As soon as a child is born, the world decided whether the child will be male or female. Andaluza argues that from the very beginning a despot duality is imposed on us which divides us in realms of either/or. This duality is oppressive because it is totalizing and leaves no room for any other conception of the self. Andulaza is Mexican, she is a Chicano; she is black and Indian; she is a woman; she is queer. She has lived on the borderlands her entire life, juggling all her identities all her life.
She speaks Tex-Mex; that’s her favorite language of the eight languages she speaks. She can instantly switch from Spanish to English in one sentence, in one word. She loves listening to Mexican music, her music, even if they make her feel ashamed for doing so. She can see the Serpent mother, even when they tell her she doesn’t exist. She is Mexican for being Mexican is a state of soul and she is American too for there’s an Anglo within her too. This plurality is what she has inherited, and she can’t possibly be asked to shred one part of an identity for another for within that plurality is home. Home, the smell of “woodsmoke, perfuming my Grandmother’s clothes, her skin. The stench of cow manure and yellow patches in the ground, the crack of a .22 rifle and the reek of cordite. Homemade cheese sizzling in a pan, melting inside a tortilla.” Home is perpetually tied to all her identities, how can she run from one and turn to another when all are home for her.
She is a woman, she is queer. She believes in the shadow beast within her, the one that refuses to be quiet, the one that refuses “orders from outside authorities. It is a part of me that hates restraints of any kind, even those self-imposed.” She refuses to accept the heteronormativity and misogyny that her culture imposes on her. She refuses to mold herself by the image the world prescribed for her. She calls them out, the Anglos and the Chicano, all those who injure her. “Not me sold out my people but they me.” The mother culture refuses to accommodate her for her culture too remains strangled by the despotic duality she has been calling out her whole life. Home is no longer home.
The world is not a safe place for a woman; a woman is alien in her mother culture and alien to the dominant white culture; men of all races are free to make her their prey. She is pushed to the spaces between the worlds she inhabits, and such is the fear that she cannot move for that is the price of refusing to settle for less than recognition of herself. The dominant culture keeps telling her to lose the accent or “go back to Mexico”. Her own Mexico doesn’t accept her either so where is she to go.
“I have no country because my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. I am cultureless because as a feminist, I challenge the collective religious/cultural male derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet.”
Andaluza, much like Fanon and all the other thinkers we have studied in the course, invites all of us to think of new ways of inhabiting the world so that we can think about constructing a new human subject which rejects the despotic dualism the world imposes on each of us. Andaluza, through her writing and conception of borderlands explains fully how despotic this duality, which we almost take to be natural, is and the only way to see its despotism and its unnaturalness is if we view the world from Andaluza’s vantage point, Black, Indian, Mexican, Anglo, Woman, Queer, someone who cannot be contained, who cannot be reduced to this or that, someone who is only at home with her pluralism.
“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face.” The freedom that any woman can ask of is this, if she is denied home, let her be free to create her own home.
Decoloniality and Decolonization 