An analysis of the book "Borderlands/La Frontera" by Gloria Anzaldua

In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua
paints a moving portrait of the search for identity in a
world that refuses to allow one. The physical
borderland between the U.S. and Mexico helps
create, but is also secondary to, the psychological
"fence" that a person is put on when they are denied a
culture and a place in society.
The beautiful language of the text hit its high
point for me personally in one poem. "She has this
fear that she has no names… that she has many
names…that she doesn't know her names." (Anzaldua
65). I was deeply moved by the profound beauty and
insight of this piece, and shared it with a close friend.
"I think everyone feels that way sometimes," was her
reply. True, and more so for people like Anzaldua,
who as both a woman and a Chicana, grew up in an
atmosphere of oppression and confusion. "It's not a
comfortable territory to live in, this place of
contradictions," she writes. "Hatred, anger and
exploitation are the prominent features of this
landscape." (Anzaldua, Preface to the First Edition).

It is also a landscape where the question "Who
Am I?" is not readily or easily answered. The
restrictions placed by cultural institutions, for all their
pretensions to protection, aim to suffocate. "The
culture and the Church insist that women are
subservient to males." (Anzaldua 39) This includes
obeying without question, keeping silent, and
essentially stifling their very beings. According to
Michel Foucalt, this power keeps it grip by placing
self-policing thoughts in the minds of people: "In
order to be exercised, this power had to be give the
instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent
surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as
it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a
faceless gaze that transformed

the whole social body into a field of perception:
thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile
attentions ever on the alert." (Foucalt 475). The
concept behind this is to make it unnecessary for the
institutions to arrange the physical disciplinary
action; the women are kept in check by their own
minds.

However, there are some, like Anzaldua, who
recognize this and aim to break free, to let loose the
"Shadow-Beast": "It is a part of me that refuses to
take orders from outside authorities." (Anzaldua 38)
Here Anzaldua demonstrates her awareness of the
Hegemonic Discourse. Most of us adhere to
authority because we are not aware that authority has
to prove itself valid; the impositions placed on
Anzaldua, all Chicanas, all women, came from a need
to control, disguised as the benevolent act of
"protection": "Culture (read males) professes to
protect women. Actually it keeps women in rigidly
defined roles." (Anzaldua 39)

One aspect of the oppression of people
considered "deviant" that I found telling is the fear
involved in that need to separate and control. "The
queer are the mirror reflecting the heterosexual tribe's
fear: being different, being other and therefore lesser,
therefore sub-human, in-human, non-human."
(Anzaldua 40) There is great difficulty in
acknowledging that there is more than one way of
being; people fear that which is different,
even though its existence as the "Other" is what
defines them as what they consider "The Norm." The
fear, one suspects, lies in the possibility that the
"Other" may challenge the existing power. Speaking
of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Pamella Farley
states:
"The twin stories of Clarissa with Sally and
Septimus with Evans are the artistic form of Virginia
Stephen Woolf's own conflicted experience as a
married woman who loved women in a world
increasingly threatened by the potential alternative to
patriarchal control that lesbianism could with the
period's historic push toward independence and
autonomy for women provide." (Farley Introduction)

Anzaldua speaks of an experience that points to
this: "In a New England college where I taught, the
presence of a few lesbians threw the more
conservative heterosexual students and faculty into a
panic." (Anzaldua 42).
We fear that which is not "us"; that which
threatens our power.

Anzaldua's description of the tendency of society
to also keep men in strict gender roles was of great
personal interest. "I've encountered a few scattered
and isolated gentle straight men, the beginnings of a
new breed, but they are confused, and entangled with
sexist behaviors that they have not been able to
eradicate." (Anzaldua 106). I feel that this passage
describes my own position to a great extent. Men
attempting to break out of the hegemonic discourse
are hard to find, and they are not readily accepted, be
they gay or straight. I am very grateful to Anzaldua
for pointing this out.

I regard Borderlands to be a masterpiece of great
beauty and insight, and encompasses all that we have
learned and discussed as a class.

Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera:
The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt
Lute, 1987.

Farley, Pamella. "Azalea Bushes and Asparagus
Beds: Virginia Woolf and the Medical
Backlash." The Future of Difference.
Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980.

Foucault, Michel. "Discipline and Punish."

Literary Theory: The Anthology. Blackwell

Publishers, 1998.