The borderlands
on Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
I told someone once that I have lived my life in-between. For a long time I thought I know what it meant, but in fact there was little I know beyond surface description: two religions, multiple racial streams, two homes, two and a half languages, warring cultures. What lies on the deep end? What does it mean when I stumble to answer the question: are you Christian? are you Chinese? do you eat pork? you look Filipino—are you? It is much worse when they come in open-ended forms: what are you? what is your religion? Here they are offering me a floodplain of options, yet I know they wish only to hear one—a singular, uncomplicated choice. I cannot fulfil their wish.
I struggle, at times, to talk of colonialism, racism or colourism in critical discussion groups. Which of my parents will I betray today? I cannot, in good faith, denounce colonialist narratives without confessing that my ancestors were its aide. In that same vein, I cannot praise the culture that raised me without it veering into glorification territory: I might in this way deliver, unconsciously, a kind of orientalist view which betrays not only my intention but also my blood, my skin and the soil I carry on my back. “The Mestiza,” Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to?”
Over time, I have gone comfortable in the in-between. I learned to exist in what John Keats called “negative capability”: the capacity to embody dualities, and “to be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. I have learned to acknowledge my contradictions and the inconsistencies of my cultures, and reconciled with the prospect that they might never prove compatible with one another. It is an aptitude that can only be gained through continual exercise: unlearning what I have been asked to believe, reading what I do not yet understand, understanding other complications of religion and heritage that are nothing like my own. It is an exercise that demands me to question, with every interaction, my ascribed and avowed identities—a constant renegotiation of the self.
This exercise is freeing, but it has left me lonely. It has left me longing for another soul to fight with me in this wrestling match I seem to always lose. Then I read the words of Gloria Anzaldúa, and suddenly I found with me a soulmate. I was not the only one who felt this way either: AnaLouise Keating, a professor of Women’s Studies at Texas Woman’s University, wrote that whenever she teaches La Frontera, her students feel that Anzaldúa is “describing their own deeply buried secrets and beliefs”, even as they acknowledge the many differences between theirs and Anzaldúa’s location, heritage and upbringing.
It’s true: I discovered anxieties that have lied suppressed for so long that I did not know how to name them until she had revealed them to me. “Though “home” permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I too am afraid of going home,” she wrote of her roots. “I can understand why the more tinged with Anglo blood, the more adamantly my colored and colorless sisters glorify their coloured culture’s values—to offset the extreme devaluation of it by the white culture…But I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and have injured me in the name of protecting me.” I had raced, long ago, to escape home—only to find that it flows in my bloodstream and splays underneath my skin. Like a turtle, Anzaldúa wrote, “wherever I go I carry “home” on my back”. But even though I desire it, and I am compelled to defend it, when possible, to the best of my ability, I am familiar with its defects, and they have made me fear coming back, or even marrying into it.
When my home expanded, I was left to navigate the first world and the third. I encountered privileges and liberties I never knew before, and though I had found much of myself on this land, it is one that will never claim me her own. I am reminded by a passage written by the famed Indonesian painter Raden Saleh in his unpublished memoir from 1849, where he penned the wisdom he had found from being both the son of his native land and the heir of Europe’s glory: “Two sides, opposite to each other and yet both light and friendly, put their magic spell over my soul. […] Between these two worlds my heart is split,” he wrote, “And I feel urged to offer both sides my loving thanks.”
Gloria Anzaldúa echoed this sentiment when she regarded that in leaving home, she could not abandon her origins, for it is, she wrote, “in my system”. But she hungered for more, as she should. She demanded “an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian”, an infrastructure of her own vision, within which she might hold home—and everything in between. “I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face,” she wrote, and shivers travelled down my spine. “…to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me,” she continued, “then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.” What lies in the deep end? I had asked, and Gloria Anzaldúa answered, with calm and fury both, with aching fists and flowing hair, standing tall in the Borderland.
