George Hartley's Anzaldúa Notes

Borderlands/la frontera

Preface to the First Edition

Physical vs. psychological borderlands

Border woman: between two cultures

• "Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element."
• Borders
• Margins
• Shifting identity
• Multiple identity
• Alien element
• Life in the shadows

Evolution

Awakening faculties and areas of consciousness

• This book, then, speaks of my existence.
• The inner life of the Self
• The struggle of that self amidst adversity and violation
• The confluence of primordial images
• The unique positionings consciousness takes at these confluent streams
• Almost instinctive urge to communicate

Knowledge:

• Salvation
• Sanity
• Opening the locked places
• Teaching how to soar

La madre naturaleza

Succor

Roots

Anchor to the earth

Images:

• Secret knowledge
• Fleeting
• The soul in fantasy

Words: rendering images concrete, flesh, alive

Code-switching: a new language of the Borderlands

Chicano Spanish: bastard language

But we Chicanos no longer feel the need to beg entrance.

To be met halfway

This book is our invitation to you–from the new mestizas.

You (the implied reader) = non-Chicanos

PART ONE: ATRAVESANDO FRONTERS / CROSSING BORDERS

Chapter 1: The Homeland, Aztlan / El otro Mexico (23-35)

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country–a border culture [. . .] . A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. (Anzaldúa 3)

Los atravesados vs. the "legitimate" inhabitants

El cruzar del mojado / Illegal Crossing (31)

dispossessed

maquiladoras

devaluation of the peso

the choice to stay in Mexico and starve or move north and live

a tradition of migration

Today we are witnessing la migracion de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odyssey to the historical/mythological Aztlan. (33)

The Mexican woman is especially at risk.

This is her home
          this thin edge of
                 barbwire

The rebel in me — the Shadow-beast (38)

nun-prositute-mother

Woman is the stranger, the other. (39)

tribal vs. individual rights

The queer are the mirror reflecting the heterosexual tribe's fear: being different, being other and therefore lesser, therefore subhuman, in-human, non-human. (40)

Half and Half

strange doubling

Fear of Going Home: Homophobia (41)

Intimate Terrorism: Life in the Borderlands (42)

los intersticios

My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman's history of resistance. (43)

I abhor how my culture makes macho caricatures of its men.

CHAPTER 3: Entering Into the Serpent (47-61)

su tono (48)

Coatlalopeuh (49)

pre-Aztec balance of male and female deities (53)

Huitzilopochtli (54) and state ideology (55)

La Llorona

Coatl: the symbol of the dark sexual drive, the chthonic (underworld), the feminine, the serpentine movement of sexuality, of creativity, the basis of all energy and life. (57)

white rationality vs. pagan superstition (58)

La facultad is the capacity to see in surace phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. (60)