Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

A hybrid book of essays and poems by a Chicana writer from the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, written in a mix of English, Spanish, Tex-Mex and Nahuatl. The first half is seven prose chapters. Anzaldúa describes the US–Mexico border as an open wound where two worlds grind together, and retells the history of the region from Aztlán to annexation. She writes about rebelling against a culture that polices women and queer people, about Indigenous goddesses such as Coatlicue, and about the 'Coatlicue state', a painful paralysis that comes before change. 'How to Tame a Wild Tongue' attacks the shaming of Chicano Spanish as linguistic terrorism. The final essay sets out a 'new mestiza consciousness': a way of thinking that tolerates contradiction and ambiguity and holds several cultures at once instead of choosing one. The second half is poetry on the same themes.

It is a founding text of Chicana feminism, borderlands theory and thinking about mixed identity, and its idea of a consciousness built from contradiction still speaks to anyone living between cultures.