Gloria Anzaldua

From Geography

Gloria Anzaldua, a self-described "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist" (so she is not a geographer). She 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.

Essential in the works of Gloria Anzaldua is the fact that most of her work is written in Spanglish, which is a mixture between English and Spanish. This fact highlights the importance of borders in society and the (im)possibilities to cross these borders. For example her work 'the border' which is about the Mexiacan and North American border is not only a border between countries but also between Spanish and American culture and language which is highlighted in the books of Gloria Anzaldua. So by using both languages she creates some kind of territory between those borders which gives an objective view of the situation in the border area.

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. One of these influences, is the phenomenon of code-switching which is an important element of the border culture. This phenomenon creates a new language that may be used by people between the border between USA and Mexico, called Spanglish (Price, 2010). 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. In her book she writes the situation in her Homeland, "Aztlan", the border that seperates the safe from the unsafe. The significant contribution of Gloria Anzaldua to postcolonial studies with her understanding of the border as an in-between personal location is described as follows: "Anzaldúa constructs a transdisciplinary space for thinking about colonization from a personal inscription (linguistic and personal) in colonial legacies rather than writing about colonization from the rules of a disciplinary game" (Mignolo, 1995).

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

• Mignolo, W. (1995). The Darker Side of Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

• Price, T. (2010) What is Spanglish? The phenomenon of code-switching and its impact amongst US Latinos, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

Contributors

• Page created by Lars-Olof Haverkort -- LarsHaverkort 15:54, 27 September 2012 (CEST)
• Edited by Lotte den Boogert, 21 october 2012
• Page edited by Marleen Revenberg --MarleenRevenberg 11:55, 24 October 2012 (CEST)
• Page edited by Rens Mennen -- RensMennen 11:54, 24 October 2012 (CEST)

• Page edited by Jan-Peter Hoste October 26 2012