Borderlands La Frontera

Content Warning: The source material employs and reappropriates some derogatory terms for Mexican Americans, which this guide reproduces only in quotes. In addition, both the source material and guide contain references to racist and anti-gay violence, rape, and suicide.

Gloria Anzaldúa specifies that when she speaks about la frontera, she is dealing with the border between the United States and Mexico in Texas. Still, she says, borderlands are not unique to this territory; they are there wherever two peoples occupy the same space. She describes herself as a “border woman” and explains that she code-switches from English to Castilian Spanish to Tex-Mex Spanish in an effort to make visible the “bastard language” of Chicano Spanish. This book invites readers to try to understand this language and culture from the perspective of its people, from “the new mestizas” (20).

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).