Anzaldua’s Borderland is the unfortunate story of a people that lost their heritage, their importance and most importantly, their identity in the midst of the imposition of cultural supremancy and the constant struggle of an oppressed people to ‘fit in’ to the society.
Her book, a combination of sentimental poetry and description, is not merely the quest of a people, but more importantly, it is an anecdote of the life of a Chicana woman who was in a constant quest to find herself. Anzaldua, through her writing, questions the various normative constructs that are imposed on a society – the constant struggle an individual, more specifically, a woman feels as an ‘inbetweener.’ Anzaldua pens her thoughts to question the various indemnities and the binary division of ways to exist in a society.
What I find rather compelling in Anzaldua’s description of her societal surroundings is her boldness and fearlessness while questioning aspects such as the normative presence of femininity, homosexuality, religion and culture. Anzaldua’s life is the visual representation of an anti-thesis to the constructs that have so carelessly been imposed on post-colonial societies. The unfortunate fact that the white patriarchal supremacy took away the historical ‘way of being’ of her oppressed society. This can be highlighted by the variety of languages spoken by the Chicano men and women in the quest to search for their self-assumed identity. Through her text, she attempts to declassify this diminished sense of identity that has been corrupted in the quest to find its reality. She attempts to empower her people by arguing that being Latino or Mexican is not a state of mind or of citizenship, but that being Mexican is a state of soul, a way of being that lies in one’s internal self.
To sum up her assertion, Anzaldua brings about the concept of ‘la Mestiza’, a superior identity that is the catalyst to the ultimate revolution that will bring back the lost consciousness of her people. La Mestiza in literal terms is a woman of mixed Spanish and Indian descent, however, in Anzaldua’s eyes, she is a much more intricate and complex figure. By bringing about this form of identity, she counters the existence of the Mestiza as a conflicted being. She asserts that the Mestiza is not an inferior or conflicted identity, she isn’t a ‘half and half’, neither through gender, through her language, through her culture, but rather, she is a being in herself, a new form of identity, an evolved ‘combination of all.’ Through her creation of the Mestiza, Anzaldua breaks down the duality in terms of the subject and the object that keeps one prisoned in the quest to find oneself.
Anzaldua’s book provoked me to question my identity as a Pakistani. The mere fact that we live our lives in ignorance of who we truly are, what our reality is. To be fair, we have, in all honesty, lost our identity in the various phases that signify the development of our past. Sure, as an average Pakistani, I am an Urdu-speaking boy who finds pride in speaking English and complying with the various ways of a foreign sense of identity – fighting and trying to liberate myself of the stereotypical localized normative values that might, in all honesty, be a representation of my historical origins.
Don’t Give in Chicanita
Something I particularly loved
was Anzaldua’s poem that so vehemently makes the reader gauge the sentiment of the
Chicano movement. The poem tends to put the reader in the shoes of a Mexican
woman who is reminded of her origin, her glorious past and the sacrifice of her
ancestors. It gives her hope that the sacrifices of the Chicanos hasn’t stopped,
that there will be a day when they will rejuvenate their sense of being and
their identity will be restored and “like old skin will fall the slave ways of
obedience, acceptance and silence.”
Decoloniality and Decolonization 