Borderlands La Frontera

Chapter 1 opens with an epigraph of lyrics from a song by a conjunto band (a small folk music band) describing the “other Mexico.” Anzaldúa then launches into her own poem describing standing at “the edge where earth touches ocean” (23), where Mexican children kick a soccer ball that lands in the United States. She describes this border as a “1,950-mile-long open wound” that splits her in half (24). This “thin edge of barbwire” is her home (25).

Anzaldúa then moves into prose, again describing the US-Mexican border as una herida abierta (an open wound) that constitutes a “third country—a border culture” (25). This is the home of those who traverse space, who are queer or other. However, only the gringos—white Americans--feel legitimate in their power there. Anzaldúa recalls a vignette of la migra (border patrol): Pedro, a fifth-generation American who couldn’t speak English, ran from the border police and was deported to Guadalajara.

From this scene, Anzaldúa moves into a historical account of the peopling of Mexico and Texas: the migration across the Bering Strait into North and South America, the Cochise people migrating from the southwest into Mexico in 1000 BCE, the Aztecs being guided by the god of war to Mexico City in 1168 CE, and the arrival of Hernán Cortés and the Spaniards in the 16th century, marking the birth of the mestizo race (people of mixed Indigenous and Spanish blood).

In the 1800s, Anglos migrated into Texas, driving the Tejanos (native Texans of Mexican descent) off of their land and establishing white superiority. With the Mexican-American War beginning in 1846, white Americans moved the Texas border south, effectively establishing the border fence with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. From there, white power marked Tejano existence. Anzaldúa connects this to her own experiences growing up, as Anglo agro-business bought up land in the 1930s, forcing the end of dryland farming by Indigenous inhabitants. She links these histories to Mexico’s contemporary reliance on American business conglomerates, creating a wealth gap that pushes more and more Mexicans to attempt the border crossing.

Immigrants who are derisively called “mojados” (“wetbacks,” a slur) float on rafts across the border’s river. If they make it across, they are met by an unwelcoming culture and forced to work under inhumane labor conditions, poor and exploited. Mexican women are especially at risk: “[L]a mojada, la mujer indocumentada is doubly threatened” (34), explains Anzaldúa. Her home is that thin edge of barbed wire.

A passage in Spanish describes the rebellion innate in the veins of Mexicans. She declares, “[F]or this Chicana, la guerra de independencia is a constant” (37). She details the strength of her rebellion, revealing this rebel to be “the Shadow-Beast” who refuses to take orders. Anzaldúa positions this rebellion in relation to the cultural tyranny enacted by men, in which women are forced to be subservient as mothers, nuns, and sex workers. She links this to the human fear of the supernatural, describing how Chicano culture rejects deviance and queerness. She paints a picture of a muchacha in her neighborhood who was “half and half, mita’ y mita’, neither one nor the other but a strange doubling” and whose queerness granted her supernatural powers (41). Anzaldúa says that she too embodies this duality.

She describes her fear of going home as a queer woman: the fear of being abandoned by “the mother culture, la Raza” (42). Many people bury parts of themselves so as not to be rejected, though the Shadow-Beast of inner rebellion will eventually awaken regardless. This experience breeds alienation for the woman of color, alienating her even from her inner self and shackling her, frozen. This inner rebellion is also grounded in the Indigenous woman’s history of resistance, located in the Aztec female’s rites of mourning, like La Llorona’s wailing. Still, “I am a turtle,” says Anzaldúa, “wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back” (43).

Though that home stays with her, Anzaldúa is still critical of her home and its injurious elements. She wants “an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian” to then build a “new culture—una cultura mestiza” borne out of a feminist architecture of her own making (44).

Anzaldúa ends the chapter with the refrain, “Not me sold out my people but they me” (44). She asserts that Chicano people reject the Indigenous woman in their culture, La Chingada, “the fucked one” (44), who betrayed the Indigenous people and sold out to the Spaniards. Anzaldúa remarks that for 300 years, this woman has been kept silent, but now, she is waiting, ready to rebel, with the sun feeding her spirit.