Borderlands and choques

In her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Chicana lesbian writer Gloria Anzaldúa envisions a new mestiza consciousness, and illuminates the tensions that arise in the experience of embodying multiple realities and identities at once. She situates herself among women of color, and lesbian/queer scholars in the U.S. to tease out crucial considerations on race, gender, sexual identity and possibilities for coalition-building and liberation. Focusing on the experience of Chicanas who have grown up along the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas, she meditates on the various complexities and contradictions held in the experience of mestizaje. Defining mestizaje not solely in the colonial context of mixing race, but in the Nahuatl understanding of nepantla, an in-betweeness, Anzaldúa attempts to transcend the dualistic logic inherent to coloniality. She writes, “the coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision” (Anzaldúa 100). For Anzaldúa, a choque is not merely a collision or disagreement, but a middle space of tension that produces nuance, contradictions, pluralistic modes and potential outlets for new understandings. She writes, “the work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (Anzaldúa 102). Writing in both poetry and pose, and translated in English and Spanish, Anzaldúa transcends a new consciousness through a blend of methodology, linguistics, geographies. 

Bearing great influence to contemporary decolonial thinkers, including Maria Lugones (who I cite on the following page), Anzaldúa approximates an understanding of Chicanx/Latinx experience in the U.S. while drawing possible connections to feminist struggle across Latin America. I find myself often returning to Anzaldúa through my own research, work, and personal healing. Her encouragement to live in the space of choques has prompted me to follow curiosity around all that is ambiguous and undeterminable. As a film programmer, youth educator, and scholar, I hope to spark curiosity in others through art and dialogue and tease out these tensions together.

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007. access file here: http://users.uoa.gr/~cdokou/TheoryCriticismTexts/Anzaldua-borderlands-la-frontera.pdf