Professor Rabinowitz 3/30

Anzaldúa 3/30

“Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (Anzaldúa 109)

Professor Rabinowitz facilitated a conversation about Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera. Professor Rabinowitz framed the work in the context of the feminist movement of the 70s and 80s, which largely excluded feminists of color and lesbian feminists. Anzaldúa’s text, in addition to being a central Chicano text, was also a response to this exclusion.
We first addressed Anzaldúa’s assertion that borders do not only exist as the line between nation-states, but also conceptually in all different areas of the world (patriarchy, language, religion, etc). We questioned both the content of Anzaldúa’s argument and her means of arguing it. If she really wanted to resist borders, many students asked why does she exclude people by writing in Spanish? Also, we spent some time exploring why people felt confronted by various strong ‘attacking’ statements she makes; “the dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance” (108) or “Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity” (106).
In this conversation, however, we need to remember that Anzaldúa desired this discomfort and sees it as an essential step towards change. In the first chapter Anzaldúa describes the border as “un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab can form it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (25). For Anzaldúa the border is also a metaphor for how we understand knowledge. Every time we come up against challenging issues (and when we’re not confronting challenging issues we’re probably not learning) we are in some sort of borderlands (although we’re possibly on different ‘sides’ of the border). Being in this place is usually painful, but it is more painful (although necessary) to get out of it—she writes, “every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a travesía, a crossing. I am an alien in a new territory. And again, and again. But if I escape conscious awareness, escape “knowing,” I won’t be moving” (70).
This is why whenever we come to new consciousnesses we have to develop a “tolerance for ambiguity” we need to recognize as the mestiza women Anzaldúa describes knows; “she has discovered that she can’t hold concepts of ideas in rigid boundaries” (101) because this creates new borders. This is more challenging said than done because to some extent our current knowledge system depends on the assumption of boundaries and contradictions. But I agree with Anzaldúa, that “the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures” (102). It is the ‘how’ that we need to figure out.