Borderlands La Frontera Summary

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Alexandra Loebrich Women’s History 10/6/2014 Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldua was born to a sharecropper/field-worker parents in South Texas. She spent most of her time as a child reading and writing. She has won a lot of awards for her work, the Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award, an NEA Fiction Award and many more. Borderlands La Frontera was chosen by the Literary Journal as one of the top 38 Best Books of 1987. The book goes into detail and examines the lifestyle of women in Latino and Chicano culture, Chicanoes in white American society, nonetheless being a lesbian women. It is written as a personal and history narrative, which allowed me to view the life of a prisoner between culture both close-up and as an overview. This …show more content…

She lived as a Chicana women in a society of oppression and confusion. I feel like the overall theme of the story could be, Who am I? She’s questioning herself throughout the whole thing, trying to figure out how to be and who she is going to be. “It is a part of me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities”(38). She also shows her awareness of disobeying authority. All the standards that were placed upon Chicanas and women were coming from a need to control and disguised to ‘protect.’ Men were keeping women in a defined role. No one asked questions or went up against authority. You can look at these stories in numerous ways. She states that they are never alone with men, not even the ones in her family. “The culture gave us mixed messages...Which was it to be- strong, or submissive, rebellious of conforming?”(40). They are first a mother, father, or sibling, and lastly they were to think of themselves. Selfishness was condemned. They have very strict rules about how they were supposed to act. You couldn’t act like you were better than anyone else, you didn’t want people to get envious and do acts of ‘witchcraft’ on you. I see this as the men being threatened by the women. Men always have been. They must obey and not speak out because they know that if the women are free to say what they want in this time then all hell will break loose. It makes it hard to

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