Borderlands La Frontera

This section marks Anzaldúa’s most explicit consideration of Language as Identity and Performance. Chapter 5 concentrates on the Chicano language and its wildness, contending that language is ethnicity for Chicano people. Chicano Spanish is complex, comprising various layers of languages to create a messy web of colonial and Indigenous histories. Anzaldúa acknowledges these complexities, both in terms of the language’s cultural position and its literal approach to Spanish and English grammar. In linking language to the broader Chicano experience, Anzaldúa thus indicates the ontological questions inherent in Chicano identity. Even as the Chicano language has amalgamated so many different ethnic groups and histories, it remains, thanks to the stubbornness of its people—the mestizos and mestizas.

Once again, however, Anzaldúa’s discussion has implications that extend beyond culture and ethnicity to encompass other facets of experience—e.g., gender. With the image of the wild tongue at the fore, Anzaldúa draws a picture of the dominant language as patriarchy, with Tex-Mex Spanish positioned as the outsider mestiza. In fact, Anzaldúa at one point describes language itself as “male,” implying that any woman using it must contend with the kind of split consciousness she has earlier associated with mestiza identity in particular.

This context lends insight into both the struggles and the unconventionalities of Anzaldúa’s own writing process. The hybrid experience of metaphor and the vivid relationship between image and text that her writing process entails create a clear parallel with the borderland as a mystical performative space. Anzaldúa proposes her texts as performances, a perspective that alludes to the field of performance studies, which border studies is closely linked, as interdisciplinary fields linking sociocultural analysis and subjective experience. Indeed, in linking her subjective experience with a larger social phenomenon, Anzaldúa makes the personal political, her writing serving as a form of action. Through such means, Anzaldúa strives both to decolonize language and to feminize it.

Writing is painful for Anzaldúa, not least because of how language intersects with systems of oppression, and yet, that pain seems to be an important part of the journey toward the joy of writing. Yet again, paradox emerges as the defining feature of Anzaldúa’s life, developing the theme of Contradiction as Mestiza Consciousness. The Coatlicue state, embodied in Anzaldúa as writer’s block, is indicative of a larger cultural shift in Anzaldúa and in the broader population. Citing these experiences as her own Aztec blood sacrifices, Anzaldúa unites the past with the present, threading her Indigenous heritage into her contemporary writing practice.