Analysis Of Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera

The eternal endeavor of obtaining a realistic sense of selfhood is depicted for all struggling women of color in Gloria Anzaldua’s “Borderlands/La Frontera” (1987). Anzaldua illustrates the oppressing realities of her world – one that sets limitations for the minority. Albeit the obvious restraints against the white majority (the physical borderland between the U.S. and Mexico), there is a constant and overwhelming emotional battle against the psychological “borderlands” instilled in Anzaldua as she desperately seeks recognition as an openly queer Mestiza woman. With being a Mestiza comes a lot of cultural stereotypes that more than often try to define ones’ role in the world – especially if you are those whom have privilege above the “others”.

She is the one that refuses to oblige to societal orders. She is the “Shadow-Beast” (38) with “Chicana identity grounded in the Indian woman’s history of resistance” (43). Although alienated physically, Anzaldua is “immobilized” (43) mentally the more confined she becomes in a culture engulfed in pure oppression. She claims her “shadow-beast” as the depiction of her highly wanted independence as an individual human being, which eventually forces her to leave her family behind to find herself separately from the “intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed” (38) for people like Anzaldua for many years. Her push for rebellion sets a voice for the silenced anger and pure resistance against the ostracism of herself, her family, culture, and the white-washed society she has been born into. To be the only Chicana, lesbian, and rebellious woman in her family is considered sinful, as women, according to Anzaldua, in Mexico only have “three directions she could turn: to the church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother” (39). Noticing that women are culturally restricted to these roles, Anzaldua creates the opposite role for herself claiming to take the “fourth choice” by “entering the world by way of education and career and becoming self-autonomous persons,” (39), which she uses to her advantage to transform the prolonged oppression into her long awaited freedom to live as an openly queer woman

The contrast between the Mexican world versus the Anglo world has led Anzaldua to a new form of self and consciousness in which she calls the “New Mestiza” (one that recognizes and understands her duality of race). Anzaldua lives in a constant place of duality where she is on the opposite end of a border that is home to those that are considered “the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel and the mulato” (25). It is the inevitable and grueling clash of two very distinct cultures that produces the fear of the “unknown”; ultimately resulting in alienation and social hierarchy. Anzaldua, as an undocumented woman, is at the bottom of the hierarchy. Not only is she a woman that is openly queer, she is also carrying the burden of being “undocumented”. Women of the borderlands are forced to carry two degrading labels: their gender that makes them seem nothing more than a body and their “legal” status in this world. Many of these women only have two options due to their lack of English speaking abilities: either leave their homeland – or submit themselves to the constant objectification and oppression. According to Anzaldua, Mestizo culture was created by men because many of its traditions encourage women to become “subservient to males” (39). Although Coatlicue is a powerful Aztec figure, in a male-dominated society, she was still seen