I want to begin in a queer place. My central text in this chapter is Gloria Anzaldúa’s eclectic mix of theory poetry and nonfiction prose in her 1987 collection Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, and my central subjects are those Anzaldúa calls los atravesados: “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’” (3). Los atravesados are those who live in the “borderlands” of Anzaldúa’s title; caught between two colliding cultures, this queer group of “outcasts” emerges from attempts to separate, definitively, “us” from “them.” Before discussing los atravesados de Anzaldúa, however, I examine briefly another group of fictional “outcasts” who “crossed over” earlier in the century in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
Although Kerouac might likely play a leading role in a study of homo- sociality in the American canon, he is certainly an unlikely candidate for inclusion in a study of the contemporary Queer Renaissance.1 Yet I want to begin this chapter elsewhere, temporarily outside of the Queer Renaissance and the queer communities that are my subject. The two chapters that have preceded this one have examined variations on the idea of queer “community,” focusing on, respectively, what queers do in and to the communities of which they are a part. This chapter initially approaches the issue from a different direction, considering what other “communities” might do with and to queerness.
Kerouac’s appropriation of the trope of “the border” sets the stage for my analysis of contemporary deployments of borders and of queerness. Using Kerouac, I make the somewhat unremarkable assertion that there is more than one way to cross a border. Using Anzaldúa, who stands at the crossroads where “border theory” and queer theory intersect, I expand on this assertion in order to consider how there are different ways to cross the theoretical border. Queer theory is definitely part of what might be called the “theoretical border-transgressing boom,” but instead of deploying queer theory as some sort of theoretical NAFTA that provides cultural critics with “unlimited access” to new markets, Anzaldúa’s particular brand of queer/Chicana theory challenges the unchecked mobility of oppressive systems of power. Some overly celebratory understandings of queerness, not unlike Kerouac’s “outcasts” in On the Road, tend to efface the ways in which identities and histories are structured in domination, so that some identities are immobilized while white, male, and heterosexual power is able to travel anywhere and everywhere with ease. Anzaldúa’s work undermines this structural domination by insistently foregrounding a “mestiza queer” identity.2
For Anzaldúa, “the border” and “queerness” stand as figures for the failure of easy separation. Rather than establishing two discrete entities, each attempt at separation actually produces (mestiza/queer) identities that do not wholly fit in either location. Such identities are consequently marked as “other” (undocumented, illegal, perverse) by those with the power to police the border. The marking and fixing of “other” identities directs attention away from the border guards themselves, who in turn pass unmarked and unrestrained. The opposition of “unmarked” and “marked” is, at times, far from metaphorical. In a recent article in the Arizona Daily Star, physicist Bill Wattenburg suggests that a “florescent glowing dust” be used on the border to police “illegals”; those who cross over (los atravesados) would pass through the dust, and authorities could then use “ultraviolet lights and lasers [to] track down the marked people” (qtd. in Day an, 812). The mestiza queer identity theorized by Anzaldúa, however, counters the border guards’ absolute mobility with another, critical mobility.
The Kerouacian hipsters with whom I begin my analysis are hardly a pure coextension of these border guards or of ominous, all-pervasive “systems of power.” I begin with On the Road, however, in an attempt to situate the history of borders and border crossings as multifaceted, involving more than two sides. Relations between the multiple players are often contradictory. There is doubtless much in the Beat project as a whole that is oppositional to the restrictive white middle-class mores of the 1950s, even while that project is simultaneously implicated in the very forces it opposes. In On the Road, the hipsters’ and border guards’ locations are contiguous but are not reducible to each other; hence the hipsters’ border crossing marks an extremely complex concourse of oppositional and hegemonic forces. So, too, with border crossings in the academy: there is not, on the one side, a group that establishes borders, and opposite it, another that transgresses them. The particular logic of the “fad,” for instance, demonstrates how complicated border crossings may be. Fads (such as the theoretical border-transgressing boom) may, in the first place, speak to the desire for community, the desire for transformation, or the desire to cross over to something new that opposes the status quo. At the same time, fads are part of a much larger network: they are marketable, and market forces demand and ensure that a fad will inevitably disappoint and eventually disappear, clearing the way for the next fad.
The mestiza queer locates and manipulates these and other contradictions effected by the border and by border crossings. Not content to remain a casualty of binaristic thinking or to be merely celebrated for her hip transgressions, Anzaldúa’s mestiza queer redraws the boundaries, mobilizing a critique that spotlights the location and history of all the players in a given border conflict, and in the process unmasks the border guards’ and others’ attempts to escape identity and history.
In Kerouac’s 1957 novel, the protagonist Sal Paradise is a young writer who “want[s] to take off”: “Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me” (11). “Beaten down” by a world that lacks “vision,” Kerouac’s protagonist takes to the road to find it, along with “girls” and “everything.” And indeed, in one of the final sections of the text, it seems as if this desire to have it all might actually be realized. Sal and his friends Stan Shephard and Dean Moriarty head south toward “the magic land at the end of the road” (276). As the trio approaches the U.S.-Mexican border (the “magic border” [273]), a shift occurs:
To our amazement, it looked exactly like Mexico. It was three in the morning, and fellows in straw hats and white pants were lounging by the dozen against battered pocky storefronts.
“Look—at—those—cats!” whispered Dean.. .. We couldn’t take our eyes from across the street. We were longing to rush right up there and get lost in those mysterious Spanish streets. (274)
Kerouac’s protagonists assume that “crossing the border” means one thing: the signifier “Mexico” and its signified fit together “exactly.” Mexico here, like the fellows “lounging” against the storefronts, is passive and immediately accessible; one can “rush right up there and get lost in” this magical union of desire and object. What these characters elide, however, is that theirs is a particular construction of Mexico: it is the hip, exotic land of excess Kerouac’s boys have dreamed about discovering.
The protagonists are held up by the border officials, but ultimately, even the police in this new world fit the exotic picture they are constructing:
They weren’t like officials at all. They were lazy and tender. Dean couldn’t stop staring at them. He turned to me. “See how the cops are in this country. I can’t believe it!” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m dreaming.” Then it was time to change our money. We saw great stacks of pesos on a table and learned that eight of them made an American buck, or thereabouts. We changed most of our money and stuffed the big rolls in our pockets with delight. (274–75)
Crossing the border is a transcendent (or, we might say, “beatific”) experience for Kerouac’s characters—an experience that finally allows them to escape the banality and rigidity of (white) American middle-class life. To them, the land they have discovered on crossing the border is “magical” and “delightful.” The powerful and bulging pockets with which this chapter of On the Road concludes, however, suggest—and perhaps not so subtly—that someone, at least, is about to get fucked. As the journey continues, this connection between American buying power and white heterosexual male sexual power is literalized. Victor, the boys’ hip new Mexican friend, takes them to a whorehouse where, as Sal Paradise explains, they can “buy señorita” (281). The protagonists spend several hours at the establishment to which Victor takes them, patronizing women from several Central and South American countries. The narrator proclaims, “Through our deliriums we began to discern [the girls’] varying personalities” (287), but none of the women is given a name. In fact, the “wildest,” who was “half Indian, half white, and came from Venezuela” (287), becomes, in only a few pages, coextensive with her supposed homeland: “Venezuela clung about my neck and begged for drinks. . . . With Venezuela writhing and suffering in my arms I had a longing to take her in the back and undress her” (289). Apparently, white male power in Kerouac’s text buys not only individuals but entire nations. The reduction of this woman to Venezuela is particularly ironic, given that her mestiza identity and Mexican location complicate any easy notion of “origin.” Despite how “wild” she is, the boys “keep her in her place” with the epithet “Venezuela.”
This border crossing undoubtedly reveals more about the white male protagonists than it does about the inhabitants of Mexico; to these “hip” bohemians, “all of Mexico [is] one vast Bohemian camp” (302) that allows them to transcend their own rigid and restricting identities and cultural contexts. This “transcendence” is not entirely negative: Beat writers despised what they saw as the materialism and stultifying conformity of middle America, and, without question, they effectively shaped alternative visions that had a major impact on the next generation. Andrew Ross, examining a passage from On the Road where Sal Paradise walks the streets of Denver “wishing [he] were a Negro,” suggests that “[white] fantasies, however romantic ... had real and powerful social effects ... for the white students in SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] who participated in the struggle for civil rights, and who supported the black liberation movements of the sixties” (68–69). Despite the potential positive impact of the Beat writers’ racial fantasies, however, the example Ross chooses—a fleeting fantasy on the streets of Denver—pales in comparison to the extreme exploitation represented later in the novel, when the protagonists cross the border into Mexico.
In fact, Ross’s observation might be inflected somewhat differently: if we admit that white fantasies such as Sal’s had “real and powerful social effects,” then we would have to admit simultaneously that Kerouacian male fantasies also had such real and powerful effects—an admission that is borne out historically by the New Left’s callous disdain for, even outright hostility toward, feminism in the 1960s. This misogyny, coupled with the romanticism Ross details (which is nonetheless racist), would have particularly disastrous consequences for women of color, who “experience racism not as ‘blacks’ [or ‘Latinos’], but as black women” and Latinas (de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects,” 134).3 Sal Paradise, of course, walks the streets of Denver wishing he were a Negro man. In Denver, Sal’s desire to escape his own identity can be read as simply a romantic fantasy that (perhaps) lays the groundwork for powerful, and potentially positive, social effects; in Mexico, when this fantasy is symbolically realized, the negative material consequences for the women on the other side of the border are far more difficult to dismiss.4
Ironically, the constricting white American identities that Kerouac’s protagonists try to escape are reproduced in the Mexican section of On the Road. As John Tytell confirms, in Mexico “Dean and Sal act without grace, as ‘self-important moneybag Americans’” (168). On the Road demonstrates that the logic of a border crossing that seeks to escape identity actually facilitates the emergence of the self-important American. Dean insists that they are “leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things ... so that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this, you see, and understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven’t done before us” (276). However, his admission that they can and will “safely think of nothing else” guarantees that the boys never fully consider how “other Americans” before them have understood the world, how they inadvertently replicate American perspectives, or how the path they have taken parallels the path taken earlier by others. The boys’ “wonderful Mexican money that went so far” buys them anything they want and can take them “right on to South America” if they so desire (276, 277). As they get closer to Mexico City, Dean’s wristwatch even buys them the authenticity they left home to discover. Encountering a three-year-old girl standing in front of a group of Indians, Dean exclaims, “She’ll never, never leave here and know anything about the outside world. It’s a nation. Think of the wild chief they must have! . . . How different they must be in their private concerns and evaluations and wishes!” (297–98). Not paying for this “difference” makes Dean uncomfortable, and he presents the little girl with his wristwatch: “She whimpered with glee. The others crowded around with amazement. Then Dean poked in the little girl’s hand for ‘the sweetest and purest and smallest crystal she has personally picked from the mountain for me’” (298). In a sense, Dean gives up his wristwatch and buys the “timelessness” and “authenticity” that countless American travelers before and after him have sought to discover.
Nothing could be more alien to Kerouac’s protagonists, however, than the thought that they are participating in a history of exploitation of the region they are exploring. On the contrary, in their minds, they have left banal American identities behind them at the border and now freely merge with what they see as a hip new Mexican identity. This escape from their own identities, however, necessarily obscures that history of exploitation. Sal’s thoughts as the other boys sleep illustrate just how glaring their effacement of history is:
The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore—they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of “history.” (280–81)
In this passage, specific histories and struggles are effaced as people of color the world over are blurred into one exotic, hip lump: Malaysia is China is India is Arabia is Morocco is Mexico is Polynesia is Siam. Ultimately, the narrator settles on Benares, a sacred Hindu city on the Ganges River in India, to stand in for the “Capital of the World,” Of course, it is more than a little ironic that this invocation of India is followed in the text by the narrator’s observation that “these people were unmistakably Indians,” since the history of white exploitation of indigenous peoples on this continent begins with just such a mistake, or (mis)naming. As the passage concludes, history indeed requires the distancing quotation marks Kerouac employs, for this is not so much history as it is history’s efface-ment. Centuries of exploitation are erased as Kerouac’s neo-Columbian hipster once again “discovers” a New World full of abundant resources that are his for the taking.
Even when On the Road was published, however, the “border” was a contested site. In 1958, one year after the publication of On the Road, Americo Paredes published his important study of Chicano corridos (ballads, folk songs), “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Paredes was the first of many Chicano scholars to respond to Walter Prescott Webb’s studies of the Texas Rangers, which championed the supposed “heroics” of the Rangers and denigrated the Mexicans and Mexican Americans who lived within the Rangers’ jurisdiction and who were often victims of their attempts to maintain ‘Taw and order” (J. Saldívar, 49–53). Through an extended analysis of “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez,” Paredes contested Webb’s characterization of the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Mexican border region. In contrast to both Webb’s representation of the border region as the site of Anglo-American “heroics” and romanticized Anglo understandings of the region as “Old Spain in Our Southwest,” Paredes “redefined the border . . . [as] a historically determined geopolitical zone of military, linguistic, and cultural conflict” (Caldéron and Saldívar, 5). “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez” was, for Paredes, paradigmatic of early twentieth-century border corridos in general, which he saw as tending “toward one theme, border conflict,” and “toward one concept of the hero, the man fighting for his right with his pistol in his hand” (Paredes, 149; qtd. in R. Saldívar, 28).5
Far from providing an escape from identity, the border thus becomes a metaphor for the complex and oppressive social and historical forces that have shaped and continue to shape Chicano identity. Teresa McKenna writes that the border between Texas and Mexico “stands as figure and metaphor for the transition between nations and the complex of connections which continue to exist for all Mexicans whether border residents or not” (qtd. in J. Saldívar, 54). The meanings borne by border crossings, in turn, are also very different in Chicana/o scholarship from the meanings borne by the “magical” border crossing in Kerouac’s novel. In 1981, for example, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa compiled a collection of prose and poetry that complicates easy, celebratory notions about the transgression of boundaries. “Literally, for years,” Moraga writes in her preface to that volume, “I have dreamed of a bridge” (xviii). That dream is realized with the publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, but the editors’ title complicates the idea of “crossing over” by introducing history and embodiment: this crossing is not simply celebratory but is rather inscribed onto the bodies of women of color; “this bridge,” according to Moraga and Anzaldúa, is “called my back.”
This Bridge Called My Back stands at the crossroads where border theory, feminism, and a nascent queer theory intersect. Indeed, I would argue that, because of its construction of relational and critical identities, the collection is one of the first texts of the Queer Renaissance. Moraga writes, “But the passage is through, not over, not by, not around, but through” (xiv); she goes on to explain her hope that This Bridge Called My Back “will function for others, colored or white, in the same way” (xiv). In spite of the hope for coalition, however, Moraga’s emphasis (“the passage is through”) suggests that This Bridge Called My Back (and other books for which it will eventually function as an antecedent) cannot and will not advocate “crossings” that allow for an avoidance of identity and history Anzaldúa and she have put together a collection that is about border crossings and connections between women, Moraga explains, but connection is possible only if readers are willing to ask difficult questions about the many silences surrounding race, class, and sexuality in feminism, and to admit they do not have all the answers (xiv–xv).
In the end, On the Road in fact demonstrates that an avoidance of the difficult questions of history and identity cannot be easily sustained; ultimately, the hipsters succumb to the history they were trying to escape. Sal Paradise and his friends come down from the emotional, transcendental high that crossing the border facilitated, only to return once again, “beaten down,” to the United States. “Crossing the border” inevitably disappoints these American boys, since “the magic land at the end of the road” turned out to be little more than a passing fad.
Academic border crossings are all the rage. Cultural studies, promising to break down the borders between disciplines or between the academy and outside communities, trumpets the advent of “postdisciplinary knowledge”; in literary studies, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has recently published an assessment of the profession explicitly titled Redrawing the Boundaries. The editors of that collection, Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, write that “our profession has become increasingly concerned with the problem of boundaries.. . . These boundaries can be crossed, confused, consolidated, and collapsed; they can also be revised, reconceived, redesigned, or replaced” (4). Likewise, in the field of education, theorist Henry Giroux has developed the idea of “border pedagogy” in his book Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education.
Queer theory, fashionably late yet central to this theoretical border-crossing party, similarly champions the crossing and recrossing of borders. As queer theorist Lisa Duggan writes:
The notion of a “queer community” ... is often used to construct a collectivity no longer defined solely by the gender of its members’ sexual partners. This new community is unified only by a shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and gender. .. . The “queer” nation is a newly defined political entity, better able to cross boundaries and construct more fluid identities. (“Making It Perfectly Queer,” 20–21)
I do not intend to be disingenuous toward any of the critical schools mentioned here or to dismiss what theorists are doing as “trendy” or unreflective. On the contrary: one of my intentions in this chapter is to question the ways in which queer theory in particular gets interpellated as a “fad” and to disarticulate it from that which is, supposedly, merely trendy. In this section of my chapter, I begin that disarticulation by considering briefly two types of theoretical border crossings: first, the crossing that interrogates the construction of borders, identities, and histories; and second, the crossing that implicitly posits a cosmopolitan consumer/theorist, able to move everywhere with ease, and that is consequently more celebratory of transgression for transgression’s sake. I then offer an extended reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s queer Chicana border theory and argue that Anzaldúa’s work, which ironically both interrogates and celebrates critical border crossings, redefines mobility through its deployment of the mestiza queer. Borderlands/La Frontera does represent a mestiza queer subject able to cross borders skillfully, but her movement, even when it is celebratory, is always in the service of locating other identities and histories that seek to maintain power by escaping detection.
The theorists and critical schools mentioned above generally represent the first sort of border crossing. They constantly question what “border crossings” might mean; each seeks to examine how and where power is located in both the demarcation and transgression of boundaries. In fact, Greenblatt and Gunn’s insistence that “boundaries can be crossed, confused, consolidated, and collapsed” syntactically links the consolidation—or reestablishment—of power to its confusion or collapse: as in Kerouac’s work, the crossing of one boundary may entail the reinforcement of others. After their delineation of what can be done with and to boundaries, Greenblatt and Gunn go on to insist that we not take them lightly: “The one thing they cannot be in literary studies is entirely abolished” (4). Giroux likewise connects his theory of “border pedagogy” to an interrogation of configurations of power: border pedagogy allows for “forms of transgression in which existing borders forged in domination can be challenged and redefined... . Border pedagogy must take up the dual task of not only creating new objects of knowledge but also addressing how inequalities, power, and human suffering are rooted in basic institutional structures” (28–29). Finally, Duggan also attends to “basic institutional structures” when she stresses that queer border crossings are unified only by their “shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and gender.” In short, scholars in cultural studies, radical pedagogy, queer theory, and the like are aware that the crossing of borders is no simple matter. Borders and boundaries are not inviolate, but they are almost always the products of configurations of power that are not easily displaced.
At the other end of the spectrum, seemingly, are border crossings that tend to affirm the transgression of boundaries for transgression’s sake. Such celebratory transgressions are perhaps more in evidence outside the academy: as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner point out, “There are even components of the national mass media, such as Details and MTV, that have cultivated a language of queerness in their highly capitalized forums” (346). In these consumer contexts, queerness and the transgression of boundaries are marketable. It was such marketability that supposedly made 1993 the year of “lesbian chic” and that, oddly enough, packaged both Tony Kushner and Jack Kerouac as Gap ads (“Kerouac,” the ad insists, “wore khakis”). As Phillip Brian Harper writes, “The easy appropriability of the signifiers of certain forms of social marginality makes them prime commodities in the mass-cultural drive to market the effects of disfranchisement for the social cachet that can paradoxically attach to it” (188). The marketing of queerness puts transgressive “new” (in the case of Kerouac, reissued) identities up for sale, but what get elided in the transaction are the systemic forces that construct all identities, marking some as exotic and marketable while others are allowed to pass unmarked.6 At first, the consumption of a fashionable queerness in videos, in magazines, and on talk shows might seem far removed from a critical academic queerness. Yet the academy, certainly, is also a consumer context, and in the 1990s, queer theory inside the academy (like lesbian chic or Details on the outside) is—for many—decidedly “hip”; it is often casually characterized as the “latest thing” or the “next wave.” One of the problems with such “hipness” is that—as with Sal Paradise’s border crossing or any “passing fad”—inevitable disappointment and failure become structural components of queer theory.7
We can look carefully at the contradictions inherent in queer theory’s academic location and marketability without forgoing its critical promise, however. Academic and consumer border crossings overlap but are not absolutely reducible to each other, and we need not be, like Kerouac’s hipsters, blind to contiguities and contradictions. Because of the existence of more celebratory variants of queer theory, however, some critics have been quick to deny queer theory’s transformative potential. Such critics would see the critical type of theoretical border crossing as simply and totally reducible to the celebratory. Donald Morton, for instance, argues that the queer theory of Eve Sedgwick and others in the academy is “basically nothing more than the politics of shocking the sensibilities of the bourgeois reader by ‘performing difference’” (134). Against what he sees as a “ludic (post)modern theory [that] demands the de-essentializa-tion, de-naturalization, and de-centering of signs and representations in the name of personal libidinal liberation,” Morton posits “resistance (postmodernism [that] demands collective emancipation by the overthrow of existing exploitative and oppressive structures and a rebuilding of the space of the public sphere along new lines of coherence” (138). Despite the fact that many practitioners of queer theory not only commit to the “de-essentializations, de-naturalizations, and de-centerings” he denounces but understand these as the precondition for shaping precisely such “new lines of coherence,” Morton—because of what he sees, and demonizes, as pure “performance”—is determined not to see queer theory as at all participating in this collective rebuilding. Instead, he homogenizes queer theorists into one apolitical, flaming lump. To paraphrase Emma Goldman: apparently one can’t dance in Donald Morton’s revolution.
In a way, Morton’s denunciations of queer theory can be read as homophobic calls not to “flaunt it.” Moreover, Morton reduces the players in this border conflict to two (the “redeemed” and the “damned,” to borrow language from my last chapter). In contrast to Morton, we might recognize that, even though I have sketched out two types of theoretical border crossings, the boundary between these two types is not absolute. It is, indeed, impossible for any border crossing to be purely one or the other. In fact, it is the desire for a pure critical and political space (the magic land at the end of the road?) that both produces queer theory as the “latest thing” and allows for it to be dismissed as a “passing fad.” Rather than acceding to either characterization, however, queer theory might expose the desire for purity (as opposed to, say, perversion?) as a fantasy and as an impediment to the critical work it seeks to advance. We might envision the best queer theory, then, as aware of the tensions caused by its contradictory location and on guard against attempts to cast its critical transgressions as (merely) hip, even as it simultaneously puts the “celebration” or “performance” back into “politics”—or rather, uses performance to spotlight and challenge, as Morton would have it, “existing exploitative and oppressive structures.”
With this goal in mind, I turn to the particular convergence of queer theory and border theory in the work of Anzaldúa. Anzaldúa’s work puts into play a new and transgressive identity but at the same time resists mere transgression for transgression’s sake. Anzaldúa exhibits an awareness of the complexity of “existing borders forged in domination” and controverts queer theorists who do not. She even queries “queerness” if and when it seeks to escape the complexities of history and identity There’s more than one way to cross the theoretical border, and Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza crosses the border in ways that challenge the unchecked mobility of oppressive systems of power: Anzaldúa exposes the supposed “authorities” who mark her as “other” while attempting to pass unmarked themselves. More than just a passing fad for appropriation by disembodied theoretical hipsters, queer theory as practiced by Anzaldúa becomes a tool for the difficult work of shaping and performing what she calls “/a concien-cia de la mestiza... a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer” (77). This critical mestiza, woman-centered consciousness is the “consciousness of the Borderlands” that the text celebrates (77).
The remainder of this chapter explores how Anzaldúa shapes mestiza queer identity in Borderlands I La Frontera. First, I analyze the poem that opens Anzaldúa’s first essay, since that poem provides a blueprint, of sorts, for the text as a whole. In her opening poem, Anzaldúa transforms the abject identity into which she has been interpellated into a resistant identity, intent on exposing and dismantling the history of oppression to which both her identity and the border stand as citations. Second, I examine how that transformation is reproduced on a larger scale in Borderlands I La Frontera more generally. Third, and finally, I consider the ways in which Anzaldúa theorizes mestiza identity in and through queerness and vice versa. Although Anzaldúa has at times been relegated to the theoretical margins,8 this chapter redraws the boundaries in an attempt to position her (and the “positions” she advocates) as central to the theoretical agenda of queer theory. Like Zami and the theories of queer positionality I examined in my first chapter, the queer trickster identity I delineated in my second, and the bisexual artistic/activist identity I explore in my last, the mestiza queer identity Anzaldúa posits exposes and undermines the dominant, normative organizations of sexuality, gender, and race that police los atravesados in an attempt to “keep them in their place.”
Anzaldúa divides Borderlands/La Frontera into two sections: “Atravesando Fronteras/Crossing Borders,” which consists of seven autobiographical/poetical/theoretical essays, and “Un Agitado Viento[An agitated wind]/Ehecatl, The Wind,” which is made up of six sections of Anzaldúa’s poetry Border crossings are central to the entire text, but Anzaldúa’s crossings are not simply hip migrations to an exotic land of excess. Anzaldúa’s first representation of a border crossing comes in a poem she includes in her first essay, “The Homeland, Aztlán/El otro México [The other Mexico].” In this poem, Anzaldúa reinvents the marked identity the border compels her to embody and thereby establishes a pattern of transformation that is replicated in the text as a whole. The poem commences in Border Field Park, on the U.S.-Mexican border south of San Diego:
I walk through the hole in the fence
to the other side.
Under my fingers I feel the gritty wire
rusted by 139 years
of the salty breath of the sea.
Beneath the iron sky
Mexican children kick their soccer ball across,
run after it, entering the U.S. (2)
This is not the “end of the road” for Anzaldúa; crossing the border here marks the beginning of the poet’s journey in Borderlands/La Frontera, and there is nothing very magical or transcendent about it. On the contrary: the children’s soccer ball, accidentally kicked across this border, underscores the everyday triviality of this event. At the same time, the children’s trivial “accident” contrasts ominously with the other historical “accident” that has occurred “beneath the iron sky”: the accident that produced the artificial border in the first place.
Like the soccer ball, Anzaldúa is no respecter of borders. The very text of “The Homeland, Aztlan El otro México” crosses back and forth freely between prose and poetry, between sections consisting of Anzaldúa’s “original” writing and excerpts (of prose, poetry, song) from other writers whom she has found useful and pleasurable. Her lack of respect for the border, however, is accompanied by a profound respect for the people whose lives and histories have been shaped by the border, and who have resisted, in various ways, the oppression that this accident of history has generated. This multifaceted understanding of the border, introduced in her opening poem, fuels Anzaldúa’s entire theoretical project. Her lack of respect is evident in the ease with which the poet walks across the border. Unlike Kerouac’s protagonists, her crossing is not sanctioned by hip authorities; she is not likely to gape in amazement at the “cats” who patrol the border. At the same time, even as she crosses, she reveals her awareness of how long the border has engendered both oppression and resistance: “I feel the gritty wire / rusted by 139 years / of the salty breath of the sea.”
The border and its history in this text are not picturesque; Anzaldúa uses harsh adjectives (“gritty,” “iron”) to describe the setting, and the wavelike structure of the poem itself reproduces the insistent pounding of the sea that has gouged the hole in this fence (“silver waves marbled with spume / gashing a hole under the border fence” [1]). Yet Anzaldúa’s lack of respect for the border, coupled with her simultaneous awareness of its oppressive history, leads her to yearn for something different, and she begins to identify with the harsh, insistent pounding of the ocean. She begins to look—as it were—for other holes in the fence, for ruptures in the seemingly monolithic force field that would separate her from “the other side.” In this poem, and in Anzaldúa’s theoretical project in general, mestiza queer identity comes out as one of those ruptures, and she repeatedly deploys this identity as a challenge to those who have created the border and who police it in order to maintain the division of “us” from “them.”
“I walk through the hole in the fence” suggests nothing remarkable or dreamlike about crossing the border. Earlier in the poem, however, prior to the poet’s crossing-over, there is at least one magical moment of sorts:
Miro el mar atacar [I watch the sea attack]
la cerca en [the fence in] Border Field Park
con sus buchones de agua [with its cleansing watery maw],
an Easter Sunday resurrection
of the brown blood in my veins. (2)
In this passage, the pounding of the sea—though violent—is far from negative, since it leads to a “resurrection of the brown blood” in the poet’s veins. This resurrection, however, is different from the transcendence of identity experienced by Kerouac’s protagonists; it actuates a renewed understanding of and appreciation for the poet’s specific identity and history that contrast sharply with the hipsters’ attempts to escape both. Furthermore, the poet conceives her mestiza identity here as something that defies the history of oppression that the border signifies, just as the powerful ocean gnaws away at the gritty wire fence.
One of the institutions that literally secures that fence, and the corresponding opposition between “us” and “them,” is the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the branch of the U.S. Justice Department responsible for policing the border. Significantly, the INS has been exposed as one of the more discriminatory of government agencies; a group of black agents in Los Angeles filed a suit charging that the INS repeatedly denied them promotions and that people of color are extremely underrep-resented in positions of power within the agency. Joyce Jones reports that of approximately four thousand border patrol employees, only thirty-eight are black (18). Hence the current organization of the INS reproduces the “us” (white power structure)/”them” (“illegal” brown or black “others”) binary that Anzaldúa contests. If the department were less discriminatory presumably this division would be harder to uphold.
However, neither in this poem nor elsewhere does Anzaldúa depict mestiza identity as that which automatically disrupts institutions such as the INS. Instead, Anzaldúa’s work represents a process, whereby the mestiza queer comprehends her multiple identities (mestiza, queer, “outcast”) as results of unsuccessful attempts to divide people and transposes the meaning of those identities, turning them against ongoing attempts to maintain hierarchical divisions.9 Without such transpositions, mestizo/a identity might trouble such institutions, but it will certainly not disrupt them.
Anzaldúa makes this clear in her bilingual book for children, Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro lado. Prietita is a young Chicana, living in Texas, who befriends an undocumented Mexican boy and his mother. When the border authorities search Prietita’s town, one of these authorities is Chicano:
From behind the curtains, Prietita and the herb woman watched the Border Patrol van cruise slowly up the street. It stopped in front of every house. While the white patrolman stayed in the van, the Chicano migra got out and asked, “Does anyone know of any illegals living in this area?” Prietita and the herb woman saw a couple of people shake their heads and a few others withdraw into their houses.
They heard a woman say, “Yes, I saw some over there,” pointing to the gringo side of town—the white side. Everybody laughed, even the Chicano migra.
Detrás de las cortinas, Prietita y la señora miraban la camioneta de la migra pasar despacito por la calle. Se paraba frente a cada casa y uno de los dos agentes de la migra se bajaba. Casi todas las veces se bajaba el agente chicano para preguntar, “¿Saben ustedes dónde se esconden los mojados?” Algunos indicaban que no con la cabeza y otros se quedaban callados. Algunos se metían en sus casas.
Siempre había una persona que contestaba, “Sí, ví a unos por aliá,” apun-tando al lado del pueblo donde vivían los gringos. Todos se reian, hasta el agente chicano. (not paginated)
The Chicano’s (uneasy?) laughter indicates that his presence complicates, but does not disrupt or disable, the power relations in this scene. The Chicano border guard still participates in the system that would mark as ‘’illegal” and then deport Prietita’s friend and his mother. Indeed, the Chicano character literally translates that system for the predominantly white, English-speaking agents, thereby securing the border patrol’s ability to move freely. Another character, however, makes visible that which the Chicano border guard would mask: the “illegal” gringo side of town. Hence disruption comes not from an essential mestiza/o or Chicana/o identity but from an identity committed to re-vision. Anzaldúa’s new mestiza refuses to be kept in her place and instead spotlights the inconsistencies and elisions the border conceals.
In contrast to the Chicano border guard, who eventually gets back into his van and drives away with the other (white) officers, the speaker in the initial poem in Borderlands/La Frontera moves from the recognition of a history of oppression toward the strategic deployment of mestiza identity as that which challenges the attempt to maintain divisions between people. To illustrate this trajectory, I quote at length from the final part of Anzaldúa’s poem:
1,950 mile-long open wound
dividing a pueblo, a culture,
running down the length of my body,
staking fence rods in my flesh,
splits me splits me
me raja me raja
This is my home
this thin edge of
barbwire.
But the skin of the earth is seamless.
The sea cannot be fenced,
el mar does not stop at borders.
To show the white man what she thought of his
arrogance,
Yemaya blew that wire fence down.
This land was Mexican once,
was Indian always
and is.
And will be again.
Yo soy un puente tendido
del mundo gabacho al del mojado,
lo pasado me estird pa’ ‘tras
y lo presente pa’ ‘delante.
Que la Virgen de Guadalupe me cuide
Ay ay ay, soy mexicana de este lado.
[I am a bridge extending
from the world of the Spaniard/European to that of the “wetback,”
The past stretches me backward
and the present forward.
The Virgin of Guadalupe watches over me
Ay ay ay, I am a Mexican woman of this side.] (2–3)
In the first stanza of this passage, Anzaldúa foregrounds an ongoing history of oppression by reading the border as an open wound that divides a people, a culture, even individuals (“splits me splits me / me raja me raja”). But this history of oppression, inscribed onto the poet’s very body, simultaneously secures the possibility—indeed, the inevitability—of resistance. Here and throughout Borderlands I La Frontera, Anzaldúa aptly demonstrates that the attempt to divide absolutely “us” from “them” can never fully succeed, since it always produces groups of people who do not fit either category These groups find themselves in an in between position that could disrupt or destroy—just as Yemaya destroys the border fence—the dualistic foundation on which binary thinking rests. Binary thinking casts the poet into an abject position here, but Anzaldúa works that abject, mestiza position against the very ideology that produces it.
In this poem, Anzaldúa reproduces a disruptive, in-between position in several ways. First, Anzaldúa writes bilingually or multilingually, switching codes without always bothering to translate. Diane Freedman points out that Anzaldúa’s code switching signals for some privileged readers that there are “borders they cannot cross” (53); hence, even as Anzaldúa challenges the border patrol in the name of those whom the border would mark and separate, she implicitly insists that no one should have unlimited access to others’ lives and histories. Throughout Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa employs not only Spanish and English but Chicano/a and working-class variants of both, as well as an occasional word or phrase of Nahuatl. As she explains later in the text, “Deslenguadas. Somos los del espanol deficiente [Foul-mouthed, shameless. We speak the deficient Spanish]. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje [mongrels/half-breeds], the subject of your burla [joke]” (58). Anzaldúa’s switching of linguistic codes stands as the figure for a disruptive and vital mestiza/o existence more generally: “Chicano Spanish is a border tongue . . . un nuevo lenguaje[a new language]. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir [a language that corresponds to a way of life]. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language” (55).
Second, Anzaldúa reproduces the in-between position in this poem by describing the land as simultaneously Mexican and Indian, despite attempts by Anglos (during the 139 years that have elapsed between the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and the writing of this text) to confine Mexican identity to el otro lado (the other side). The poet herself exclaims that she is a “mexicana de este lado,” in order to conclude the poem with literal evidence (again, inscribed on her body) that the divisions enacted by Anglo tyranny have not been ultimately successful.
Finally, the poet deploys a cultural mestiza identity through her use of various mythical and religious figures, such as la Virgen de Guadalupe (“the single most potent religious, political and cultural image of the Chicano/raexz can 0” [30]) and Yemaya, who is the Yoruban and Afro-Cuban goddess of the sea (Freixas, 27; Lorde, Black Unicorn, 121–22). Later in the text, Yemaya is also identified as “the wind,” and Anzaldúa positions herself as the daughter of both Yemayá and Oyá, “the whirlwind” (95n. 7). Both Anzaldúa and her text, then, embody this cultural mestiza identity
Since she begins the poem with a metonymic linkage of woman and land (“1,950 mile-long open wound . . . running down the length of my body”), Anzaldúa also redeploys a masculinist and colonialist trope that would figure both (as in On the Road) as passively waiting to be conquered. Anzaldúa links woman and land, however, not to reenact but to indict the colonial history of which such a trope is a part. Her indictment is sustained throughout the poem and can be heard in the poet’s final anguished cry. Although Ay ay ay can, on one level, be read as a simple lament, it is simultaneously a defiant, resistant cry. The poet’s body, which had earlier been marked as divided, with an open wound running down its length, becomes in the end a bridge connecting past and present. The poem’s trajectory works to transform mestiza identity from a casualty of oppression and division into a sign of resistance and connection.
Still, Anzaldúa’s bridge imagery in this conclusion is not simply celebratory, just as it was not in This Bridge Called My Back. That the conclusion can be read as a lament reminds readers that this transformation has come at some cost. Moreover, the image of a body connecting the “Old” and the “New” World recalls La Malinche, the Aztec woman whom some, such as Octavio Paz, have denigrated as La Chingada, “the fucked one,” who supposedly “betrayed” her people through her union with Hernan Cortes. Alfredo Mirande and Evangelina Enriquez dispute Paz and the others, emphasizing instead La Malinche’s passivity:
One persistent indictment of La Malinche in folklore, concerning the fact that she was Cortés’s mistress or whore, implies active volition on her part, but this need not have been the case. Paz . . . suggests that Malinche’s sexual transgression derives precisely from passive volition on her part, an openness or willingness to be violated. Whether active or passive, history does not ascribe volition to Malinche in becoming Cortes’s mistress; she was presented to him as a slave along with nineteen other women when he arrived on the coast of Mexico. (24)
La Malinche thus passes from critic to critic and interpretation to interpretation in a bizarre parody of the transaction between Cortes and those who met him on the coast of Mexico.
Through her invocation of the La Malinche story, however, Anzaldúa intervenes in the myth on several levels, replacing captivity with freedom (“The sea cannot be fenced”), betrayal with steadfastness (“This land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is”), and passivity with agency (“To show the white man what she thought of his arrogance, / Yemaya blew that wire fence down”). Most important, the poem’s final line replaces the historical and critical objectification of La Malinche (and the nineteen other women) with a new subjectivity: “Ay ay ay, soy mexicana de este lado.” Soy mexicana is already a subjective construction, but since the poem is both multilingual and constantly shifting between various linguistic codes, readers can hear (multiple) subjectivity in Ay ay ay as well, since the phrase aurally recalls the English “I I I.” The end of Anzaldúa’s poem thereby literalizes Sidonie Smith’s argument: “For Anzaldúa the topography of the borderland is simultaneously the suturing space of multiple oppressions and the potentially liberatory space through which to migrate toward a new subject position” (200).
Anzaldúa’s first poem in Borderlands I La Frontera, with its border crossing from one understanding of the borderlands and of mestiza identity to another, serves as a blueprint for the text as a whole. The desperate and oppressive “borderlands” that dominate “The Homeland, Aztlan/E/otro Mexico,” the first essay, have been transformed into el camino de la mestiza (the mestiza way) in the final essay, “La conciencia de la mestiza/ Towards a New Consciousness.” The six sections of “Un Agitado Vientol Ehécatl, The Wind” that follow the final essay and that conclude Borderlands/La Frontera can then be read as poetic explorations/performances of this new mestiza consciousness. Despite Anzaldúa’s turn to the lyrical and poetic in the second half of her text, however, Borderlands/La Frontera contains no transcendent escape from identity and history a la Sal Paradise; rather, Anzaldúa’s liminal and disruptive identity “puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of” (82). Over the course of the text, Anzaldúa’s mestiza queer refocuses her (and her reader’s) vision on the border conflicts that more celebratory travelers disavow.
After the opening poem, which concludes with the defiant assertion that she is what Anglo-American binary thinking would like to disavow (a “Mexican woman of this side”), Anzaldúa moves immediately into the borderlands. In the first essay, the region that is the borderlands remains a desperate and dangerous place, inhabited by the “prohibited” and “forbidden”; that is, by those whose identities are proscribed by dualistic thinking:
The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here. . . . The only “legitimate” inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger. (3–4)
Anzaldúa’s borderlands stand in stark contrast to the tension-free land that Kerouac’s protagonists enter, where everything is pleasantly “mysterious” and even the authorities are “lazy and tender” (On the Road, 274). In fact, the passage immediately after this description of the borderlands in Anzaldúa’s text highlights instead conflict with the “authorities.” The passage consists of an anecdote about la migra, who deport a character named Pedro to Guadalajara, despite the fact that Pedro is a fifth-generation American. In his terror, Pedro is unable to find the English words to explain his situation, and since he has not brought his birth certificate with him to work in the fields, the white authorities deport him (Borderlands/La Frontera, 4).
Anzaldúa’s anecdote thus ironizes the Kerouac passage I examined earlier, in which “these people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore” (On the Road, 280). Although this passage criticizes Americans, Sal and his friends remain blind both to the ways in which their exoticization and primitiviza-tion of “these people” are implicated in “silly civilized American lore” and to the ways in which they themselves carry “America” with them. The effacement of an ongoing Anglo-American history of exploitation of Mexico inevitably effaces the material conditions that actual Pedros (and Panchos) face. Not surprising, this is not the last complication of celebratory border-crossing tropes that Anzaldúa effects. In On the Road, Kerouac’s hipsters are flabbergasted by the “great stacks of pesos” they receive in exchange for American dollars (275). Anzaldúa’s essay in Borderlands/La Frontera reveals how such North-to-South border crossings are part of a larger exploitative economy:
Los gringos had not stopped at the border. . .. Currently, Mexico and her eighty million citizens are almost completely dependent on the U.S. market. The Mexican government and wealthy growers are in partnership with such American conglomerates as American Motors, IT&T and Du Pont which own factories called maquiladoras. One-fourth of all Mexicans work at maquiladoras; most are young women. . . . The devaluation of the peso and Mexico’s dependency on the U.S. have brought on what the Mexicans call la crisis. No hay trabajo [There is no work]. Half of the Mexican people are unemployed. In the U.S. a man or woman can make eight times what they can in Mexico. By March, 1987, 1,088 pesos were worth one U.S. dollar. I remember when I was growing up in Texas how we’d cross the border at Reynosa or Progreso to buy sugar or medicine when the dollar was worth eight pesos and fifty centavos. (10)
In contrast to those moving North to South, those making the migration from South to North do so out of material necessity, brought on by the position of economic dependency into which the United States has cast Mexico. When these travelers cross the border, moreover, they do not receive great stacks of either pesos or dollars.
The bulk of “The Homeland, Aztlán Elotro México” combines history, mythology, philosophy, and poetry in order to document the existence of those who reside in the borderlands. The title refers to Aztlan, the region of the southwestern United States that is the mythological homeland of Chicanos/as. At the same time, Anzaldúa’s theory of the borderlands is about other, less literally geographic borderlands; those who live in Anzaldúa’s borderlands, to return to the quote with which I began this chapter, are “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’” (3). This large cast of characters notwithstanding, Anzaldúa concludes “The Homeland Aztlán/Elotro México” by focusing on how the U.S.-Mexican border and the borderlands provoke danger for one very specific figure:
La mojada, la mujer indocumentada [the female “wetback,” the undocumented woman], is doubly threatened in this country. Not only does she have to contend with sexual violence, but like all women, she is prey to a sense of physical helplessness. As a refugee, she leaves the familiar and safe homeground to venture into unknown and possibly dangerous terrain.
The poetic echo at the end of the essay is from the poem that opens Borderlands/La Frontera, in which Anzaldúa asserted, “This is my home / this thin edge of / barbwire” (3). Although the experience of the borderlands extends beyond specific figures and geographic locations, Anzaldúa’s pronominal shift as she returns to the language of her earlier poem (“This is my home .. . This is her home”) simultaneously grounds borderlands existence materially in the endangered figure of la mujer indocumentada.
The end of “The Homeland, Aztlán El otro México,” with these images of tension and danger, places the essay firmly within the first part of the trajectory I have been sketching out: Anzaldúa demonstrates the ways in which subjects are cast into abject positions as a result of binary thinking and how identities emerge as casualties of oppression, but she does not yet indicate fully whether such locations might be transformed into sites of resistance. In the second essay, “Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan “(Movements of rebellion and cultures of betrayal), however, that possibility once again emerges: “There in front of us is the crossroads and choice: to feel a victim where someone else is in control .. . or to feel strong, and, for the most part, in control. My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman’s history of resistance” (21). By the final essay, “La conciencia de la mestiza/To wards a New Consciousness,” the transformation that is initiated in the early essays (and that is presented in microcosm in Anzaldúa’s first poem) is complete.
Anzaldúa returns to material conditions such as those experienced by la mujer indocumentada throughout Borderlands/La Frontera. Hence the transformation represented in the text is not one that smooths over or escapes from conflict but rather one that locates and engages conflict. Anzaldúa’s border crossings do not perpetuate but instead bring to light the effacement of identity and history that patriarchal, Anglo-American power encourages. Borderlands I La Frontera also discourages purely celebratory appropriations (by theoretical hipsters) of borderlands existence, since such appropriations would universalize away specific experiences. Anzaldúa’s pronominal shift, in fact, reverses the course of appropriation. Instead of taking what is “yours” and making it “mine,” Anzaldúa moves in the opposite direction: “This is my home ... This is her home.” This is not to say by any means, that Anzaldúa discourages critical dialogue or coalition; it is simply to say that Anzaldúa’s text in many ways resists what Annamarie Jagose calls “utopic undifferentiation” (152) and, indeed, insists that critical dialogue proceed by specifying all the players in any given border conflict.10
Jagose reads Anzaldúa’s liminal position as a transcendent one and mistakes the critical mobility of the mestiza for an absolute mobility that would escape conflict. Jagose insists, “Borderlands installs and valorizes the mestiza as a figure whose traversals of the border between inside and outside ensure only a utopic undifferentiation, merging and indistinguish-ability” (152). Although I would not deny that Borderlands/La Frontera contains utopic moments, Jagose’s argument necessarily discounts Anzaldúa’s persistent attention to the material conditions of borderlands existence. Jagose’s “only” purifies Borderlands/La Frontera of its perverse insistence on specificity. Jagose argues that the text “ultimately represses” its understanding of the border and the mestiza “as the paradoxical site of undifferentiation and distinction” (157); only “utopic undifferentiation” remains in the end. According to Jagose’s “ultimate” logic, Anzaldúa’s concluding essay should valorize nothing but “merging and indistinguish-ability.”
In actuality, even in the final pages of the essay, the mestiza advances by differentiating and distinguishing the particular histories and conflicts the border cites:
This land has survived possession and ill-use by five countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the U.S., the Confederacy, and the U.S. again. It has survived Anglo-Mexican blood feuds, lynchings, burnings, rapes, pillage.
Today I see the Valley still struggling to survive... . The borderlands depression that was set off by the 1982 peso devaluation in Mexico resulted in the closure of hundreds of Valley businesses. Many people lost their homes, cars, land. Prior to 1982, U.S. store owners thrived on retail sales to Mexicans who came across the border for groceries and clothes and appliances. While goods on the U.S. side have become 10, 100, 1000 times more expensive for Mexican buyers, goods on the Mexican side have become 10, 100, 1000 times cheaper for Americans. Because the Valley is heavily dependent on agriculture and Mexican retail trade, it has the highest unemployment rates along the entire border region; it is the Valley that has been hardest hit. (90)
“Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the U.S., the Confederacy”—these signs mark specific restructurings of the borderlands. Furthermore, each restructuring repositions, and even multiplies, the players in this border conflict—players whom Anzaldúa’s account, in turn, renders distinguishable: the homeless, the unemployed, U.S. store owners, Mexican buyers, American shoppers. As this passage indicates, then, liminality might be understood as the opposite of transcendence: the mestiza sees more clearly not because she is “above it all” but because she is caught between colliding cultures.11
Thus, in “La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness,” Anzaldúa participates in the Chicano/a critical tradition in which the border marks not a site of transcendence but a geographical and metaphorical site of struggle. The “new consciousness” that the text enacts, however, encourages the mestiza to see herself as enabled, not immobilized, by the struggle. The final essay makes the transformation explicit:
The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain the contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. (79)
Anzaldúa’s “something else” is akin to the “something else” enacted by various texts in the Queer Renaissance: like Audre Lorde’s Zami, Anzaldúa’s mestiza queer understands identity through collectivity; like Randall Kenan’s queer trickster, she is determined to disrupt and transform both a specific locale and the dualistic, hierarchical systems of power that oppress her. In one of Anzaldúa’s earlier essays, included in This Bridge Called My Back, the collectivity-transformation equation is made explicit:
We are the queer groups, the people that don’t belong anywhere, not in the dominant world nor completely within our own respective cultures. Combined we cover so many oppressions. But the overwhelming oppression is the collective fact that we do not fit, and because we do not fit we are a threat. In El Mundo Zurdo [the Left-Handed World] I with my affinities and my people with theirs can live together and transform the planet. (“La Prieta,” 209)
Six years later, in Borderlands/La Frontera, this disruptive figure emerges once again, more fully developed: “Let us hope that the left hand, that of darkness, of femaleness, of ‘primitiveness,’ can divert the indifferent, right-handed, ‘rational’ suicidal drive that, unchecked, could blow us into acid rain in a fraction of a millisecond” (69). Over the course of the text, the mestiza queer moves from being a casualty of dualistic thinking to being an agent of transformation: “Su cuerpo es una bocacalle[Her body is an intersection]. La mestiza has gone from being the sacrificial goat to becoming the officiating priestess at the crossroads” (80). Earlier, “life in the borderlands” had been characterized by paralysis: “Petrified, she can’t respond, her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits” (20). In contrast, in the final essay, la mestiza uses the seemingly interminable condition of being “caught between” identities and cultures to actively mediate with and contest the various cultures and identities that come together at the crossroads.
The terms mestiza and queer function similarly in Anzaldúa’s work. Although she never obscures the specificity of oppressions that people experience (say, “homosexuals and others who deviate from the sexual common” [18], on the one hand, and people of color, such as la mujer indocumentada, on the other), Anzaldúa nonetheless sees “queer” and “mestiza” identity coming together in similar liminal and disruptive ways. Both mestizas and queers, after all, are among los atravesados,”those who cross over.” In “La conciencia de la mestiza/To wards a New Consciousness,” Anzaldúa explicitly probes how these identities inform each other, and in her work after Borderlands/La Frontera, she continues, insistently, to link them.
One of the first ways in which Anzaldúa brings these two identities together is in their formation: both result from attempts to identify and police deviant “others.” Judith Raiskin explains how the conflation of a marked sexual and racial “deviance” occurred historically and argues that Anzaldúa rewrites that legacy:
Categories of sexual behavior and identity created by nineteenth-and twentieth-century sexologists were also influenced by the classification systems of race, whereby people of color, particularly “mixed race” people, and homosexuals were conflated through the ideas of evolution and degeneration in the late nineteenth century. . . . Gloria Anzaldúa allows homosexuality and mixed-race identity to reflect each other by using and reworking the language of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory. (157; 159)12
In the queer context, the “marking” of “degeneration” is most evident in “La Prieta” (The dark-skinned one), the essay from This Bridge Called My Back that ends with the defiant assertion “We are the queer groups ... and because we do not fit we are a threat” (209). In that essay, Anzaldúa subjects queerness to a transformation similar to the one she will later perform on mestiza identity in Borderlands/La Frontera. In contrast to the defiant assertion with which the essay ends, “La Prieta” begins with an exclusionary marking. After explaining that her mother “fucked before the wedding ceremony” (199), Anzaldúa writes that her mother felt “guilt at having borne a child who was marked ‘con la seña [with the sin],’ thinking she had made me a victim of her sin. In her eyes and in the eyes of others I saw myself reflected as ‘strange,’ ‘abnormal,’ ‘QUEER.’ I saw no other reflection. Helpless to change that image, I retreated into books and solitude and kept away from others” (199). Like Horace in Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, Anzaldúa has looked in various “mirrors” and seen only inadequacy. At the end of “La Prieta,” however, Anzaldúa moves from a debilitating solitude to an enabling collectivity, as “we . . . the queer groups” turn the reflection/(mis)recognition against the glassmakers, whose ideology of “normalcy” requires and produces the “abnormal” and the “strange.”
Hence, and more important, Anzaldúa links mestiza and queer identities in terms of their function: to unmask Anglo, patriarchal, and heterosexual systems of power, which rest on binaristic foundations and which declare that some people “fit” while others do not. Nowhere, perhaps, is this similarity of purpose more clear than in “La conciencia de la mestiza/ Towards a New Consciousness,” where mestiza identity is bolstered by queerness and vice versa. There, immediately after situating la mestiza as the “officiating priestess at the crossroads,” Anzaldúa links mestiza identity to queerness. Furthermore, in this passage Anzaldúa reproduces even in her syntax the movement away from an understanding of mestiza and queer identity as individual and abject and toward an understanding of both as collective and transformative:
As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out, yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) . . . Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. (80–81)
From being outcast and disclaimed to being at the center of “all countries ... all races”—Anzaldúa’s syntax “gives new meaning” to “deviant” and individual mestiza/queer identities, reinventing them as collective and ensuring thereby that echoes of multiple subjectivity be heard around her (Yo) soy construction.
As the essay continues, the mediating, transformative role Anzaldúa assigns to la mestiza is clearly delegated to queers as well:
Being the supreme crossers of cultures, homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian, Native American, Latino, and with the queer in Italy, Australia and the rest of the planet. Our role is to link people with each other.. . . People, listen to what your joteria [queer contingent] is saying.
The mestizo and the queer exist at this time and point on the evolutionary continuum for a purpose. We are a blending that proves that all blood is intricately woven together, and that we are spawned out of similar souls. (84–85)
Significantly, the section heading that immediately follows this passage declares, “Somos una gente [We are a people]” (85), emphasizing a connected collectivity that is then underscored by the epigraph Anzaldúa employs for the ensuing section, which she takes from Gina Valdes’s Puentes y Fronteras: Coplas Chicanas (Bridges and borders: Chicana ballads):
Hay tantisimas fronteras
que dividen a la gente,
pero por cada frontera
existe también un puente.
[There are many, many borders
which divide people, but for every border
there exists also a bridge.]
(Borderlands/La Frontera, 85)
“What your jotería is saying,” then, is that attempts to separate absolutely “us” from “them” will fail, since bridges are always already conjoined to borders. The border crossing celebrated at the end of Anzaldúa’s essay section certainly engages conflict and is still only the beginning of a process, the results of which cannot be wholly predicted in advance. “Your jotería,” however, boldly envisions a transformed, less hierarchical world: “A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war” (80).
Anzaldúa’s reference to rape, violence, and war suggests that her mestiza queer comprehends the dangers of nationalism. Moreover, perhaps because of those dangers, the mestiza queer does not seek a hip Queer or Chicano “Nation” that would supplant, however metaphorically, the existing nations she criticizes. In this respect, Anzaldúa’s linkage of queer and mestiza identity differs from Cherríe Moraga’s linkage of queer and Chicana identity in “Queer Aztlan: The Re-formation of Chicano Tribe” (Last Generation, 145–74). In my mind, Anzaldúa’s mestiza queer has more theoretical promise than Moraga’s Queer Aztlan, which Moraga describes as a “Chicano homeland that could embrace all its people, including its joteria” (147). Moraga’s theory, like Anzaldúa’s, affirms identification across difference (“Chicana lesbians and gay men ... seek a nation strong enough to embrace a full range of racial diversities, human sexualities, and expressions of gender” [164]), but it nonetheless ends up locating (or “fixing”) another “nation,” whereas Anzaldúa’s theory, in the end, more rigorously queries both nations and nationalisms. (Borderlands I La Frontera, remember, moves from “The Homeland, Aztlan,” and to a new and flexible mestiza consciousness.)
Although Anzaldúa understands where more nationalistic theories are coming from, she nonetheless is fairly consistent, in Borderlands/La Frontera and elsewhere, in her advocacy for more connections outside of oneself or one’s groups:
A bridge excludes racial separatism. So the concept has taken a beating recently because of the reactionary times we’re going through and the upsurge in racism and white supremacy. But I can see that in the ‘90s a rainbow serpent bridge composed of the new mestizas/os, bi- and multiracial queer people who are mixed and politicized will rise up and become important voices in our gay, ethnic and other communities. (“To(o) Queer,” 260–61)
In this passage, the new mestiza again brings to light contradiction and conflict (racial separatism, reactionary times, racism, white supremacy),
but she simultaneously envisions the impossible “something else”: a rainbow bridge, a bridge without borders.
After mestiza queer identity emerges as a disruptive, transformative force at the end of the essay section of Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa celebrates/performs this critical “new consciousness” in “Un Agitado Viento/Ehecatl, The Wind,” the poetry section that comprises the second half of that text. The poems in this section reproduce the liminal linguistic position Anzaldúa introduces in the essays: some are written entirely in English, some in Spanish, some in a combination of the two. Some of the Spanish poems are followed by English translations; some are not. Once again, the liminality of these poems is also not simply linguistic; Anzaldúa forges a cultural mestiza identity by continuing to mix various myths and traditions (Spanish, Mexican, Native American). Finally, as with the Lorde poems I examined in my first chapter, the poetic voice itself often represents a coming together of various voices. At times, it is ambiguous whether the speaker is Anzaldúa, the women she loves, or a larger group of oppositional voices.
In “Arriba mi gente” (Rise up, my people), for example, Anzaldúa performs the mestiza queer consciousness that she advocated in her essays:
Chorus:Arriba mi gente [Rise up, my people],
toda gente arriba [all people, rise up].
In spirit as one,
all people arising
Toda la gente junta [all the people united]
en busca del Mundo Zurdo [in search of the Left-
Handed World]
en busca del Mundo Zurdo. (192)
The chorus to this poem is mestiza in its mixture of Spanish and English and queer in its invocation of el Mundo Zurdo, which Anzaldúa previously identified as the world of “the queer groups, the people that don’t belong anywhere” (“La Prieta,” 209). El Mundo Zurdo is also the place where transformation is possible, and here again, queer mestiza identity and el Mundo Zurdo are linked to collectivity and transformation: the poem ends with the imperative “Arriba, despierta mi gente[Rise up, awake my people] / a liberar los pueblos[to liberate the masses] / Arriba mi gente, despierta[Rise up my people, awake]” (193). The dedication to the poem—“para Tirsa Quinones who wrote the music and Cherríe Moraga who sang it” (192)—underscores that this is a performance; mestiza queer identity is literally “staged” here and is at once individual and collective: Anzaldúa, Quiñones, and Moraga come together as one mestiza queer voice. In this context also, “chorus” might be read as “a group of people singing together” or as what Lorde envisions in Need as “a chorale of women’s voices” (7), rather than simply as “a refrain,” so that the collective identity extends even beyond those Anzaldúa explicitly names.
Hence, in Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa—”trapped” by identities (“queer,” “mestiza”) that are not supposed to fit anywhere—works those identities against the systemic forces that produce them as “other,” “deviant.” In the process, mestiza queer identity moves from being a site of individual abjection to one of collective transformation. The transformation mestiza queer identity advances is a transformation of hierarchies that perpetuate domination of individuals and groups on the basis of race, class, gender, and sexuality: “mestiza” speaks to and for those subordinated because of their race, class, and gender; “queer,” to those subordinated because of their sexuality, gender, and—because Anzaldúa understands it as a “working-class word”—class (“To(o) Queer,” 250). Even this schema-tization, however, is ultimately too easy, too neat. The mestiza queer as Anzaldúa deploys her moves away from easy categorizations, seeking instead to understand, for instance, how race complicates gendered issues or how class confounds simplistic, unexamined assumptions about sexuality.13 Anzaldúa contests the demarcation of borders intended to divide people neatly, highlighting instead the overlapping margins that belie such attempts to divide absolutely.
In her work after Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa continues to reinvent mestiza/queer identity. In “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island: Lesbians-of-Color Hacienda Alianzas[Forging Alliances],” she writes, “The mestiza queer is mobile, constantly on the move, a traveler, callejera[gadabout], a cortacalles[jaywalker]. Moving at the blink of an eye, from one space, one world to another, each world with its own peculiar and distinct inhabitants, not comfortable in anyone of them, none of them ‘home/yet none of them ‘not home’ either” (218). The mestiza queer “mobility” detailed here is quite different from various white, male, and heterosexual mobilities. In contrast to the extreme comfort Kerouac’s boys feel among the “peculiar and distinct inhabitants” of Mexico (inhabitants who, despite their peculiarity, are nonetheless recognizably hip, as far as Sal and the boys are concerned), the mestiza queer feels discomfort everywhere she goes. There is no magical end of the road for this gadabout as she drifts from place to place, and her travels and crossings are, like jaywalking, usually unsanctioned by, and in opposition to, “the law.” Furthermore, as Anzaldúa’s essay continues, it becomes clear that this traveler’s goal is to identify those who claim unlimited access to her life and experience: those who attempt to “fix” her, to mark her as “other,” to name and dismiss her experience. She calls her family and Chicana/o communities generally to task for their “heterosexist bullshit” and anti-feminism (218); she critiques white lesbians for their “exclusionary or racist remarks” (218); she feels empathy with men of color, “only to be saddened that they need ... to be educated about women-only space” (219).
In short, Anzaldúa counters the unchecked mobility of others with a mobility intent on unmasking the hierarchies and exclusions they perpetuate. This critical mobility animates a politics of alliance:14
In alliance we are confronted with the problem of how we share or don’t share space, how we can position ourselves with individuals or groups who are different from and at odds with each other, how can we reconcile one’s love for diverse groups when members of these groups do not love each other, cannot relate to each other, and don’t know how to work together. (219)
As “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island” continues, Anzaldúa emphasizes (literally) the importance of identifying and countering oppressive relations of power: “coalition work attempts to balance power relations and undermine and subvert the system of domination-sub ordination that affects even our most unconscious thoughts” (224–25).
In “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana [Crazy woman, writer, and Chicana],” Anzaldúa again brings together queer and mestiza identities, asserting, “The new mestiza queers have the ability, the flexibility, the malleability, the amorphous quality of being able to stretch this way and that way. We can add new labels, names and identities as we mix with others” (279). This malleability and amorphism, used in the service of unmasking the operations of domination-subordination, is not unlike the image with which Anzaldúa closes the essay section of Borderlands/La Frontera. Although the earlier image in Borderlands/La Frontera is not so much a “working” of identity as a more literal working of the land, both images emerge from the desire for a radically different world:
The Chicano and Chicana have always taken care of growing things and the land. ... Growth, death, decay, birth. The soil prepared again and again, impregnated, worked on. A constant changing of forms, renacimientos de la tierra madre [renascences of Mother Earth].
This land was Mexican once
was Indian always
and is.
And will be again. (Borderlands/La Frontera, 91)
Significantly, Anzaldúa’s renacimientos here intersect with the understanding of “renaissances” I am advancing as a critical context for all the writers of the Queer Renaissance. Anzaldúa does not seek an escape from history and location; instead, her renacimientos, with their “constant changing of forms,” seek a re-vision of history, identity, and location. The reemergence of the refrain from Anzaldúa’s earliest poem in Borderlands/La Frontera (“This land was Mexican once / was Indian always / and is”) underscores her connection of these renacimientos to alternative histories of resistance. Moreover, because of the transformation Anzaldúa puts into play over the course of the text, the refrain at this point is even more of a defiant assertion than it was in the earlier essay. It is, literally and symbolically, the last word of Anzaldúa’s essay section. Because of Chicano/a, mestizo/a, and queer flexibility and malleability, Anzaldúa is able to shape life in the borderlands, where formerly “ambivalence and unrest” resided and death was “no stranger” (4), into something vibrant and triumphant, like the plants that emerge out of the dead ground.
The note of triumph sounds most clearly in “La conciencia de la mestizal Towards a New Consciousness,” but it is foreshadowed as early as the preface to Borderlands I La Frontera, where Anzaldúa asserts, “There is an exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of humankind, in being ‘worked’ on. I have the sense that certain ‘faculties’—not just in me but in every border resident, colored or non-colored—and dormant areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened. Strange, huh?” (preface, no page number). Over the course of Borderlands I La Frontera, Anzaldúa establishes that the evolutionary process is ongoing. The “exhilaration” she feels is not transcendence; “work” here, as the image of working the land much later in the text suggests, entails a grounding in location and history. Moreover, the mestiza queer’s own work is not done once she has shed light on the border guards. Instead, the “faculties being activated” within the mestiza queer provide her with the mobility necessary to shed light on all the players and overlapping locations in this border struggle. Anzaldúa encourages those in all the geographical and theoretical communities through which she moves to consider the tensions and contradictions they embody and the ways in which their locations overlap with other locations, whether privileged or marginalized. Thus, Anzaldúa even queers “queer” if she sees the concept interpellated as a fad and appropriated by theoretical hipsters seeking escape from identity and history.
The work of Judith Butler can help both in considering how such a queering moves forward and in complicating questions of agency in Borderlands/La Frontera. As the invocation of evolution should confirm, the mestiza queer’s movement is not simplistically voluntaristic; instead, the queer agency Anzaldúa theorizes (where certain unexpected “faculties” are “awakened”) exemplifies Butler’s insistence that the subject “is always the nexus, the non-space of cultural collision, in which the demand to resignify or repeat the very terms which constitute the ‘we’ cannot be summarily refused, but neither can they be followed in strict obedience” (Butler, Bodies That Matter, 124). Butler’s understanding of performativity as “working the weakness in the norm” (237), in turn, glosses Anzaldúa’s own performance of mestiza queer identity as that which is produced but never fully contained by the border or border guards.
In a parody of the ways in which some have understood her notion of “gender performativity” from Gender Trouble, Butler writes in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” “If I were to argue that genders are performative, that could mean that I thought that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night” (x). Distancing herself from such voluntarism, Butler explores in Bodies That Matter the possibility of a “repetition that fails to repeat loyally” the identities into which one has already been cast (220). If binaristic systems of power demand that some embody, over and over, abject identity positions (say, “mestiza,” “queer”), those same abjecting systems also provide “the occasion to work the mobilizing power of injury, of an interpellation one never chose” (123). Using recent theoretical and political citations of “queer” as an example, Butler explains:
Paradoxically, but also with great promise, the subject who is “queered” into public discourse through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that very term as the discursive basis for an opposition. This kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses. The hyperbolic gesture is crucial to the exposure of the homophobic “law” that can no longer control the terms of its own abjecting strategies. (232)
Likewise, Anzaldúa, in the process of “citing” the mestiza identity she did not choose and that she experiences as an open wound at the beginning of Borderlands/La Frontera, renders hyperbolic and reverses the conventions of an Anglo-American discursive regime that would subordinate mestizas/os, “keeping them in their place” while reserving unchecked mobility for itself. Anzaldúa’s “disloyal repetition” of mestiza queer identity both figures the border as always already transgressed by those who were supposed to be immobilized by it and turns the searchlight on those who fixed the border in the first place.
Repetitions can be “disloyal,” however, not only to dualistic ideologies that would compel mestizas, queers, and others to embody abjection but also to “alternative” discursive regimes that would compel them to embody “hipness.” Anzaldúa writes:
If I have to pick an identity label in the English language, I pick “dyke” or “queer,” though these working-class words (formerly having “sick” connotations) have been taken over by white middle-class lesbians in the academy. Queer is used as a false unifying umbrella which all “queers” of all races, ethnicities and classes are shoved under. At times we need this umbrella to solidify our ranks against outsiders. But even when we seek shelter under it we must not forget that it homogenizes, erases our differences. (“To(o) Queer,” 250).
In this passage, Anzaldúa repeats with a difference even her own previous endorsement of queerness; “queers” here are no longer simply “the supreme crossers of cultures” who have bonds with “the rest of the planet.” Still, despite the shift, Anzaldúa’s cautions here reiterate one of the main tenets of her theory: what is needed is not an effacement of identity and history but a grappling with specific identities and histories, particularly histories of oppression and exploitation. The mestiza queer theory Anzaldúa advocates refuses to let dominant identities travel unmarked under the banner of a unifying hipness—in this case, an overly celebratory, transcendent, and unmarked white queerness that elides its contiguity to privilege and disavows any policing role it might continue to play in and around the borderlands. Queerness may provide a useful bridge, but as always for Anzaldúa, a bridge is never in and of itself cause for celebration. She writes elsewhere that “being a bridge . . . may mean a partial loss of self. Being ‘there’ for people all the time, mediating all the time means risking being ‘walked’ on, being ‘used.’ I and my publishing credentials are often ‘used’ to ‘colorize’ white women’s grant proposals, projects, lecture series, and conferences. If I don’t cooperate I am letting the whole feminist movement down” (“Bridge, Drawbridge,” 223). As with feminism, so too with queer theory: even (or perhaps particularly) beneath the sign of queerness, whiteness must be marked and white privilege challenged. When white middle-class lesbians and gay men “frame the terms of debate,” Anzaldúa suggests, “they police the queer person of color with theory . . . Their theories limit the ways we think about being queer” (“To(o) Queer,” 251).15
Anzaldúa’s cautions here, in her comments and in the title of this later essay (“To(o) Queer the Writer”), signal a certain retreat from the identity “queer.” Yet this is the essay that includes the bold assertion I have already quoted: “The new mestiza queers have the ability, the flexibility, the malleability, the amorphous quality of being able to stretch this way and that way” (249). Anzaldúa’s retreat, then, is not from queerness per se but from monolithic and overly celebratory understandings of it.16 Indeed, Anzaldúa’s title obviously anticipates this double move: “to queer” calls readers and writers to action at the same time that “too queer” cautions them. Anzaldúa shapes—as she has since This Bridge Called My Back, long before queerness was hip—what Butler might call a “critical queerness” (Bodies That Matter, 223): a queerness that is both critically necessary and critical of itself; a queerness that insists on foregrounding, and hence undermining, the ways in which identities (even, potentially, other queer identities) are structured in domination so that certain histories of exploitation or appropriation are effaced. As Butler explains:
As expansive as the term “queer” is meant to be, it is used in ways that enforce a set of overlapping divisions: in some contexts, the term appeals to a younger generation who want to resist the more institutionalized and reformist politics sometimes signified by “lesbian and gay”; in some contexts, sometimes the same, it has marked a predominantly white movement that has not fully addressed the way in which “queer” plays—or fails to play—within non-white communities; and whereas in some instances it has mobilized a lesbian activism, in others the term represents a false unity of women and men. Indeed, it may be that the critique of the term will initiate a resurgence of both feminist and anti-racist mobilization within lesbian and gay politics or open up new possibilities for coalitional alliances that do not presume that these constituencies are radically distinct from one another. (Bodies That Matter, 228–29)
Anzaldúa’s titular use of the phrase “to(o) queer” is a critical redeployment of the term precisely in the service of the “feminist and anti-racist mobilization” Butler envisions here. Butler’s call for attention to how queer may or may not play in nonwhite communities, in turn, is a recognition, à la Anzaldúa, that it should not be solely white middle-class lesbians and gay men (such as Butler or myself) who “frame the terms of the debate.”
Anzaldúa and Butler come together at this point not only in their critical understanding of queerness but also in their emphasis on coalition. Just as mestiza queer agency is not simplistically voluntaristic, neither is it simply individual. Indeed, as with Zami in my first chapter, mestiza queer identity is not simplistically voluntaristic precisely because it is not individual. I have already examined some ways in which Anzaldúa performs a collective mestiza queer identity in the poetry section of Borderlands/La Frontera. The emphasis on “coalition and alliance building” (“Bridge, Drawbridge,” 229) is evident throughout her work and is a central component of the mestiza queer identity she theorizes: “Dime con quien andas,” she writes, quoting a Mexican saying, “y te dire quien eres [Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are]” (Borderlands I La Frontera, 62). Her commitment to identity through collectivity is undoubtedly one reason why two of Anzaldúa’s most important contributions to feminist, multiethnic, and lesbian/gay studies have been anthologies: This Bridge Called My Back, which she coedited with Cherríe Moraga, and Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Car as. The former text has been credited by many with revolutionizing feminism, and although neither text is marketed as “lesbian/gay,” I would argue that both—because of the collective and disruptive queer positions they advance—should be seen as central texts in queer studies and in the Queer Renaissance as well.17
Long before taking the magical journey across the border, Kerouac’s Sal Paradise heads to San Francisco. He explains, “There were plenty of queers. Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar John I took out the gun and said ‘Eh? Eh? What’s that you say?’ He bolted. I’ve never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country” (On the Road, 73). Despite Sal’s incredulity at his own actions, queer readers of On the Road might provide an answer to his quandary: Sal acts as he does to ensure an unlimited mobility for himself (indeed, “all over the country” and beyond), while simultaneously policing “others” who, with their mobility, might expose and disrupt the privileged positions he occupies. Such a mobility, which ultimately reinforces relations of domination-subordination, stands in stark contrast to the mestiza queer mobility Anzaldúa champions. “Allies,” Anzaldúa writes, “remember that the foreign woman, ‘the alien,’ is nonacayocapo which in Nahuatl means one who possesses body (flesh) and blood like me. Aliadas, recuerda que la mujer ajena tambien es nonacayocapo, la que tiene cuerpos y sangre como yo” (“Bridge, Drawbridge,” 229). Queer mestizas cross borders not in order to consolidate definitions of “self” and “other” or to appropriate the “exotic” and transcend the “self” but rather to unmask the separations and disavowals the border perpetuates and to locate, in a transformed borderlands, others/allies who can similarly imagine a queer, more humane, new world.