Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza: Third Edition |  | Author: Gloria Anzaldúa
Publisher: Aunt Lute Books
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Rating:  21 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3 Blg
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 1879960745
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9781879960749
Publication Date: June 1, 2007
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Product Description
Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remapped our understanding of what a “border” is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This twentieth-anniversary edition features new commentaries from prominent activists, artists, and teachers on the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa’s visionary work.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
 Borderlands/la frontera February 12, 2010
Paula J. Ramos (Beaveron Oregon)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
El excellente libro que nos muestra la historia y la batalla personal de la mujer que creciera en la frontera.
 Oye, chica! Como hablas! February 4, 2010
R. Borneman
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Rather than jump into the political debates of identity and race, I thought I'd mention some unusual aspects of Anzaldua's use of language. Page references are to the third edition.
Anzaldua's use of language is both inclusive (it contains elements of her eight spoken languages plus Nahuatl, p. 77) and exclusionary - she adamantly refuses to translate for her non-multi-lingual readers. Her use of Spanish is rather peculiar and begins in the very title of her work: La Frontera. Part of what makes it so peculiar is her frequent use of Spanish-English cognates, coupled with huge portions of untranslated text. "La Frontera" is easily understood by non-Spanish speakers to be "The Frontier" although she (appropriately enough) translates it as "border" or "borderlands". "El otro México" and "Aztecas del norte" (p. 23) continue the cognate approach, but wedged between them is a larger, untranslated passage, generally inaccessible to non-Spanish speakers. Spanish is then sprinkled across the following pages, including slang (what she calls "Chicano Spanish" - p. 79): "pa' `trás", "pa' `delante", "gabacho" etc. (p. 25). On the very same page she defines la frontera: "Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them." Anzaldua does not hesitate to set up her linguistic fences, to establish her fronteras - to keep the foreigners (Gringos) out. She sets traps around the river beds of language and beneath the bridges of translation (p. 33) to carefully police her territory from the incursions of the unwanted.
When she does translate, one wonders why she bothers. Swiftly, on pages 47 - 48 she translates individual words, a patronizing joke in which she even provides endnote translations for cognates (veneno: venom, poison), or bizarrely personal translations (nalgas becomes "vagina"). More confusing is her translation of Silvio Rodriguez' poem in which her verbs take on new meanings in translation: "Oh, oh, oh, la mató ..." is shifted into first person and present tense as "Oh, oh, oh, I kill one..." Meaning is lost when she translates "con serpientes" into "of serpents" and not "with serpents". But perhaps there is method to her madness. Her endnote 14 (p. 51) is in Spanish, referring to a translation - which itself is a contestable translation: "Algunos dicen que Guadalupe es una palabra derivida del lenguaje árabe que significa "Río Oculto." Anzaldua cites de Paola (1980) who in turn is citing the French historian Jacques Lafaye (1976). Lafaye argues that a "rio oculto" is a "river flowing between high banks" (Lafaye p. 217), but in the romantic mythology of Anzaldua's writing, the English-language associations with the word "occult" are much more appealing.
Occlusion is also a valuable reason for Anzaldua's lack of translation from Spanish. Her quotation of the Violeta Parra poem (p. 28, untranslated) would lose some of its mystery if it were revealed to be a sympathetic remembrance to the ghostly chilenos, victims of Pinochet, and not to a dispossessed Indian or mestizo populace. She occludes her sources with her use of the mythological narrative formula "some say..." (p. 51). She occludes complexity in favor of mythic narrative with her bald assertions that "La Virgen de Guadalupe's Indian name is Coatlalopeuh." (p. 49) She occludes logic and reason, reversing historical narratives ("Because Coatlalopeuh was homophonous to the Spanish Guadalupe, the Spanish identified her with the dark Virgin, Guadalupe, patroness of West Central Spain." p. 51; or, as Orsini Dunnington notes, "Some 360 years after the original apparition sequence, Mariano Jacobo Rojas announced that the Virgin had wished to be known as `Coatlaxopeuh,' or `She who crushed the serpent's head.' No early chronicle notes this genesis." Orsini Dunnington p. 8) Linguistic occlusion serves well Anzaldua's decimation of the fences of history, logic, and verifiability.
Badly Thought, Badly Argued, With a Few Good Phrases November 1, 2009
D. Ashal (Aztlan, holmes)
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
I debated giving this book one star, but that wouldn't have been entirely honest, as much as I found it excruciating. Anzaldua, whatever her other failings, has a gift when it comes to using poetic language to evoke certain images and moods, and deserves to be credited for that. Talking about the border as a series of stakes in her flesh, no matter the laughable identity politics behind the expression, has a certain visceral quality. So I'll start by saying that while this was pretty awful, I've read far worse.
Also, to be fair, I clearly wasn't the target audience for this. While Anzaldua mentions that the identity she is searching for doesn't fall within current categories, the book is about nothing but identity politics, which I'm no great fan of. The kind of people who love this book also love to smugly remind you that the "personal is the political", which is true in a sense, but can also just provide someone with a literary and political license to act out their own life's problems and assign them a cosmic significance, which results in books like this. There's no shame in discussing life as a member of group X if you can bring some substance to the discussion; James Baldwin could do this as both a black man and a gay man, Phillip Roth could do this as a Jew, and Sandra Cisneros can do it as a Latina and a woman. Anzaldua however, has simply written an gratuitously oppositional mess.
Logic and reason go out the window fairly quickly, though I'm sure Anzaldua would say that consistency was some horrible conspiracy by white people to spiritually enslave transgendered brown shamans or something like that. I'm not exaggerating; in this book's worldview, white people are all representatives of a culture somewhat like the Borg except WASP-ier. We're spiritually dead and hate everyone else. I don't really debate that this is true incidentally, just that I've never seen another group that's really any better. A familiar bit of nonsense from Chicano studies, that Spanish can be some kind of language of resistance, is presented--ignoring that fact that Spanish is just another imperial language like English, and that the white people who brought it to the Western Hemisphere are the ones who destroyed Anzaldua's beloved (human-sacrificing, slave-keeping) Aztecs and Mayans. White people would be better off if we explored paths like Zen, Taoism, and Shamanism. Ignoring that these three philosophies are entirely different and mutually exclusive, and that Shamanism is more of a catch-all term for various primitive systems of religion, I really don't think Anzaldua would appreciate if we did take to these disciplines en masse, as she makes clear when she states that white people tend to just take things and commodify and ruin them. This claim seems potentially insulting to non-white people; if we're a dead culture for preserving things of historical value, does that mean other cultures would all just use things until they fell apart? Then again, I find many of Anzaldua's claims potentially as insulting to people of color as to honkies; considering how many notable Chicano thinkers, scientists, philosophers, activists, artists, and innovators there have been it seems somewhat denigrating to suggest that Chicanos should just throw all that away to imitate some spiritual golden age that may never have existed. The glorification of primitive barbarism by people who enjoy the intellectual comforts of modern liberal democracy always rubs me the wrong way, though, to be fair.
I am aware that white people wield most institutional power, especially men and especially straight men. Being a Chicana Lesbian is probably tough in some ways, and I don't feel like a "victim of racism" because Anzaldua seems predisposed to dislike me as I'm aware that I'm further up the social totem pole than she is in a fundamental way. This doesn't mean I have to say that her self-evident hatred of the sort of white/Western construct that she's carrying around in her head makes any sense or is at all helpful to understanding the world. Also, Anzaldua's identification as a lesbian seems problematic. First off, she mentions choosing this path, which is at odds with most of what I know about human sexuality, i.e. that homosexuality is not something one consciously "chooses". This seems like a very cynical and politicized "choice" unless I am interpreting it incorrectly. Also, sorry but taken as a whole, white people are significantly more accepting of homosexuals than Chicanos, and of feminism for that matter. The people she wants to speak for, by and large, don't much like her.
I grew up largely around working-class Chicanos and I never met anyone who strikes me in retrospect as a sleeping Anzaldua fan. However, once I went to college, I met plenty of liberal arts majors who live in white neighborhoods, have mostly white friends, speak a mangled form of Spanglish, and love Anzaldua's writing. It's not for the average Aztlana, it's for an audience that mostly consists of well-to-do Latinas who would be called "coconuts" in East L.A. and guilt-ridden white liberals. It's an academic audience, which is fine, but let's not fool ourselves on that score. I suppose there's the possiblity that a poor Mestiza girl who feels torn between different identities somewhere will find this and get something useful from it; and if so, good for her. I'm sure some people can get something here, and there are a few poetic snippets that are quite lovely in their way. Also, the very concept of identity and the various categories we find ourselves in deserves some serious study and reflection; this book passes up that chance to wallow in anger and self-pity and automatically indict Western Civilization for these things. Truly a shame.
The Chicana Perspective August 18, 2009
Holly Fernandez (New York, New York)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
In a time where controversy continues around issues of offical language, immigration, and national identity in the United States, this book opens the eyes of the "dominant white culture" in America to struggles that our latino citizens need to overcome in their lives. Not only an excellent book for any latina to read who shares the same expereince as Anzaldua, mestiza born in the United States struggling to choose a clear identity, but also a highly recommended read for non latinos. In her introduction, Anzaldua extends an invitation to anglo americans to meet them halfway in understanding these controversial issues of our society. Although written in the style of a personal narrative that at times makes you laugh out loud, this book will help chicanas have a better understanding of their own heritage and whites to rethink their positions on immigration and official language.
wishing for review of 3rd edition June 16, 2009
C. J. Woodward
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have the first and second editions and my praise of each is complete. However, I came to this amazon.com page because I wanted to learn about the 3rd edition, which has additional materials from teachers, scholars, and critics. amazon.com has provided nothing at all re: the 3rd ed. The "search" inside the book is a search inside the 2nd ed, and the "product descriptions" are for the first edition. None of the reviews are regarding the 3rd edition. What a frustrating experience.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
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