Before I actually read Anzaldua’s piece From Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, I read sfbull5’s post questioning the essay’s relevance to our class. So when I started reading the essay, I went into it wondering what it has to do with literary interpretation, and looking for answers to that question.
I can’t really say I found an answer, but I did come up with a number of questions in the process. First of all, what if we apply literature to the idea of the new mestiza? Anzaldua says that “the future will belong to the mestiza”, and speaks of a “new story” that she will create: “…yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (2214). This notion of the future belonging to the mestiza makes me think of current literature/art/media as a type of mestiza in itself. In today’s world, almost every form of expression is globalized, shared and exchanged by way of the internet. Ideas and culture blend together and bounce back and forth from one corner of the world to another, essentially creating a new, inclusive and ever-changing breed of art and expression. So rather than asking how the essay applies to literary interpretation, what if we apply literature to the idea of the mestiza?
What are your thoughts on the essay itself as literature? The segment we read mixes Spanish and English, and is organized into sections with bilingual headings and various quotes. What are the effects of this unusual format, which is unlike anything we’ve read so far?
Lastly, reading Borderlands/La Frontera made me consider Junot Diaz’s presentation and how timely our assignment was. I haven’t read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but the portion Diaz read to us included a similar seamless interchanging of English and Spanish. I do not know for sure, but I imagine Diaz’s novel addresses similar issues to ones we see in this essay: belonging and yet not belonging to several cultures…confusion and ambiguity, flexibilty and ambivalence. Anyone who has read the novel have any insight?
5 responses so far ↓
sparkling_bears47 // 9 November 2008 at 10.15 pm
I think what you said about applying literature to the idea of the mestiza is the right thing to do here. The piece seemed to be much more about the clash between different cultures within the world rather than about how literature portrays or works with different cultures.
To be honest, though, I would be more curious to see how this essay applies to media studies than literature, if only because visual mediums lend themselves to interesting interactions in terms of race. It would be interesting to look at something like spacial relationships in terms of this essay. I think that it would be much harder to do so within literature. Still, the essay raises interesting questions that have more or less been ignored so far in the criticism we’ve read.
campusm79 // 10 November 2008 at 12.44 am
sfbull5 mentions Anzaldúa’s idea of “breaking down paradigms†and changing the way we perceive reality, ourselves, and how we behave. I definitely see a connection between the assigned reading and literary interpretation in that both demand a “new consciousnessâ€. People read a text with their own personal ideologies, which are shaped by dominant cultural modes of thinking. People are therefore, in some ways, limited by their ideologies. And as reading is a transaction between reader and text, the reader puts limitations on the text as well. I think Anzaldúa’s essay calls people to be aware of limitations and boundaries so that people can overcome them and see things with a wider perspective.
bbug8 // 10 November 2008 at 11.14 am
One idea I was left with after reading Borderlands/La Frontera was the concept of blending. We’ve read many different kinds of criticism, and in a way, I kind of draw a connection between this and the multiculturalism discussed in the essay. This is kind of a stretch, but what I was drawn to in the essay was the idea that one can be aware of different backgrounds and groups to which they are related, but in being of mixed ancestry, one is also creating their own new group. I sort of feel the same way now about reading. I’m aware of so many different kinds of criticism and manners of reading thanks to this class, but I can’t choose just one. Now that I know about them, they’re all a part of me, so I have to sort of blend them all together to find a style of reading that is right for me. I doubt this will make much sense to anyone else, but I feel like that is what I gained most from the essay.
spotofbother // 10 November 2008 at 11.40 am
I think it was really interesting to read this essay in the context of Junot Diaz’s book-reading. Everything he said about his ambivalence toward his own culture was interesting. I think what is most easily comparable to Anzaldua is what Diaz said about the curse that dominates the lives of Oscar and his family, which is called the fuku. He said that the curse was symbolic not of African myth translated to Latin America. The superstition of the Dominican family actually increased when they moved to the United States. He said that the U.S. is actually the most superstitious country. There is no other country, he argued, that thinks it is God’s gift to the world. So, the fuku is not simply left over from the days of the oppressive Trujillo. It is a living symbol of oppression in the United States. I think it is interesting how some things change as they move across borders, and it is one of the main subjects Anzaldua explores.
zzzzz // 10 November 2008 at 2.26 pm
I see where bbug8 was going with his (her?) comments about blending. This so called “blending” in the objective view is a mixture of the different interpretations that can be obtained from reading. What I see as most important, though, is how it points out the ways in which a single entity that appears one way (a blend) objectively can appear to individuals as only a single component of that “blend.” Just as some may see a mestiza as a mexican, a mexican indian, a lesbian, etc, she is in fact all of these things even though many observers may only classify her as a single component of that mixture. It is the same for literature: one may read and see the final message only as a single component that was extracted from the mixture of the work as a whole.
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