrating at times. But these linguistic shifts aren’t trivial or random; in fact, her book’s success arguably depends on her language-mixing.

In the essay “Tlilli, Tlapalli / The…