Borderlands: The New Mestiza

Front Cover
Aunt Lute Books, 2012 - Biography & Autobiography - 300 pages

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity.Borderlands / La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

This twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new introduction by scholars Norma Cantú (University of Texas at San Antonio) and Aída Hurtado (University of California at Santa Cruz) as well as a revised critical bibliography.

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana-tejana-lesbian-feminist poet, theorist, and fiction writer from south Texas. She was the editor of the critical anthologyMaking Face/Making Soul: Haciendo Caras (Aunt Lute Books, 1990), co-editor ofThis Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. She taught creative writing, Chicano studies, and feminist studies at University of Texas, San Francisco State University, Vermont College of Norwich University, and University of California Santa Cruz. Anzaldúa passed away in 2004 and was honored around the world for shedding visionary light on the Chicana experience by receiving the National Association for Chicano Studies Scholar Award in 2005. Gloria was also posthumously awarded her doctoral degree in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. A number of scholarships and book awards, including the Anzaldúa Scholar Activist Award and the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars, are awarded in her name every year.


About the author (2012)

A native of the Southwest, Anzaldua is a Chicana lesbian feminist theorist, creative writer, editor, and activist. She has taught Chicano studies, feminist studies, and writing at a number of universities. In addition, she has conducted writing workshops around the world and has been a contributing editor for the feminist literary journal Sinister Wisdom since 1984. She has also been active in the migrant farm workers movement. Anzaldua first came to critical attention with an anthology she coedited with Cherrie Moraga, another Chicana lesbian feminist theorist and writer. Titled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), the anthology includes poetry, fiction, autobiographical writing, criticism, and theory by Chicana, African American, Asian American, and Native American women who advocate change in academia and the culture at large. Anzaldua is well known for her second book, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). It combines prose and poetry, history, autobiography, and criticism in Spanish, English, as well as Tex-Mex and Nahautl. Its purpose is to interrogate and deconstruct sexual, psychological, and spiritual borderlands as well as the United States-Mexican border. In 1990 Many Faces/Making Souls was published. Anzaldua currently resides in Santa Cruz, California.

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