BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: BOOK REVIEW
“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 the forbidden are its inhabitants.”
Gloria Anzaldúa’s book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, resists characterization in both content and structure. Its bilingual exploration of Anzaldúa’s experience as a queer woman of color growing up on the United States-Mexico border redefines what it means to live in a world where cultures and peoples are constantly mixing and changing.
Across several chapters and collections of poems, Anzaldúa explores her experience to highlight not only the pain that comes from internal and external borderlands, but also the liberation that they provide. She delves into the struggle of being a woman in a “machista” culture and queer in a heteronormative culture. Anzaldúa illustrates how being rejected from both her Mexican and American roots gave her the power to create her own mestiza/Chicana culture. All of these investigations create a book that itself exists uniquely on its own — a mixture of the many things which influenced it.
Anzaldúa’s stories are very personal, but the themes of her book are ones which everyone can relate to. While we do not realize it, we all live in some kind of border state. For example, Anzaldúa describes how she speaks 8 different languages: English, Spanish, and the numerous regional dialects and mixes of the two. Anyone who has moved across the country can resonate with how their speech patterns change while still sounding different from the natives of that region. Throughout the book, she explores the confines of language by interspersing specific Spanish passages within English writing. The pieces written in Spanish are usually translated into English or are short enough to where a non-Spanish speaker could decipher what she means. Not only is Anzaldúa embracing the full range of experiences which her multilingual background facilitates, but she also is standing in protest of the conventions of academic writing.
In interviews, Anzaldúa has mentioned that she wanted her work to take the useful elements of academic writing and apply them to a new context. This experimentation changed the way I thought about language as a tool to both convey information and affect how it can be expressed. This tension appears throughout the book, especially in the collections of poems at the end. Some poems, such as “Mar de Repollos/ A Sea of Cabbages” are fully translated from Spanish to English, but other Spanish-language poems are left untranslated, such as “Matriz sin Tumba.” The presence of both translated and untranslated poems highlights how languages are unique communication tools that cannot be simply substituted for one another. Anzaldúa refuses to cater her writing exclusively to white Americans and challenges them to reconsider the power of language.
Borderlands is a chance for the reader to recontextualize their own experiences and the borders that have affected their lives. Anzaldúa argues that borderlands are the future, and leads the readers in a call to action to actively help build up a new culture. She calls on us to embrace our backgrounds in a critical light and reminds us that we need to reconstruct our identity and cultural assumptions as much as we deconstruct them. Anzaldúa’s message feels ever-present in today’s changing world where borders, both internal and external, are constantly being debated and redefined by politics and technology. After reading this book, readers will feel empowered to look inwards with the environment that shaped them in mind, embracing the borderlands and contradictions that have shaped their lives and the modern world.