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This chapter celebrates the fertility goddess, Serpent Skirt, and the women who have come out of her tradition. “Holy Relics” describes the entombment of Saint Theresa, which Anzaldúa then links to the other wailing women in “En el nombre de todos las madres que han perdido sus hijos en la guerra.” “Letting Go” describes the experience of dealing with one’s inner demons: “You must plunge your fingers into your navel, with your two hands / split open” (186). Ultimately, one arrives on the other side, becoming one with the creatures inside. “I Had To Go Down” positions the basement as a space for confronting one’s history, becoming aware of the horrors within oneself. “Cagado abismo, quiero saber” is written with Chicano slang, probing for knowledge within the self. “that dark shining thing” deals with Anzaldúa’s experience of being “the only round face, / Indian-beaked, off-colored / in the faculty lineup, the workshop, the panel” (193), describing the alienation that experience engenders. “Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone” reenacts the new mestiza’s struggle to stay part of her community while fighting for change, with the goddess Cihautlyotl standing in for the mestiza.
“Animas” focuses on the relationship between nature and humans in the borderlands. “La curandera” depicts the serpent as the source of all healing, with the woman becoming the healer and the male healer becoming her apprentice. “mujer cacto” depicts the mestiza as the desert, illustrating her intense relationship with the borderland’s landscape. In “Cuyamaca,” Anzaldúa describes a meeting with an Indigenous woman, Til’pu, which ends on a sinister note—“the Indians locked up in reservations / and Til’pu behind glass in the museum” (205)—illustrating the subjugation of Indigenous peoples by corporate interests. “My Black Angelos” describes an encounter with a bruja (witch), with Anzaldúa’s narrator eventually becoming a witch herself. “Creature of Darkness” describes Anzaldúa’s process of dealing with the darkness within oneself, in which one becomes both “a creature afraid of the dark / a creature at home in the dark” (209). “Antigua, mi diosa” describes a desire to be intimate with the goddess within oneself and the challenges confronted in creating that intimacy.
“El Retorno” sees Anzaldúa return to her homeland with optimistic poems embodying the new mestiza consciousness. “Arriba mi gente” opens the chapter with a call to action in the form of a song. “To Live in the Borderlands means you” expands on this call to action, indicating the intersectionality of the new mestiza and the necessity of her continuing to live without borders in all parts of her life. “Canción de la diosa de la noche” is a lyrical piece in which the goddess of the night herself lives at the crossroads; this dark goddess is imagined as a source of empowerment and change. “No se raje, chicanita” (“Don’t Give In, Chicanita”) instructs the reader not to lose her culture in the splitting that inevitably occurs on the borderland, as Chicano culture will survive in the end.
With Anzaldúa’s final chapters of poems, she continues to follow the structure set out in the first half of Borderlands / La Frontera. Chapter 4, “Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone,” focuses on the female goddess in all her various forms, from a religious figure to a woman in the contemporary academic world. Across these poems, Anzaldúa switches perspectives, moving between historical information, calls to action, and subjective experiences. For the poem after which the chapter is named, Anzaldúa intersperses spaces between her words so that the poem can be read with different trajectories, allowing for a multiplicity of meanings that echoes her broader notion of Contradiction as Mestiza Consciousness.
“Animas” employs various symbols to convey the intense relationship between animals and humans near the border. The serpent, cactus, and eagle recur, as does darkness as representative of the inner spirit. Anzaldúa uses repetition to get at her depressed inner monologue in “Creature of Darkness,” harkening back to the Coatlicue state described in the first half of the book.
El Retorno opens with a vibrant song of the borderlands, offering the kind of embodied text that Anzaldúa discussed in the first half of the book and thus encapsulating the theme of Language as Identity and Performance. These poems take an optimistic, inspired tone, ready to fight for the longevity of the Chicana race and to inspire others to do so. They are battle cries of poems, synthesizing the ideas of the five prior poem chapters.
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