Gloria Anzaldúa

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana writer, poet and feminist theorist from the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. Mixing English and Spanish, prose and poetry, her book Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) used the US–Mexico border as a way to think about identities formed between cultures, languages and sexualities. She co-edited This Bridge Called My Back (1981), a key anthology of writing by women of colour. Her ideas of the 'new mestiza' and of nepantla, the in-between space, shaped Chicana studies, queer theory and decolonial thought.

Key ideas

• The borderlands are both a physical place and a psychological state where cultures meet and clash.
• A 'mestiza consciousness' tolerates contradiction and ambiguity instead of forcing either/or choices.
• Language is bound up with identity, so shaming someone's way of speaking is a form of 'linguistic terrorism'.
• Nepantla, the in-between state, is painful but can become a source of transformation and new understanding.

Major works

• Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
• This Bridge Called My Back (1981, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga)
• Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (1990, editor)
• This Bridge We Call Home (2002, co-editor)

In the Book corner

• Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza 1987 · Intermediate
  A hybrid book of essays and poems by a Chicana writer from the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, written in a…

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