Gloria Anzaldua

From Geography

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Gloria Anzaldua, a self-described "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist," was born to sharecropper/field-worker parents on September 26th, 1942 in South Texas Rio Grande Valley. After relocating at age 11 to the city of Hargill, Texas on the border of the United States and Mexico, she entered the fields to work. With her parents and siblings, Anzaldua worked as a migrant worker for a year in Arkansas. Realizing this lifestyle would not benefit his children's education, Anzaldua's father decided to keep his family in Hargill, where he died when Anzaldua was 14. His death meant that Anzaldua was obligated financially to continue working the family fields throughout high school and college, while also making time for her reading, writing, and drawing. (Jones, E. et al., 2009)

Gloria Anzaldua is known for her Chicano cultural theory, feminist theory and Queer theory. Her work, especially the book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, was one of the inspirations for the so-called 'Spatial turn' in social sciences: the shifting in thought on how to examine space and social interactions. One of the main aspects in the work of Anzaldua is a new kind of hybridity.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

The book by Gloria Anzaldua (1987) is a book about the United States-Mexican border and the influence this border has on the social, cultural and psychological state of Mexicans and Americans. The book is composed of poems and essays, each drawing on Gloria Anzaldua's experience as a Chicana (a female United States citizen of Mexican descent), a lesbian and an activist. The main purpose of her book is challenging the conception of a border as just a simple divide (Anzaldua, 1987). Anzaldua insists that while these borders are abstract, they should never be implemented into the soul (Jones, E. et al., 2009). Anzaldua don't see borders as something of dead, misery and etc. She invite people to re-imagine borders. She tried to change the relationship between us versus them. Anzaldua believes that you can cross borders between us and them.

References

• Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, California: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Books.

• Jones, E., Olson, J., Teale, R., & Curtright , L. (2009, June 17). University of minnesota. Retrieved from http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/anzaldua.php

Contributors

• Page created by Lars-Olof Haverkort -- LarsHaverkort 15:54, 27 September 2012 (CEST)
• Edited by Lotte den Boogert, 21 october 2012