10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796
The essay offers a deeper understanding of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of borderlands, crisis, mobility, and resistance as a theory for coalition making among women of color. Through an analysis of Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of borderlands, strongly rooted in the socio-political context of the United States in the 1980s, the article deals with Anzaldúa’s innovative resignification of crisis and mobility as constitutive elements of political and coalition-making processes. Anzaldúa’s reconfiguration of borders and borderlands, and her intersectional analysis of politics, should be understood as a crucial formulation in the development of the U.S. multiracial and transnational feminist movement.
application/pdf
2611-2752
11796
en
Anna Nasser
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics
Multiracial Feminism
Borderlands as a Site of Resistance in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought
Text.Serial.Journal
https://usabroad.unibo.it/
4
Essays
2021-03-04
2020-11-20
2021-03-04
2021-03-04
25-36
USAbroad
Anna Nasser
2021/03/04
10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796
25
Scuola Superiore Meridionale - Università Federico II
2611-2752
Multiracial Feminism
en
36
Borderlands as a Site of Resistance in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought
https://usabroad.unibo.it/article/download/11796/12362
4
Essays – peer-reviewed                                 USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics. Vol. 4 (2021)
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                            ISSN 2611-2752




Borderlands as a Site of Resistance in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political
                                                   Thought

                                                  Anna Nasser

                                               Published: March 4, 2021



                                                      Abstract

       The essay offers a deeper understanding of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of borderlands, crisis,
       mobility, and resistance as a theory for coalition making among women of color. Through an anal-
       ysis of Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of borderlands, strongly rooted in the socio-political context
       of the United States in the 1980s, the article deals with Anzaldúa’s innovative resignification of cri-
       sis and mobility as constitutive elements of political and coalition-making processes. Anzaldúa’s
       reconfiguration of borders and borderlands, and her intersectional analysis of politics, should be
       understood as a crucial formulation in the development of the U.S. multiracial and transnational
       feminist movement.
       Keywords: Gloria Anzaldúa; Borderlands; Migration; Coalition Politics; Multiracial Feminism.




Anna Nasser: Scuola Superiore Meridionale - Università Federico II (Italy)
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3096-3057
 anna.nasser@unina.it;  https://example.edu
Anna Nasser is currently a PhD candidate in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale –
Università degli Studi Federico II of Naples, where she is working on a research project on black and white French
women’s organizations and colonial politics during the decolonization of the French Empire. She obtained a
master’s degree in International Relations at the University of Bologna. Her main research interests include
history of political thought, twentieth-century French and American History, history of French colonialism and
empire, and women’s and gender history.



Copyright © 2021 Anna Nasser                                                                                 Art. #11796
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.                                                       p. 25
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




1 Introduction: Searching for a Politics of Mobility and Resistance
Gloria Anzaldúa’s work has been widely discussed in the academic world as her theories on border-
lands and mestiza consciousness have been crucial in opening new directions in several academic fields,
specifically, in cultural studies, ethnic studies, border studies, and gender studies. While her critique of
subject formation has been deeply investigated in its relationship with identity-making processes, her
constant rejection of identity as a base for political action and subject formation in the borderlands has
been widely overlooked. In this regard, it is not sufficient to state that the subject in Anzaldúa’s work
is “non-unitary,” as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano and Norma Alarcón claim.1 Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s
borderlands have often been identified as a site of identity formation, yet her description of identity
is neither unitary nor stable, since it is constantly reshaped and shifting. If we look at identity in its
etymological meaning as “being the same as oneself,” the constant rejection of dichotomies and fixed
categories, and the endless shifting of position which is prefigured in the borderlands, make Anzaldúa
a theorist of identity rejection. Yet, Chicanas subjectivity and struggle for liberation has been discussed
as individual and located in a “third space,” as Emma Pérez2 maintains. In a similar way, Anzaldúa’s
description of coalition-making processes in the borderlands has generally been the theoretical base
for the process of liberation for Chicana feminists to find a collective voice as mestizas within the inter-
stices of other movements. However, if we dwell upon Anzaldúa’s description of borderlands and in-
terstices, women’s complete liberation cannot take place within borderlands as a counterstance based
on dichotomic positions.3 Nor it can be achieved in private but, instead, it must be achieved by means
of a collective stance of “colored and white men and women.”4 A process which demands interaction
between shifting political positions.
    By employing primary and secondary sources, this paper presents a new interpretation of An-
zaldúa’s theory on borderlands and coalition by focusing on mobility as a permanent element in the
interaction between political subjects that is formed in the borderlands and on the process of coalition-
making. Additionally, this essay attempts to explore the relevance of Anzaldúa’s thought in shaping
multiracial feminist activism in the United States. First, Anzaldúa’s definition of borderlands and mes-
tiza consciousness as rooted in a crisis that materializes as a constant rejection of identity is discussed.
Second, her theory of coalition in the borderlands as “politics of mobility from the interstices” is
considered. It is argued that Anzaldúa does not consider resistance to be an act which culminates in
the interstices. Instead, although resistance originates in the borderlands, it aspires to go beyond the
edges of the border-space. By rejecting identity-based definitions of the political subject and seeing
resistance as taking place not only inside the borderlands, Anzaldúa envisions coalition as a process
of negotiation between shifting notions of differences and commonalities. Finally, this paper dis-
cusses multiracial feminism, especially in the 1990s, as an approach that was strongly influenced by
Anzaldúa’s thought on coalition-building, grounded on the centrality of women of color as political
subjects.



2 Crisis and Identity: Subject Formation, Mestiza Consciousness and
      Mobility
Anzaldúa’s definition of borders and borderlands is based on her personal and political experience as a
Chicana woman. In fact, by living as an outsider in political movements and in different social realities,
she comes to understand the alienating effects of the chaotic intertwining of different systems of op-


1.   Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Cultural studies,”difference,” and the non-unitary
     subject,” Cultural Critique, 28 (1994): 5-28; Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and
     Anglo-American Feminism,” in Criticism in the Borderlands. Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, ed. Hector
     Calderon and José David Saldivar (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 37.

2.   Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

3.   Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 78-9.

4.   Gloria Anzaldúa, “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar, or Island. Lesbians-of-Color Hacienda Alianzas,” in The Gloria Anzaldúa
     Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 155.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                                 26
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                      USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




pression, belonging and allegiance, and she becomes able to theorize the risks and the opportunities
for her political and personal emancipation.

         I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds. […] ‘Your allegiance is
         to La Raza, the Chicano movement,’ say the members of my race. ‘Your allegiance is to
         the Third World,’ say my Black and Asian friends. ‘Your allegiance is to your gender, to
         women,’ say the feminists. […] What am I? A third world lesbian feminist with Marxist and
         mystic leanings. They would chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a
         label.5

    This description reflects the condition of the borderlands that she describes in her most widely
known work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, since borderlands emerge “whenever two or
more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where un-
der, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with
intimacy.”6 This definition arises from the dialectic between those ‘invisible’ societal borders and
the historical materiality of the U.S.-Mexican border, described as a “thin edge of barbwire,” a “1,950
mile-long open wound” controlled by border patrols (la migra). The reference to an open wound allows
Anzaldúa to narrate a different and conflictual history, and to address the contemporary process of
militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border.7 In describing Mexican migrants as a people rightfully re-
turning to their original land, which “was Mexican once, was Indian always and is. And will be again,”8
she recovers a forgotten history and unveils the contradictions of neoliberal globalization, hidden by
the political discourse on ‘illegal’ immigration. Furthermore, while the free crossing of individuals is
sanctioned and rejected by policies of massive deportation, the passage of goods, capital, and cheap,
controlled labor is encouraged as a crucial element for development and national growth, creating
experiences of exploitation on both sides of the Southern border.
    Anzaldúa defines the subject of her transformative theory within a game of mirrors between the
concrete experience of border-crossers at the Southern border and the reality of borders within the
U.S. society. While she attempts to speak to all Chicanas, women of color and white women in the
United States, she articulates the possibility of resistance from the specific position of “la mojada, la
mujer indocumentada,”9 whose situation is associated with the woman of color. As an ‘undocumented’
migrant woman is doubly threatened and dwells in an unsafe environment, similarly a woman of
color does not feel safe and is alienated both in her own culture and in the dominant culture. Due
to multiple rejections, this alienation defines the borderlands in which migrants and women of color
live. In fact, borderlands are places of crisis for Anzaldúa, where “two or more forces clash and are
held teetering on the verge of chaos, a state of entreguerras.”10
    Anzaldúa’s borderlands are not comfortable places to be in since they are products of oppression
and reproduce a “a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country.”11 To be in the border-
lands means to be in a continuous status of reiteration of non-belonging, of difference, and of alien-
ation; to be in a place of contradiction, violence, and exploitation. Anzaldúa defines this space of the
borderlands as nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning “tierra entre medio,” “a constant state of transition.”12
Based on this description of chaos, difference, and transition, several scholars, including Gabriela


5.    Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” in This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and
      Cherríe Moraga (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 205.

6.    Anzaldúa, Borderlands, ix.

7.    Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978–1992. Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin:
      University of Texas Press—CMAS Book, 1996), 4.

8.    Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 3.

9.    Ibid, 13.

10. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Border Arte,” in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise
    Keating (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 56.

11.   Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 11.

12. Ibid, 3-4.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                                    27
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                   USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




Arredondo and Aída Hurtado,13 have looked at borderlands as the site in which a hybrid identity, the
mestiza, is produced. Yet, as Suzanne Bost cautions,14 the chaotic and critical dimension of the border-
lands should not lead us to interpret Anzaldúa’s theoretical project of the mestiza consciousness as a
glorification of hybridity and post-modern subjectivity. In fact, borderlands are a site of undefined
boundaries, of dangers and misunderstandings, a precarious environment where paradigmatic divi-
sions, such as the one between friend and enemy, do not hold and where the queer and the outcast
find their home. It is a different kind of chaos, when compared with the celebration of hybridity as
a freed identity, which several post-modern authors glorify. De Genova, in describing the condition
of Mexican migrants in the United States, discusses their lives as characterized by a condition of con-
stant “deportability,”15 while Anzaldúa’s borderlands depict that sense of fear and uncertainty. In fact,
Anzaldúa defines border people by their being in an in-between state, by their difference and “abnor-
mality,” that is constantly highlighted and punished for not conforming to the dominant culture and
their culture:

        The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-
        eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed,
        the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the
        ‘normal.’ Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands trans-
        gressors, aliens—whether they possess documents or not, whether they’re Chicanos, Indi-
        ans or Blacks. Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot.16

    Anzaldúa describes how living in the borderlands and in the margins pushes women of color to
develop a mestiza consciousness based on la facultad, the ability to “see from two or more perspectives
simultaneously.”17 This consciousness is born by refusing to identify with one “side” of the border or
one set of cultural norms and develops from claiming a plurality of belonging, in Anzaldúa’s case, as
“hispana india negra española ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed.”18 As Hurtado points out, be-
ing an “outsider within,”19 and the “ability to hold multiple social perspectives while simultaneously
maintaining a center that revolves around concrete material forms of oppression,”20 are two sides of
the mestiza consciousness. Yet, in asserting similarities between the mestiza consciousness with W.E.B.
Du Bois’ double consciousness, Hurtado and Martinez21 fail to address the contradictory dimension
of Anzaldúa’s proposal. In fact, while carrying a similar wounding reminiscence of oppression and
sharing “the dilemma of the mixed breed,”22 Anzaldúa’s inner “struggle of identities”23 is among sev-
eral identities. The conflict does not end with a “pacified” identity combination of being Chicana and



13. Gabriela F. Arredondo and Aída Hurtado, “Introduction. Chicana Feminisms at the Crossroads: Disruption in Dialogue,” in
    Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, ed. Gabriela F. Arredondo and Aída Hurtado (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003),
    5.

14. Suzanne Bost, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Mestiza Pain. Mexican Sacrifice, Chicana Embodiment, and Feminist Politics,” Aztlán, 30,
    2 (2005): 8-9.

15. Nicholas De Genova, “The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant ‘Illegality’,” Latino Studies, 2 (2004): 161-62.

16. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 3-4.

17.   Gloria Anzaldúa, “Now Let Us Shift… the Path of Conocimiento… Inner Work, Public Acts,” in This bridge We Call Home.
      Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 548.

18. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 194-95.

19. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social
    Problems, 33 (1986): S14-S32.

20. Aída Hurtado, Voicing Chicana Feminism: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity (New York: New York University
    Press, 2003), 15.

21. Aída Hurtado, “The Landscape and Languaging of Chicana Feminisms,” in Routledge Handbook of Chicana/o Studies, ed. Fran-
    cisco Lomelí et al. (New York: Routledge, 2019), 332-46, 335; Theresa A. Martinez, “Making Oppositional Culture, Making
    Standpoint. A Journey into Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands,” Sociological Spectrum, 25 (2005): 560-61.

22. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 78.

23. Ibid, 78.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                                28
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




American. It generates a consciousness which is not a sum of two “unreconciled strivings,”24 since the
creation of a mestiza consciousness is not a process culminating in a successful reconstruction. An-
zaldúa sees the possibility for a new consciousness, not an identity, to emerge25 from the split caused
by this inner struggle, namely, a point of view and not an identity. The contradictory dynamic op-
erating within Anzaldúa’s theory of mestiza, borders, and identity becomes visible in tension. The
point I want to make here is that while Anzaldúa is trying to put together the pieces26 to solve the
identity dilemma which originates in the borderlands, she is constantly forced to deny the formation
of a specific identity for the purpose of maintaining a wider perspective. For Anzaldúa there is no pos-
sible stabilization of identity in the borderlands; moreover, it can only be temporary and collective
if we take seriously the claim that nepantla is a state of constant transition, Anzaldúa’s understanding
of identity as relational and her encouragement to break down boundaries. The refusal to “pick” one
identity, one side, which takes place in the borderlands, is the very refusal of the category of iden-
tity itself. This refusal, indeed, becomes a methodology for developing a different and oppositional
stance from which Anzaldúa questions the crucial categories of modernity.
    Yarbro-Bejarano and Alarcón27 correctly define Anzaldúa’s subject as non-unitary. The disarticu-
lation of the subject, caused by the condition of crisis of the borderlands as an epistemic space built on
knowledge of past and present oppressions, becomes the only possible subjective movement and pro-
ceeds through continuous shifting. Indeed, this procedural path expresses the construction of identity,
as well, in Anzaldúa’s borderlands, or rather the continuous breakdown. Still, as it has been pointed
out by Linda Alcoff,28 her call for the deconstruction of social and identity categories does not fit
completely into the creation of a post-modern subject. In fact, Anzaldúa proposes a spatial, although
temporary and mobile, definition of her positioning by reframing identity definitions with the ma-
teriality of the body. What I want to stress here is that, while expressing the fragmentation imposed
by a history of colonization, alienation, and discrimination in the borderlands, Anzaldúa refuses that
imposed fragmented position and engages in an endless dynamic of putting together pieces which,
however, can culminate in the formation of a new identity only by renouncing the consciousness of
the borderlands—a price she is not willing to pay.
    By refusing to choose one of the sides of the border, Anzaldúa avoids falling into a “neither/nor”29
dilemma since, as border-dwellers, she has learnt how to live with ambiguities and contradictions.
This oppositional and marginal position becomes a creative site. Through the act of crossing it is
possible to question boundaries and to observe contradictions and understand how different systems
of oppression interact. Being in an endless state of crisis, in constant transition,30 becomes politi-
cally productive as it brings up unresolved conflicts and unveils reality. From a privileged, although
costly, position, border subjects become able to question authorities and the societal boundaries that
constitute the limits of their political action. The mestiza consciousness enables the questioning of
paradigmatic definitions, such as the “myth of the inferiority of mujeres,”31 to “rebel and rail against
[one’s own] culture,”32 and to unveil how reality is experienced “from a particular perspective and a
specific time and place (history), not as a fixed feature of personality or identity.”33



24. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 3.

25. Anzaldúa, “Now Let Us Shift,” 548.

26. Gloria Anzaldúa and Andrea Lunsford, “Towards a Mestiza Rhetoric. Gloria Anzaldúa on Composition, Postcoloniality,
    and the Spiritual. An Interview with Andrea Lunsford,” in Interviews/Intervistas, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating
    (New York: Routledge, 2000), 280.

27. Yarbro-Bejarano, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera,” 5-28; Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s),” 37.

28. Linda Martín Alcoff, “The Unassimilated Theorist,” PMLA, 121 (2006): 257.

29. Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry. Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 94.

30. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Let Us Be the Healing of the Wound. The Coyolxauhqui Imperative – la Sombra y el Sueño,” in Keating,
    Light in the Dark, 17.

31. Anzaldúa, “Now Let Us Shift,” 549.

32. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 21.

33. Anzaldúa, “Now Let Us Shift,” 549.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                               29
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                     USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




3 Borderlands as a Site of Resistance: Shaping Coalition from the
      Interstices
Still, the risk of being “petrified” in the in-betweens and in the margins, to be forcefully kept in the
borderlands, to reiterate a traumatic identity and become unable to cross from one side of the border
to the other is concrete. While many scholars have addressed the importance of understanding An-
zaldúa’s conceptualization of the borderlands in order to describe and stabilize identity-making pro-
cesses,34 which Wendy Brown would probably define as a masochistic reproduction of traumatized
identities,35 it would be superficial to forget the political and revolutionary element of Anzaldúa’s
theory. Anzaldua’s coalitions are primarily political both because political is the rejection of identity
which takes place in the borderlands, continuously practiced by border subjects in cultural groups
and in the women’s movement, and because the need of coalitions and alliances comes from an un-
derstanding of violence and inequality as being structural. Thus, Anzaldúa’s border-dweller subjects
are caught in a plural dynamic: while making their difference visible, they continuously seek coali-
tions. As Aída Hurtado rightly puts it, “coalition building is necessary because structural oppression
is far from being dismantled”36 and, I claim, it is necessary to understand how different systems of
oppression operate simultaneously and create different effects on different subjects. Closing in sepa-
rated cultural identities or putting them in coalitions based only on culture, which Anzaldúa criticizes
since they risk becoming exclusionary,37 means falling into a dynamic of reaction again, without being
able to articulate an autonomous, stable political prerogative. This does not mean that Anzaldúa does
not envision a project for Chicanx’ liberation within their culture. She does. What I argue is that this
process is intrinsically connected with a wider emancipatory process which should be addressed by
looking within the tensions between a specific cultural dimension and a broader liberation for women
from group boundaries and systemic oppression. Thus, Anzaldúa conceives coalitions as the way to
challenge the boundaries of dualistic thinking, based on the action-reaction dynamic, and that this can
only be done by having multiple perspectives resulting from different positions. As Anzaldúa notices,
coalition-making requires more than an “oppositional consciousness”38 or a “differential conscious-
ness,”39 as stated by Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Chela Sandoval. It requires the willingness and the ability
to cross over from one culture to another, it demands a collective stand that is based on political, not
cultural, commonalities. It requires, then, a “politics of mobility” to express a specificity.
     Discussing the ability to move beyond frontiers, Anzaldúa addresses the contemporary critique
of women of color toward white and mainstream feminism while simultaneously recognizing the
different and mobile positions that political subjects occupy in different spaces. Coalitions, however,
cannot be pursued in separated spaces. Therefore, coalitions and alliances are not possibilities, but
they are, instead, the necessary means by which it is possible to break that “matrix of domination”40
which makes the condition of women of color in the women’s movement, women in different social
movements, and lesbians of color invisible.
     Borderlands as sites of resistance are not meant to be fortresses, but rather they are places where it
is possible to think about “how to act and not only react” on the two sides of the border. Consequently,
the political and creative processes of resistance, imagination, and contestation of existing boundaries


34. Ellie D. Hernández, Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 180;
    Christina Wolbrecht et al. “What revolution? Incorporating Intersectionality in Women and Politics,” in Political Women
    and American Democracy, ed. Karen Beckwith and Lisa Baldez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 75.

35. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 52-3.

36. Aída Hurtado, “Sitios y Lenguas: Chicanas Theorize Feminisms,” Hypatia, 2 (1998): 148.

37. AnaLouise Keating and Gloria Anzaldúa, “Writing, Politics, and las Lesberadas. Praticando con Gloria Anzaldúa,” Frontiers.
    A Journal of Women’s Studies, 14 (1993): 110-11.

38. Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border. Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press,
    2000), 59.

39. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 29.

40. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, Routledge,
    2000), 18.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                                  30
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                       USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




and power move together with the movement of border-crossing subjects. Being in a nepantla state
allows one to recast the relationship between the center and the margins, and to reverse it completely
by making the border—the most marginal place—the center of political action. This position per-
mits a return to forgotten histories and a questioning of dominant narratives of oppression. In other
words, it allows women of color to undertake a subversive process that is inherent in claiming back
their origins, their differences and their history. It allows them to qualify their position and subjec-
tivity as political, to become visible within different movements by claiming a specific position and
difference, and to question the modern political canon, which has sought to push women out of history
by identifying them as natural and apolitical subjects.41
     While discussing the critical dimension of borders, Anzaldúa articulates a “politics from the in-
terstices,” meaning a political process which originates in the cracks (las rajaduras) between different
worlds and which aims to move beyond the borderlands. Talking about a politics from the interstices
stresses the differences and similarities between the practices of interstitial politics,42 Foucault’s theory
of power,43 and Anzaldúa’s theorization of interlocking systems of power. Understanding Anzaldúa’s
borderlands as the lieu, or place from which liberation can be sought challenges the idea of activism
in the cracks. Therefore, it is not the creation of a separate space in wider social movements nor is it
the creation of a “safe space” located outside the operational mode of interlocking power systems, as
the comparison with Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory, proposed by Koegeler-Abdi, might
suggest.44
     This paper proposes looking at coalitions from within a framework of what the Author refers to as
a “politics of mobility from the interstices” since this definition furthers a new understanding of coali-
tions as the basis for not only an oppositional but rather a propositional and political project. This
definition is useful in understanding Anzaldúa’s rejection of exclusive identity politics, such as the
politics of group unity which homogenizes and eliminates differences,45 without losing the polem-
ical standpoint of claiming a specific difference or rejecting the possibility of creating alliances in a
non-homogenous group of women of color.46 Looking into interstices produces the premises for
coalition-making from the borderlands. The borderlands are interstices and the “point of contact y el
lugar between worlds”47 where stability of the subject is temporarily located in the relational encounter
between women of color and white women. In this sense, women of color are called to develop a pol-
itics that goes beyond the marginal spaces in which specific positionalities emerge, a politics aimed at
developing a wider alliance that is not defined by monolithic and mono-dimensional allegiance, but
instead it is framed on a relational understanding of continuously shifting and temporary positions.
Defining political perspectives from the interstices calls for a collective process of emancipation from
other marginal subjects, which remains a constant and often conflictual process of renegotiation.48
     In addressing “the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females,”49
border-dwellers’ bodies become a “bocacalle.”50 According to Anzaldúa, to be a bocacalle, a crossroad,
is the only way to survive in the borderlands. Borders must be taken down to survive, since only by



41. Brown, Politics Out of History, 52-52; Paola Rudan, Donna. Storia e critica di un concetto polemico, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2020),
    11-22.

42. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism. Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movement in America’s Second Wave (New York:
    Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12; Kymberly Springer, “The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations,”
    Meridians, 2 (2001): 155-191.

43. Michel Foucault, ‘’Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, (Paris : P.U.F., coll. Épiméthée, 1971),
    154.

44. Martina Koegeler-Abdi, “Shifting Subjectivities. Mestizas, Nepantleras, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Legacy,” Melus, 38 (2013): 79.

45. Keating and Anzaldúa, “Writing, Politics, and las Lesberadas,” 110-111.

46. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar, or Island,”144.

47. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Gestures of the Body—Escribiendo para Idear,” in Keating, Light in the Dark, 2.

48. Gloria Anzaldúa, “The New Mestiza Nation. A Multicultural Movement,” in The Gloria Anzaldúa reader, ed. Keating, 209.

49. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 80.

50. Ibid., 80.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                                     31
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




living “sin fronteras”51 it is possible to escape the risk of isolation. Breaking boundaries and borders,
then, becomes an act that is imaginable only from the borderlands. Then, it is political imagination
in recognizing commonalities among differences, without essentializing or homogenizing a specific
condition, which is the necessary element for making coalitions and challenging systemic oppression.
Almost as if referring to Audre Lorde’s caution regarding the master’s tools,52 Anzaldúa seeks new solu-
tions for moving from reaction to action, that is, for creating an autonomous collective subject defined
by a political standpoint. Anzaldúa’s call for “new teorías”53 is appropriate within this ambition. More-
over, according to Anzaldúa, the struggle for liberation is the ground on which coalition can be built
because neither culture nor shared oppression will work. Borders can be sites for liberation where it
is possible to articulate a partial and political struggle that does not replay hierarchical oppression and
that creates “interconnected webs (telarañas).”54
     The images of telarañas (literally spider webs) and bocacalle are analogies of the practice of politi-
cal action from the borderlands as an ongoing process of breaking dichotomies. In fact, it is through
the creation of an in-between space that Anzaldúa develops the concept of nos/otras and breaks down
the canonical division between the conceptual pairs of “self/other” and “us/them.” Hence, she imag-
ines and creates “communities of resistance” based on, as recognized by Chandra Mohanty, a “political
rather than biological or cultural base for alliance.”55 Breaking the us/them split is necessary for devel-
oping a politics of coalition in which diversity and difference are discussed in terms of their political
dimensions and not according to that of identity. Anzaldúa sees this process taking place through the
act of bridging. To become “a bridge,” women of color need to mediate between different positions,
creating “a new kind of community based on the strength of diversities.”56 Women of color’s com-
monality of experience, living in the borderlands and in the margins, along with the shared struggle
toward liberation, become the base for resistance and revolution as Anzaldúa claims that “in our very
flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures.”57 Borderlands are the places where women of color
can form revolutionary coalitions by starting from a historicized, common context of struggle.58 It
is the position of the political subject in the borderlands, as well as the dangers of a continuous crisis,
which allows Anzaldúa to reject an essentialist notion of “us” without losing the radicality of the expe-
rience of women of color. Eager to put forward a strong understanding of Anzaldúa as a transnational
thinker, Brenda Watts states that Anzaldúa’s coalition building is thought of as being “regardless of
class or national origin.”59 Nevertheless, the openness towards coalitions that comes from Anzaldúa’s
thought should not be considered unoriented or aimed at creating undifferentiated coalitions with
other groups. While Watts rightly asserts the transnational dimension of Anzaldúa’s thought, she fails
to center class as a crucial element in Anzaldúa’s social and theoretical framework for coalition build-
ing. In line with other Chicanx theorists and activists, starting from her working-class background and
personal experiences as a fronteriza worker, Anzaldúa’s understanding of coalition-building is deeply
rooted in the recognition of the effects of the systemic interaction of race, sex, and class.
     Yet, the reference to women of color does not put forward an essentializing and homogenizing
perspective in that women of color and ‘undocumented’ migrant women are presented as subjective
positions from which it is possible to understand the above mentioned interlocking of different op-


51. Ibid., 195.

52. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” reprinted in This Bridge Called My Back, ed. An-
    zaldúa and Moraga, 98-101.

53. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Introduction. Haciendo Caras, una Entrada,” in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras. Creative and
    critical perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), xxv-xxvi.

54. Anzaldúa, “Geographies of Selves – Reimagining Identity,” in Light in the Dark, ed. Keating, 75.

55. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World
    Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4-5.

56. Yarbro-Bejarano, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera,” 10.

57. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 81.

58. Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle,” 7.

59. Brenda Watts, “Aztlán as a Palimpsest: From Chicano Nationalism Toward Transnational Feminism in Anzaldúa’s Border-
    lands,” Latino Studies 2 (2004): 315.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                               32
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                     USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




pressions. In other words, Anzaldúa’s coalition-making process does not erase the presence of differ-
ences, and yet it maintains the polemic standpoint of a female subject. In a practice of refusing both
assimilation and an isolated (un)safe third space, bridging reflects the politics of mobility enacted by
border subjects and its polemic stance. “Women of color,” then, becomes a term defining a strategic
position for pursuing change or, as Yarbro-Bejerano maintains, a “conscious strategy”60 for alliance.



4     Anzaldúa’s Political Thought and Multiracial Feminism
The metaphors of borders and bridges question the boundaries for the categories of knowledge and
belonging, as well as those of the very same concept of identity. In highlighting the constant dialec-
tic between equality and difference, inherent in the crossing between different sides as an act which
enables resistance, Anzaldúa challenges the situations she experienced in the women’s and Chicano
movements. Starting from her critique of the exclusion of women and lesbians of color, who “speak
in tongues like the outcast and the insane”61 in the (white) feminist movement, she rejects the role of
women of color as tokens or “purveyors of resource lists.”62 By placing women of color as the pri-
mary political subject, she escapes the risk of erasing difference in the name of a “global” sisterhood63
and criticizes static definitions of identity64 as developed in exclusionary and monolithic identity pol-
itics.65 The idea of “bridging” was not a novelty in the 1980s. Not only was the previously mentioned
anthology, This Bridge Called My Back, widely read, other publications were also building on the idea
of bridging individuals in identity groups. For instance, the journal edited by Adrienne Rich, of which
Anzaldúa was part of the editorial board, was called Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and our Friends.
Yet, when discussed within the tension between her theory of mestiza consciousness, as in breaking
boundaries and categories, and the formation of political and collective subjects, Anzaldúa’s theory
challenges a strategy of bridging based on shared identities. Her conceptualization of bridging and
her effort to “question term white and women of color”66 are useful for discussing the development of
multiracial feminism67 in the 1990s and later.
     Multiracial feminism is an important framework within which we can understand Anzaldúa’s in-
fluence in shaping coalitions. The political stance of multiracial feminism originates with a radical
critique of both identity politics and the white feminist movement. Indeed, the first articulation of
multiracial feminism focuses on the need to recast race as a structural power system at the center
of feminist activism in order to overcome a political discourse framed within a “color-evasive lan-
guage.”68 By theorizing social positions as framed by a “matrix of domination”69 and emphasizing
“the intersectional nature of hierarchies at all levels of social life,”70 the theoretical stand of multiracial

60. Yarbro-Bejarano, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera,” 11.

61. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” in This Bridge Called My Back, ed. An-
    zaldúa and Moraga, 165.

62. Ibid, 168.

63. Raffaella Baritono, “An Ideology of Sisterhood? American Women’s Movements Between Nationalism and Transnational-
    ism,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 2 (2008): 197.

64. AnaLouise Keating, “(De)Centering the Margins? Identity Politics and Tactical (Re)naming,” in Other Sisterhoods. Literary
    Theory and U.S. Women of Color, ed. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 24.

65. Keating and Anzaldúa, “Writing, Politics, and las Lesberadas,” 110-11.

66. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Preface. (Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces,” in This Bridge We Call Home. Radical Visions for Transforma-
    tion, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2.

67. Becky Thompson, “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” in No Permanent Waves.
    Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, ed. Nancy Hewitt (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 39-60; Becky
    Thompson, “Time Traveling and Border Crossing. Reflections on White Identity,” in Names We Call Home. Autobiography on
    Racial Identity, ed. Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi (New York: Routledge, 1996), 93-109.

68. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism,” Feminist Studies, 2 (1996):
    324.

69. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 18.

70. Zinn and Dill, “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism,” 327.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                                  33
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                   USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




feminism sits between theories based on a standpoint approach and intersectionality. As multiracial
feminism recognizes how the interaction of forms of domination does not only define oppressions but
also opportunities, it also regards the position of groups and individuals at the top of the intersection
of social hierarchies. In asserting the effects of race, sex, and class on also white women and men, mul-
tiracial feminism encompasses Anzaldúa’s proposal of breaking down divisions between groups and
triggers new possibilities for coalition-making. Thus, it acknowledges that “the liberation of women
is the private, individual, and collective responsibility of colored and white men and women. Aliadas
por pactos de alianzas, united by pacts of alliances, we may make some changes—in ourselves and in
our societies.”71
     While addressing standpoint and intersectional approaches, multiracial feminist theory grants the
possibility to consider the mobility of political subjects and provides a flexible theoretical structure
for organizing collective activism. Describing power and hierarchies as mobile and recognizing the
shifting of positions allows the investigation of the tension between standpoint and intersectionality.
This means that it is not enough to claim to be a working-class Black woman in order to define one’s
position within a system of domination and oppression that needs to be constantly specified, histori-
cized, and defined in a relational way, thus constantly negotiated as a privileged epistemic position.
Since the conceptual framework of multiracial feminism recognizes the centrality of race, as opposed
to cultural pluralism in a historical moment in which plurality had become the otherness of white, it
contests the intersectional claim that systems of oppression operate with the same intensity. In con-
nection with Anzaldua’s figure of shifting and the recognition of a differential operational mode of
power, these elements allow multiracial feminist groups to take into consideration different positions
within a local and global framework. By doing so, multiracial feminism challenges the static dimen-
sion of intersectionality which emerges in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s definition,72 and pursues a conceptual
recognition of the mutable and relational dimension of social and political positioning, thus enabling
consideration of a wider range of possibilities for collective action.
     The historian Becky Thompson, who has challenged simple narratives about the feminist move-
ment in the 1970s as either a white women’s movement or as a sum of separate movements73 in her
work, locates Anzaldúa’s work among the “theoretical guideposts”74 of multiracial feminism. To claim
the influence of Anzaldúa’s work in multiracial coalitions, however, does mean denying the creation of
separate spaces for different groups, the difficulties in articulating coalitions among women of color
and with white women, or the possibility of different strategies of coalition. Multiracial feminists,
then, enacted on the difficult task, outlined by Anzaldúa and Angela Davis,75 of shaping coalitions
based on the “recognition of commonality within the context of difference.”76
     Drawing primarily from the interviews of feminist activists collected in the Voices of Feminism Oral
History Project (Smith College) and Global Feminisms—Comparative Case Studies of Women’s Activism and
Scholarship project (University of Michigan), a few examples are now proposed which suggest how An-
zaldúa’s work has influenced several grassroot groups and activists in shaping multiracial coalitions
and in political organizing among women of color and with white women. The interview of Gra-
ciela Sánchez, a Chicana activist and the founder of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, shows the
shared conviction among activists and the need to move beyond identity politics, which is perceived
as a limit and a compartmentalized division among groups.77 Furthermore, she refers to herself a



71.   Anzaldúa, “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar, or Island,” 154-55.

72. Kimberlee Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,”
    Stanford Law Review, 43, 6 (1991): 1241-99.

73. Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism.

74. Thompson, Multiracial Feminism, 40.

75. Angela Y. Davis and Elizabeth Martínez, “Coalition Building Among People of Color. A Discussion with Angela Y. Davis
    and Elizabeth Martínez,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Angela Y. Davis and Joy James (Malden: Blackwell, 1998), 298.

76. Anzaldúa, “Preface,” in Anzaldúa and Keating, This Bridge We Call Home, 2.

77.   Graciela Sanchez, interview by Loretta Ross, transcript of video recording, February 22-23, 2005, Voices of Feminism Oral
      History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, 95.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                                34
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                      USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




“bridge”78 and describes the work done in Esperanza as an attempt to bridge between different com-
munities and generations. The political activism of the collective, INCITE! Women of Color Against
Violence, was committed to breaking racial and ethnic boundaries in order to organize politically as
women of color79 around the issues of violence, immigrant rights and reproductive rights, moving in
a similar direction. An even more explicit example of the connection between Anzaldúa’s thought and
multiracial activism lies in the work carried out by Loretta Ross, a well-known black woman and a re-
productive justice activist, who was the former Director of Women of Color Program of the National
Organization of Women (NOW), and also by the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice
Collective.80 In her interviews,81 the reference to bridging, coalition-making and Anzaldúa’s work is
evident:

       When you’re a bridge and you’re trying to bridge diverse worlds, then people are going to
       walk across your back, going in both directions, and they may not even notice that they’re
       crossing a bridge. […] I actually like that position because I like being in that bridging
       place where you get to see both worlds and see what common ground and what unifies
       us versus divides. And so that’s a very good position to be in. […] And that’s part of it, the
       positioning.”82

   These examples show the growing effort of women of color groups to engage further across racial
boundaries and with white women and reveal the different strategies and routes taken by multiracial
feminist groups. They also reveal how an approach to coalition that is rooted in the framework of
multiracial feminism and in Anzaldúa’s theory of bridging has proven useful in addressing the tension
between commonality and difference in political coalitions composed of women of color and white
women.



5     Searching for Connections: Anzaldúa, hooks, and Border-Crossers
Anzaldúa’s vision of borders and borderlands proposed an alternative to her present reality and laid
the groundwork for a renewed centrality of women of color, although sometimes in contradictory
ways. To Anzaldúa, contesting the boundaries of identity and paradigms meant engaging in a fruitful
discussion of reality and political action. By reversing the locus of subjectivity, Anzaldúa attempted
to formulate new theories for understanding both identity-making and coalition-making processes.
In one of her posthumous publications, she writes: “The border is the locus of resistance, of rupture,
and of putting together fragments.”83
    Then Anzaldúa’s border recalls bell hooks’ notion of the margins as “the site of radical possibility,
a space of resistance.”84 Like the margins, the border is a site of deconstruction and reconstruction,
a site of future possibilities for liberation created by putting together fragments, identities, commu-
nities, and struggles. As Mara Montanaro has written recently, both borderlands and margins can be
crossed.85 Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical contribution is extremely innovative as she pursues the cri-

78. Ibid., 97-8.

79. Elisabeth Martínez, “Unite and Rebel! Challenges and Strategies in Building Alliances,” in Color of violence. INCITE! Anthol-
    ogy, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 191.

80. Zakiya Luna, “ ‘Truly a Women of Color Organization’: Negotiating Sameness and Difference in Pursuit of Wquality,” Gender
    & Society, 30, 5 (2016): 769-90.

81. Transcript of the interview of Loretta Ross – Global feminisms. Comparative case studies of women’s activism and schol-
    arship, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, May 22, 2006, 29; Loretta Ross, interview by Joyce Follet, transcript of video
    recording, November 3, 2004, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith, Collection.

82. Loretta Ross, interview by Joyce Follet, transcript of video recording, November 3, 2004, Voices of Feminism Oral History
    Project, Sophia Smith, Collection, 345.

83. Anzaldúa, “Border Arte,” in Keating, Light in the Dark, 47.

84. bell hooks, “Marginality as a Site of Resistance,” in Out There. Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russel Ferguson
    et al. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990), 341.

85. Mara Montanaro, “La frontière comme forme de résistance chez Gloria Anzaldúa,” Chimères, 96 (2020): 103.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                                    35
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Political Thought                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 4 (2021)




tique of dichotomous boundaries to the extreme, coming to theorize the impossibility of recomposing
the fragmentation of identity in favor of a restless state of mobility and connection. By visualizing
crisis as a constant condition, she challenged the dominant discourse on immigration by unveiling
the enduring political centrality of borders in the contemporary globalizing context,86 and reshaped
the crisis as a creative condition for generating the possibility of resistance. Thus, she proposed a
multiple, unstable definition of identity and a process of resistance shaped by the interstices, as the
elements pushing toward coalition, hence, what this paper refers to as a politics of mobility from the
interstices. In this way, she proposed a teorías for encouraging the growing activism of women of color
in the United States, which is valuable in shaping incisive alliances based on common struggles and
for furthering feminist reflection on political action and initiative. Anzaldúa’s work should be under-
stood as a work in transition, incorporating the evolving theories and practices of women of color
and the women’s movement. Often cryptic, sometimes contradictory, her thought intertwines with
other theories, such as standpoint and intersectionality theories, and dwells in the tension between
difference and commonality.




86. Nancy Naples, “Changing the Terms. Community Activism, Globalization, and the Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist
    Praxis,” in Women’s Activism and Globalization, ed. Naples and Desai, 9; Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method.
    Or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), vi-xi.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/11796                                                                                 36
