Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity: Pieces, Shuffles, Layers 9783031218699, 9783031218705

Citation preview

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity Pieces, Shuffles, Layers

Romana Radlwimmer

Literatures of the Americas

Series Editor

Norma E. Cantú San Antonio, TX, USA

The Literature of the Americas series seeks to establish a conversation between and among scholars working in different Latina/o/x and Latin American cultural contexts across historical and geographical boundaries. Designed to explore key questions confronting contemporary issues of literary and cultural transfers, the series, rooted in traditional frameworks to literary criticism, includes cutting-edge scholarly work using theories such as postcolonial, critical race, or ecofeminist approaches. With a particular focus on Latina/o/x realities in the United States, the books in the series support an inclusive and all-encompassing vision of what constitutes literary and textual studies that includes film, arts, popular culture, and traditional and avant-garde cultural expressions. Editorial Board Larissa M. Mercado-López, California State University, Fresno, USA Ricardo Ortiz, Georgetown University, USA Romana Radlwimmer, Goethe-University of Frankfurt, Germany Ana Maria Manzanas, University of Salamanca, Spain

Romana Radlwimmer

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity Pieces, Shuffles, Layers

Romana Radlwimmer University of Tübingen Institute for Romance Languages and Literatures Frankfurt am Main, Germany

ISSN 2634-601X     ISSN 2634-6028 (electronic) Literatures of the Americas ISBN 978-3-031-21869-9    ISBN 978-3-031-21870-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Baac3nes/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Performative Concepts of the Americas 1 2 Scissors and Glue: Material Writing Dynamics17 3 Bones and Skin: Anzaldúa’s Bodymindsouls27 4 Colors and Shapes: From Borderlands to Nepantla41 5 Three Museums: “Border Arte’s” Multiplications61 6 A Hemispheric Perspective on Anzaldúan Textualities73 Bibliography83 Index89

v

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5

Liliana Wilson: Bearing Witness (2002). Courtesy of Liliana Wilson50 Liliana Wilson: El color de la esperanza (1987). Courtesy of Liliana Wilson 51 Verónica Castillo: Protectores de la Madre Tierra (2015). Courtesy of Verónica Castillo 55 Verónica Castillo: Mujeres abrazando a la madre tierra (2017). Courtesy of Verónica Castillo 56 Verónica Castillo: Madre Tonantzín (2013). Courtesy of Verónica Castillo 57

vii

CHAPTER 1

Performative Concepts of the Americas

Introducing a Theory in Motion In the preface to her 1990 anthology Making Face, Making Soul, Gloria Anzaldúa programmatically declared theory to be a performative act. She envisioned ideas in the making, thoughts formulated as politically engaged acts, theories maneuvering between different experiences: Necesitamos teorías that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries – new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods. (Anzaldúa 1990, xxv)

Consequently, Anzaldúa’s texts blend diverse notions and narratives. Flows of thought are repeated, varied, rewritten, dismissed, rehabilitated. They collide, they are not stable. Just when one believes to have tracked down and mastered a clear concept, it seems to slip away as swiftly as it appeared. The ideas’ only stability seems to be their performativity. As Norma Alarcón wittily noted, Anzaldúa’s writing is a conjunctive assemblage, a cornucopia of possibilities which leads readers as herself to follow what they believe “to be one important ‘line’” in Anzaldúan textualities (Alarcón 2012, 190). Anzaldúa’s destabilized texts on literature, arts,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Radlwimmer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity, Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5_1

1

2 

R. RADLWIMMER

bodies, identities, spirituality, or cultures require a performative reader which she once defined: Let the reader beware […]: s/he must do the work of piecing this text together. The categories in this work reflect our fragmented and interrupted dialogue which is said to be a discontinued and incomplete discourse. The method of organizing the book was largely that of poetic association, another way of organizing experience, one that reflects our lives and the way outminds work. As the perspective and the focus shift, as the topic shifts, the listener/reader is forced to connect the dots, to connect the fragments. (Anzaldúa 1990, xvii–xviii)

The Chicana writer invited readers to arrange the dispersed pieces of thought according to their own understanding, experience, and life horizon. She entitled them to control how ideas evolved and engaged them in performative acts which renewed, reinterpreted, and repositioned concepts every time the receptive process happened. The transformative quality of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory has long been highlighted by many excellent studies which discussed, for instance, Anzaldúa’s oscillating texts regarding her political engagement and her spirituality, as textual hybridity, or sexual and gender identity (Sandoval 2002; Ohmer 2010; Alarcón 2012; Keating 2013; Vivancos Pérez 2013; Carroll 2015; Pitts 2021; Zaytoun 2022). To date, however, little work has thoroughly examined, firstly, in which ways the Chicana writer’s last book, Light in the Dark, shed new light on the dynamic composition of her textual worlds, and, secondly, how Anzaldúa contributed to a larger hemispheric tendency of performative feminisms. As a result, scholarship on performativity endorses a narrative frequently shaped by well-known earlier works such as Borderlands and by a Chicanx and Latinx context. Without an adequate analysis of Anzaldúa’s newest conceptualizations of performativity, and without situating the Chicana writer as quintessential figure of a critical juncture of theory making in the Americas, we undervalue the impact of Anzaldúa’s interventions, ultimately overlooking the wider frame of her lifelong work on transformations. My book, Pieces, Shuffles, Layers: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity, remedies this gap by investigating the variable approaches to performativity Anzaldúa proposed throughout the years, and by regarding Anzaldúa’s work from a hemispheric point of view which locates her theory in the wave of feminist performativity emerging in the Americas at the turn of

1  PERFORMATIVE CONCEPTS OF THE AMERICAS 

3

the millennium. My close reading of Anzaldúa’s texts, contexts, and co-­ texts brings out the constant changes in her intertwined phases of literary and conceptual production. The text corpus reaches from This Bridge and Making Face to Interviews, Borderlands and Light in the Dark, and includes other documents and archival papers. The Chicana writer articulated her notions on fluctuations through what I call “performative concepts” which did not respect the borders of single texts or editions, but organically grew through them. These performative concepts—on questions concerning performativity—arose out of the piecing, shuffling, and layering of her texts. The hard-to-grasp quality of Anzaldúa’s “theory always in motion” (Ohmer 2010, 143), or “ebb and flow of varying relations of multiplicity” (Pitts 2021, 12), implied an ethics of transformation which shaped feminist, queer, and decolonial discourse. Chela Sandoval was of the first ones to elaborate on Anzaldúa’s perpetual enactment of social and political positionalities (Sandoval 2002, 25). In her comprehensive study on the politically engaged transformative aspects of Anzaldúa’s work, AnaLouise Keating highlighted Anzaldúa’s relational approach to feminist theory and her employment of a performative language (Keating 2013, 32, 127). Amy Sara Carroll saw Borderlands, published in 1987, as “puro performativity,” as a “journey, a process, an invitation,” and as a queer “text that explodes, implodes, multiplies like female orgasm” (Carroll 2015, 197–198). Norma Alarcón analyzed Anzaldúa’s continuous attempt to convert chaos into order and her persistent pursuing of new meaning as a quest for personal and political decolonization (Alarcón 2012, 189–190). In the same line, Sarah Ohmer assessed the decolonial significance of Anzaldúa’s “performative, corporal and malleable” texts (Ohmer 2010, 143). Concentrating on her writing practice shaped by these dynamics, Ricardo Vivancos Pérez pointed out Anzaldúa’s relentless dedication to drafting and polishing her texts. Borderlands was a milestone in her ongoing search for method, but it was just one step in a larger, lifelong project of ongoing reformulations. Anzaldúa’s “thought is performative” because it “emerges as a continuum of accumulations, reformulations, additions, and provisional syntheses” (Vivancos Pérez 2013, 30). Accordingly, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce found a “laundry-list of items” in his notes on Anzaldúa’s references, from Marx, Vasconcelos, Said, and Freud to Nietzsche, Foucault, Habermas, Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, or Carlos Castañeda (Capetillo-Ponce 2006, 88).

4 

R. RADLWIMMER

These analyses either shortly mention or centrally analyze the moving quality of Anzaldúa’s writing, illustrating the directions Anzaldúa’s performativity took. They showed that, among other options, it referred to political engagement, sexuality, spirituality, coloniality, linguistics, and literary drafting or scientific referencing. However, the studies either were conducted before Light in the Dark (2015) or did not specifically take into account the performativity of Anzaldúa’s posthumously published work and the new dynamics it generated in interaction with her earlier texts. They focused on specific aspects of Anzaldúa’s transformations, such as Kelli Zaytoun’s meticulous study on the shapeshifting quality of naguala— originally a Mesoamerican spiritual concept recovered and rewritten by Anzaldúa—, which, in “its final appearance,” is also a “performance” (Zaytoun 2022, 39). Meanwhile, the present study emphasizes a decolonial and feminist performativity as a broad overarching perspective of Anzaldúa’s work, leading through her writing practice and literary theory, determining her body experiences and politics, or designing the cultural spaces she conceptualized. Moreover, this book explores Anzaldúa’s performativity as part of a hemispheric tendency. Toward the end of the twentieth century, feminist theory of the Americas incorporated performative categories when approaching and analyzing literary and cultural phenomena. Anzaldúa, thus, participated in an epistemological turn which emanated from places as disperse as the Cono Sur, the Southern Cone of the Hemisphere, the Caribbean, or, as in this case, the Mexican-US borderlands. In the analysis of the performative it is important, as Norma Alarcón once put it, “to clarify what the shift consists of and for whom” (Alarcón 2003, 404), and, one might add, where and when it is carried out, and by which actors. With Light in the Dark in mind and after nearly two decades of experience in the Anzaldúan archives, Alarcón’s critical intervention still nudges doubts, and sets the tone for the pivotal research questions of this book: what are the dimensions of Anzaldúa’s performativity today? In which ways do her earlier and later performative concepts interact? How does Anzaldúa modify the performative through the years? Do her concepts continuously blur the same boundaries? How has performativity shaped her writing since the 1970s? How do Anzaldúa’s transformative notions echo other performative feminisms of the hemisphere? This study sets out to reevaluate these questions, allowing different time periods of Anzaldúa’s literary production to communicate with each other, and investigating the interplay of the discursive and the material

1  PERFORMATIVE CONCEPTS OF THE AMERICAS 

5

aspects of her performativity. Gloria Anzaldúa participated in what Clifford Geertz called the “alteration of the principles of mapping,” or the production of “hybrid texts” taking place at the end of the twentieth century: Geertz was intrigued by philosophical inquiries looking like literary criticism, by scientific discussions looking like belles lettres, baroque fantasies presented as empirical observations, documentaries that read like true confessions, parables posing as ethnographies, theoretical treatises set out as travelogues, or by epistemological studies constructed like political tracts (Geertz 2000, 19–20). To scholars like Jonathan Culler, such textual hybridity reflects the very nature of theory, a “miscellaneous genre” which succeeds in “reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which” it belongs (Culler 2000, 3). Anzaldúa designed her texts in a hybrid way, blending, for instance, genres, stylistic devices, or themes; however, she also went beyond the creation of ambiguous, hybrid texts as she placed shifts at the center of her theory, and at the center of the configuration of her concepts. She articulated her notions on transformations and movements through “performative concepts,” the term I propose to show that her ideas were not limited to a singular text but expanded through several writings and editions. By tracing the complex, changing histories of her concepts, they become—maybe not fully, as they tend to disappear and to reappear somewhere else, but more satisfactorily—graspable. Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the performative and her performativity of concepts belong together. Both levels are not necessarily a chain of cause and effect but interact flexibly. Anzaldúa’s way of setting up ideas reflects the phenomena she theorizes, and vice versa. In this sense, performativity appears to be one of Anzaldúa’s central epistemological principles, functioning as a guiding mechanism through her texts, shaping her concepts, asking how to see the invisible, how to stabilize the unstable, how to hold on to constant movement.

Hemispheric Performativity In the last decades, performativity has emerged as a main theoretic intervention and innovation of theories and fictional writing of the Americas, that is, the so-called Western hemisphere, or the area of the globe west of the prime meridian and east of the International Date Line (National Geographic). “Hemisphere,” and the large continental mass it designates, is far from being an innocent term, but is linked to colonial and nationalist

6 

R. RADLWIMMER

historiography and map-making (Padrón 2004; Calcott 1968). And yet, as other problematic designations, “hemisphere” has become a site of rewritings and a possibility to rethink the Americas “from top to bottom” (Castillo 2005, 192). In this book, “hemisphere” signifies an interweaving of texts and conversations from different American locations, making otherwise undetected networks of thought visible. In my earlier work, I analyzed how the feminist writers Rosario Ferré (*1938–2016, Puerto Rico), Nelly Richard (*1948, France/Chile), and Luisa Valenzuela (*1938, Argentina) shaped their conceptual work through performativity (Radlwimmer 2015). Contemplating flows of literature and migration between Puerto Rico and the US, Ferré saw languages as filters in which thought constantly moves and boils in a burning, magma-like state; contesting Cono Sur’s dictatorships, Luisa Valenzuela self-consciously developed texts in movement and about the quality of moving as means of resistance, while Nelly Richard sought to move ubications, to untie, to circulate bodies and texts beyond the oppressive military mold (Ferré 2001, 177–178; Valenzuela 2002, 126; Richard 1994, 9). While these critics linked the performative mode to their respective cultural-­ political contexts, they constructed a hemispheric intellectual panorama which moved movement to the core of attention. In this book, I do not reexamine their theories in detail, but by mentioning them, I wish to situate Anzaldúa’s dynamic textual worlds and to highlight that her approach was not a singular event. Much rather, her performativity essentially formed part of this hemispheric tendency which can be detected on various levels and throughout different bodies of work. Performativity is central, for instance, to the Argentinian writers and thinkers Sylvia Molloy (1938–2022), Griselda Gambaro (*1928), and Perla Suez (*1947), who introduced acts of trespassing, thresholds, liminal phases and who relied on the body and its transformations (González 2016). At the turn of the millennium, the idea of moving beyond, between, and among became so influential that Hermann Herlinghaus described “the critical conceptual figure” of “performativity” as the new “commonplace” for Latin American intellectual and artistic production; Diane Taylor, blending performance studies, Latin American and Latino studies as a methodological path, traced the “messy entanglements” which, in her eyes, constituted hemispheric performativity (Herlinghaus 2000, 127; Taylor 2003, 2, 274). In 2019, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra even proclaimed a Latin American “performative turn” to summarize a phenomenon manifesting all over the Americas, especially from the late 1970s to the early

1  PERFORMATIVE CONCEPTS OF THE AMERICAS 

7

1990s and onward. The diversification of aesthetics and participatory politics had allowed performativity to take center stage by displaying the live body, bodily vulnerability, or by reconfiguring relationships between subject and object, art, space, the artist, and the public (Polgovsky Ezcurra 2019, 5). Gloria Anzaldúa consciously regarded the greater hemispheric and global networks which were constituted by projects like hers, and which at the same time nurtured them. She said, “the ideas are out there because we are all in more or less the same territory. […] In reflecting on what we know and on our experiences we come up with these paradigms, concepts of what life is about” (Anzaldúa 2000, 267). The shared access to certain cultural goods, practices, and perspectives co-created hemispheric tendencies of thought which ultimately showed, as Anzaldúa placed it, that “[w]e are all […] connected to each other in the web of existence” (Anzaldúa 2015, 83). Anzaldúa was aware that, while the ideas overlapped, they did not automatically coincide in meaning, nor did they necessarily appear with the same designations: “Those theorists give it different terms than I do” (Anzaldúa 2000, 267). Anzaldúa frequently employed the words “performance” and “perform,” whether she talked about daily acts which may alter reality, or about rituals or to honor life and spiritual wisdom (Anzaldúa 2015, 20, 26). Thus, she saw the performative as a cultural-political force, but also reclaimed its anthropological semantics, as introduced in Turner’s Ritual Process (Turner 1969), from a feminist, decolonial point of view and proposed the performative as a life practice. This book analyzes performativity as rather undisciplined, but inherent structure of Anzaldúan thought; however, the Chicana theorist did not explicitly talk about “performativity.” The term is commonly ascribed to those linguistic philosophers who wondered how to do things with words and how the performative works (Austin 1962; Searle 1989), but gained popularity in a broader cultural sense, and far beyond the framework of feminist theory, with Judith Butler. In 1988, Butler postulated the category of gender to be an act, a “performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform” (Butler 1988, 520). In the preface to the 1999 reedition of Gender Trouble (1990), Butler admitted that she had spent the last decade rethinking the slippery idea of performativity. She added that “[i]t is difficult to say precisely what performativity is not only because my own views on what ‘performativity’ might mean have changed over time, […] but because so many others have taken

8 

R. RADLWIMMER

it up and given it their own formulations” (Butler 1999, xiv). While Butler claimed “her” ideas to be influential on others, she also acknowledged the common, communal thinking process which accompanied the hemispheric unfolding of the popular concept of performativity. Butler’s notion of performativity and Anzaldúa’s texts seem to lack clear connections, and a perceived erasure or simplification of Anzaldúa’s 1980s thought in 1990s queer performative thought, represented by writings such as Butler’s, has been criticized (Keating 2009, 5; Back 2019, 8). Butler knew Anzaldúa’s work and incorporated its elements among other sources to analyze the category of gender. In Gender Trouble, Butler talked about her own “listing the varieties of [racial, class, and heterosexist]oppression, as I began to do, [which] assumes their discrete, sequential coexistence along a horizontal axis that does not describe their convergences within the social field. A vertical model is similarly insufficient; oppressions cannot be summarily ranked, causally related” (Butler 1999, 20). She based these intersectional considerations, ultimately necessary to advance her notion of performativity, on Cherríe Moraga’s piece “La Güera,” included in Anzaldúa’s and Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back (Butler 1999, 197). In Bodies that Matter (1993), Butler defined subjects “at the juncture of discursive demands” as “something like a ‘crossroads,’ to use Gloria Anzaldúa’s phrase, a crossroads of cultural and political discursive forces” (Butler 1993, 124). This way, Butler supported her considerations on the performative construction of subjects through Anzaldúan thought. In Undoing Gender (2004), in a subchapter titled “Beyond the Subject with Anzaldúa and Spivak,” Butler talked most explicitly about the Chicana theorist’s contribution to performativity, which, in Butler’s view, Anzaldúa established by conceptualizing her own “identity, an identity culturally staged and produced by the very complex historical circumstances of her life” (Butler 2004, 228). After introducing Anzaldúa’s multilingual Borderlands/La Frontera and her capacity to cross all types of borders to achieve social transformation, Butler affirmed that Anzaldúa worked with a flexible configuration of the subject: Anzaldúa asks us to […] to engage in cultural translation, and to undergo, through the experience of language and community, the diverse set of cultural connections that make us who we are. One could say that for her, the subject is “multiple” rather than unitary […]. But I think her point is more radical. She is asking us to stay at the edge of what we know, to put our own epistemological certainties into question, and through that risk and open-

1  PERFORMATIVE CONCEPTS OF THE AMERICAS 

9

ness to another way of knowing and of living in the world to expand our capacity to imagine the human. She is asking us to be able to work in ­coalitions across differences that will make a more inclusive movement. What she is arguing, then, is that it is only through existing in the mode of translation, constant translation, that we stand a chance of producing a multicultural understanding of women or, indeed, of society. (Butler 2004, 228)

According to Redecker, in this paragraph Butler is concerned with learning from the “other” and with dispossessing the self and leans on Anzaldúa to underpin her own considerations of alterity (Redecker 2011, 139). Yet, Butler also needs Anzaldúa’s performativity to comprehend strategic ways of human operating—cultural translations, solidary connections, action from the margins—in a world shaped by steady transformations. Butler mentions the Chicana writer’s proposal to continuously “stay at the edge of what we know,” referring to Anzaldúa’ performative epistemology. Her reflections on Anzaldúa’s open, risky, performative way to imagine coalitions “across differences,” one might argue, further prepare, and silently announce Butler’s own shift from an “individual” to “a plural form of performativity” manifesting in the practice of assembling and its qualities of resisting, forging alliances, and embracing vulnerability (Butler 2015, 8–9, 2016). Gloria Anzaldúa preferred terms like borderlands, nepantla, or Coyolxauhqui over “performativity,” but, as this book will evidence, all these concepts were inherently performative. Zaytoun’s analysis of the Anzaldúan conceptualization of naguala, which means “shapeshifter,” comes to a similar conclusion: “Transcending limits of all types, shapeshifters […] represent changes in identities, circumstance, life stages, and paths – transformation and flexibility […]. [S]hapeshifters are often associated with Indigenous groups” (Zaytoun 2022, 11). As Anzaldúa inserts the performative into ethnical debates, she answers, in a way, Judith Butler’s “question […] what happens to the theory [of performativity] when it tries to come to grips with race” (Butler 1999, xvi). By exploring the performative within other notions, Anzaldúa took the concept of performativity to another complex level. How she achieved to do so is the topic of this book. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity: Pieces, Shuffles, Layers consists of six chapters. This first and the last chapter—the introduction and the conclusion—explain the methodological and conceptual framework and the hemispheric context of Anzaldúa’s performativity. They

10 

R. RADLWIMMER

frame four chapters which attend to (a) literature and writing, (b) body and identity politics, (c) the multifaceted concepts of Borderlands and Nepantla, and (d) the essay “Border Arte.” Each chapter portrays the specificity of Anzaldúa’s performative concepts from another angle. All chapters are divided into two subchapters which investigate different aspects of the chapter’s thematic line. Chapter 2, “Scissors and Glue: Material Writing Dynamics,” ponders on Gloria Anzaldúa’s performative writing routines and literary concepts, and on the dynamic flows between both. The first subchapter consults various works and archive material to find out how Anzaldúa practiced her writing. In the 1980s, she worked “on hands and knees” (a habit which gives the subchapter its title), cutting up pieces of text and regrouping them in new orders. As evidenced by her many electronic drafts, Anzaldúa transferred the splitting and pasting of material from the analogue to the digital world. Furthermore, she saw writing not only as an individual, but as a collective process which she achieved together with her writing comadres. This performative, collaborative procedure is reflected in the publication Light of the Dark, which was written by Anzaldúa, but arranged in its final version by AnaLouise Keating. I argue that the last shared writing/editing process, which happened after Anzaldúa’s passing, did not interrupt, but continued the performative writing dynamics Anzaldúa envisioned throughout her life. The second subchapter, “Stories and Drafts,” examines how Anzaldúa’s writing practice translated into her conceptualizations of literature. Throughout the years, as Anzaldúa thought that she had not yet fully elaborated her literary concepts, she incessantly expanded them, from “Speaking in Tongues” and Borderlands to Light in the Dark. Each time, they took on other semantics: first, she focused on writing as decolonial, feminist practice of inclusion, then on non-Western performances as texts; finally, she compared an eternally repeatable writing process to the waves of the ocean, fusing imaginal abstractions with the changing physical realities of wellbeing and illness. Chapter 3, “Bones and Skin: Anzaldúa’s Bodymindsouls,” delineates the performative character Anzaldúa attributed to bodies and identities. The first subchapter, “Hormones and Oranges,” recapitulates Anzaldúa’s autohistorias-teorías, that is, the theorizing of her life experiences. The Chicana writer developed her relational approach of interconnectedness, which she perfected in Light in the Dark, out of a lifelong engagement with bodies as transformative substance, able to link the mind and the soul

1  PERFORMATIVE CONCEPTS OF THE AMERICAS 

11

to the world. As she turned from the negotiation of bodies as painful surfaces to bodies as transcendental, metaphysical matter, she did not, as some critics stated, ignore sexuality, but—speaking in semiotic terms— transports eroticism to the level of the signifier, and created embodiments exploding on a textual level. Anzaldúa’s performative conceptualizations of the body do not seem to end: to her, the body is the decolonial self who has learned to fully express herself; it is the bleeding personification of the divided territory between Mexico and the US, or the feminist and decolonial allegory of Coyolxauhqui, who symbolizes an ongoing process of making and unmaking of material and abstract pieces. The second subchapter, “A Continual Doing,” builds upon the reflections on Anzaldúa’s performative bodies. While the Chicana writer projected identity constructions onto bodies, in her view, bodies enacted and modified identities, not reflecting a staticontological condition, but an ongoing empirical process. She did not describe identities as a stable “being,” but as “continual doing.” Out of her own history of multiple discriminations, Anzaldúa shifted, in the course of her life, from an intersectional enactment to an accentuated transformational comprehension of identity. Like performance artists who ambivalently work with shocking truths, Anzaldúa used identity labels out of an awareness of the ongoing racial, sexual, gender, and class differences which created political inequality. Simultaneously, she worked toward a time when labels would no longer be necessary, creating yielding concepts like nos/otras, Spiritual Activism or Nepantleras. In Chap. 4, “Colors and Shapes: From Borderlands to Nepantla,” I give detailed insight into Anzaldúa’s performative way from borderlands to nepantla, which was not one-directional, but a theory path which she walked back and forth. In the subchapter “Hot Pink Houses, Red Pepper Fields,” I observe how Anzaldúa introduces a materiality of space and visual images to conceptualize performativity. Even though some interpretations saw borderlands as a mere two-sided concept, the Chicana writer constructed it instead as a state of transition which generated perpetual precarity for those who pass over. My reading inquires about the performative elements of her book Borderlands, and about her terminological and conceptual advancing toward nepantla. From the 1990s on, Anzaldúa used both designations to refer to a non-dichotomized liminality full of crossings and vagueness, but slowly replaced borderlands by nepantla. With nepantla, Anzaldúa seemingly withdrew from the colorful depiction of space, and introduced an abstract, limber in-between-ness. In the

12 

R. RADLWIMMER

second subchapter, “Canvas and Clay,” however, I verify that Anzaldúa essentially shaped nepantla in interaction with the visual arts, with painters and sculptors whose paintings and figures inspired her notion. In this chapter, I follow Anzaldúa’s organization of the 1995 Nepantla workshop and the artistic productions which arose of it. Cross-reading the pictographic material she used to articulate nepantla with the ekphrases she created to explain the concept’s semantics, I clarify that Anzaldúa reformulated nepantla numerous times. With every new text, Anzaldúa overlapped and repeated nepantla’s disseminating semantics, defining it either as material category, as epistemological category, as spiritual category, or as relational category. This chapter contends that, like borderlands, nepantla is a performative concept, splitting up into several directions. Chapter 5, “Three Museums: ‘Border Arte’s’ Multiplications,” circles around the three published versions of the essay “Border Arte” (two from 1993 and one from 2015), which exemplify again, yet from another viewpoint, how Anzaldúa composed her performative concepts. The essay on Anzaldúa’s visit to the exhibition “Aztec: The World of Montezuma,” which took place at the Denver Museum of Natural History in 1992, presents some of her main concepts, like nepantla or Coyolxauhqui, for the first time. The first subchapter, “A Living Text,” traces how the essay “multiplied” as Anzaldúa created three versions which vary structurally, terminologically, and conceptually from each other. She modified almost every sentence, reworked logical ties and formalities, re-contextualized terms and notions, switched back and forth between English and Spanish, and added or deleted longer passages. The second subchapter, “Three Museums,” walks with Anzaldúa through the museum space which she portrays. As if she visited three different museums, the Denver Museum of Natural History has diversely arranged rooms in all three versions. Thus, the museum is designed as performative place which evolves in a new order each time it is evoked. As Anzaldúa’s route through the exhibition changes, the essay’s varying conceptual outline is also reversed. The dynamics created between the three versions of “Border Arte” are an open invitation to a flexible use of Anzaldúa’s thought, and the essay attests once more how Anzaldúa silently shuffled ideas, how she frequently added new layers to concepts, how she habitually divided and restructured textual pieces. The book’s last chapter, “Conclusions: A Hemispheric Perspective,” sums up the research findings of the preceding chapters and inserts them into a larger hemispheric picture. Detecting intertexts of the Americas in

1  PERFORMATIVE CONCEPTS OF THE AMERICAS 

13

Anzaldúa’s notions, I consider the ways in which Anzaldúa expanded from the Mexico-US border to the South of the continent. I show how theorists of the Americas, like Anzaldúa, distanced themselves from hegemonic models, proposing epistemological operations which partly differed from dominant Anglo-European projects, and partly used them to develop new directions of thought. By doing so, these performative feminisms stimulated an epistemic balancing of unequal global knowledge production and power relations. Thus, Anzaldúa’s significance and leading theoretic role in transformations are evidenced not only for a Chicanx/Latinx context, but on a transterritorial scale.

Bibliography Alarcón, Norma. 2003 [1990]. The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism. In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim, 404–414. New York: Taylor & Francis Books. ———. 2012. Anzaldúan Textualities: A Hermeneutic of the Self and the Coyolxauhqui Imperative. In El Mundo Zurdo 3. Selected Works from the 2012 Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, ed. Larissa M. Mercado-­ López, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and Antonia Castañeda, 189–208. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1990. Haciendo caras, una entrada. An Introduction by Gloria Anzaldúa. In Making Face, Making Soul. Haciendo Caras. Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa, xv–xxviii. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 2000. Interviews. Entrevistas. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Back, Camille. 2019. ‘We Are the Queer Groups’: De ‘La Prieta’ à Borderlands/La Frontera, lire l’autohistoria-teoríacomme Performance et ‘Nouvelle’ Perspective Critique sur la Queer Theory. EOLLES Identités et Cultures 10: 1–14. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40.4: 519–531. ———. 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 1999 [1990]. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge.

14 

R. RADLWIMMER

———. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2016. Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance. In Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zaynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 11–27. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Calcott, Wilfred Hardy. 1968. The Western Hemisphere. Its Influence on United States Policies to the End of World War II. Austin: University of Texas Press. Capetillo-Ponce, Jorge. 2006. Exploring Gloria Anzaldúa’s Methodology in Borderlands/La Frontera—The New Mestiza. In Human Architecture. Re-Membering Anzaldúa, ed. Mohammad H.  Tamdgidi, 87–94. Belmont: Okcir Press. Carroll, Amy Sara. 2015. Lesbianism-Poetry//Poetry-Lesbianism. In The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, ed. Jodie Medd, 188–203. New York: Cambridge University Press. Castillo, Debra. 2005. Redreaming America. Toward a Bilingual American Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Culler, Jonathan. 2000 [1997]. Literary Theory. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferré, Rosario. 2001. A la sombra de tu nombre. México D. F: Alfaguara. Geertz, Clifford. 2000 [1983]. Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. González, José. 2016. Performatividad de la ficción en la novela argentina contemporánea: relaciones de género en Griselda Gambaro, Sylvia Molloy, Perla Suez. PhD thesis. Université Toulouse le Mirail – Toulouse II. Herlinghaus, Hermann. 2000. ‘Performance’ as Critical Conceptual Figure: Nelly Richard’s Reading of DamielaEltit. Neohelicon 27 (1): 127–135. Keating, AnaLouise. 2009. Introduction. Reading Gloria Anzaldúa, Reading Ourselves… Complex Intimacies, Intricate Connections. In The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating, 1–15. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2013. Transformation Now! Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ohmer, Sarah S. 2010. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonizing Ritual de Conocimiento. Confluencia 26 (1): 141–153. Padrón, Ricardo. 2004. The Spacious Word. Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Pitts, Andrea J. 2021. Nos/Otras. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance. Albany: SUNY. PolgovskyEzcurra, Mara. 2019. Touched Bodies. The Performative Turn in Latin American Art. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

1  PERFORMATIVE CONCEPTS OF THE AMERICAS 

15

Radlwimmer, Romana. 2015. Wissen in Bewegung. Latina-Kulturtheorie/ Literaturtheorie/Epistemologie. Würzburg: Königshausen&Neumann. von Redecker, Eva. 2011. Zur Aktualität von Judith Butler. Einleitung in ihr Werk. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Richard, Nelly. 1994 [1990]. Presentación. In Escribir en los Bordes. Congreso Internacional de Literatura Femenina Latinoamericana 1987, ed. Carmen Berenguer, Eugenia Brito, Eugenia, Damiela Eltit, Raquel Olea, Eliana Ortega, and Nelly Richard, 9–10. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio. Sandoval, Chela. 2002. Foreword: After Bridge. Technologies of Crossing. In this bridge we call home. Radical visions for transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, 21–26. New York: Routledge. Searle, John R. 1989. How Performatives Work. Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (5): 535–558. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Valenzuela, Luisa. 2002. Peligrosas palabras. Reflexiones de una escritora. México D.F.: Editorial Océano de México. Vivancos Pérez, Ricardo F. 2013. Radical Chicana Poetics. New  York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zaytoun, Kelli D. 2022. Shapeshifting Subjects. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Naguala and Border Arte. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER 2

Scissors and Glue: Material Writing Dynamics

On Hands and Knees When Anzaldúa was writing in the 1970s and 1980s, she cut and pasted the pages she had written and distributed them in the room, lining them up all over the floor. On hands and knees, she tried to find the right order for words and concepts. She rearranged the pieces in new settings, gluing sentences and paragraphs together like a puzzle. This tactile dealing with text guided her way of constructing concepts. She did not aim for a linear, logical structure. When theorizing, she started, as she said, in the center and spiraled around, until she came back to a particular idea, expanding it to another, more complex level. Anzaldúa usually did not follow an academic abstract or outline, not even for her dissertation when her advisors expected her to complete and hand in one chapter at a time. Instead, Anzaldúa wrote her work at once and then reworked it as a whole, not knowing where she would end up (Anzaldúa 2000, 175, 2015c, 169). Anzaldúa’s staggered, layered, cut-up, reconnected “piecing-process” is well documented in the archive of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Papers of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin, which houses the cut-and-glued-together texts and the multiple versions of her manuscripts and typescripts. In 1981, Anzaldúa used a typewriter, which she described in her letter to women of color writers, “Speaking in Tongues.”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Radlwimmer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity, Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5_2

17

18 

R. RADLWIMMER

She elaborated the material dynamics of her conceptual production through handwriting and typewriting, and later applied it to electronic technologies. In 1987, she had switched to the computer which she mentioned in Borderlands. Elizabeth Anne Dahms, who examined the history of drafts of “Speaking in Tongues” with archive material and reconstructed the letter’s previous crossing through diverse genres, noticed the physically cut-out passages of typed pieces and their re-composition with scissors, tape, and glue. Dahms regrets the substitution of the typewriter as a loss of information on textual evolution, even if Anzaldúa tracked changes on the computer (Dahms 2012, 62). However, Anzaldúa continued her complex material process of production all her life, regardless of analog or digital methods. On computers, she worked with electronically saved documents and printouts. As media and methods evolved in the 1990s, she was still laying out all the pieces on the table, adding, subtracting, and shifting them around. In the early 2000s, she used a word processor to repeatedly cut and rearrange, shape and focus, input the changes, tackle repetitions and abstractions, throw out whole sections, paragraphs, sentences, expand others, merging sections, reordering again, “knitting” the connective tissue. She reread the material several times, first for a structural, then for a more detailed and formal revision. To create rhythm and texture, she toyed with word order, repetition, sentence construction, sentence length, and parallelism (Anzaldúa 2000, 175; 2015b, 109, 114). Many typescripts and their conceptual bits and pieces can be found on disks and devices. Anzaldúa saved the resources and most recent drafts of the essay “Border Arte,” for instance, on her hard drive in the folder “08 diss, biblio.” The folder has a subfolder “diss-chapters,” and a sub-­ subfolder “3. Border arte.” The chapter printed in Light in the Dark was the file titled “b art-5” which Anzaldúa last saved on June 30, 2002 (Keating 2015a, 194). The various drafts of Borderlands show how dramatically the book developed in the two years prior to its publication. In 1985, Joan Pinkvoss had heard Anzaldúa read poetry at a conference in Iowa City, and invited her to publish a book with her San Francisco-based editorial Aunt Lute. As Pinkvoss suggested to combine poetry with other genres, Anzaldúa decided to fuse the poems with essays she was elaborating: the result was Borderlands (Pinkvoss 2007, n.p.). As Ricardo Vivancos Pérez showed, Anzaldúa modified all subheadings of the 1985 poetry section for the first complete draft of Borderlands in 1986. In the published book, she maintained this change, but she added 21 new poems and deleted 16 poems of

2  SCISSORS AND GLUE: MATERIAL WRITING DYNAMICS 

19

the 1985 typescript. The first complete draft of the prose section from 1986 was shorter and differently structured than the one in the printed book. It consisted of only four parts (Vivancos Pérez 2013, 38–41). Unsurprisingly, the material process of these modifications reflected and significantly shaped her concepts. For the coherent logics of Borderlands, it mattered deeply if “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” or “La conciencia de la mestiza” were included—or not yet elaborated as in the 1986 draft. The long cycles of writing, cutting, shuffling, and pasting of text pieces were accompanied by collaborative readings. In the early 1980s, Anzaldúa’s friend Leslie “comes in gets on hands and knees to read my fragments in the floor and says: ‘It’s good, Gloria’” (Anzaldúa 2015c, 169). In the new millennium, Anzaldúa used to meet her “writing comadres” in a coffeehouse. They plugged in their laptops at a table by a wall, debated their work and encouraged each other. Anzaldúa saw writing as a shared act of creation; she relied on her comadres (such as Irene Lara or Liliana Wilson) to tell her what worked and help her express what she wanted to say (Anzaldúa 2015b, 106, 113). Someday, Anzaldúa would eventually send off a manuscript, if she didn’t put it in a drawer for later revisions. The editing—just as the collaborative readings—represented an additional modification factor for her concepts. From the beginning of a new project, Anzaldúa worked closely together with advisors, editors, or co-editors. This Bridge Called My Back came to live in 1979, when Anzaldúa went to where Cherríe Moraga worked as a waitress, urging her to one more time to participate. Anzaldúa had already written a call and was about to print and send it out to possible contributors. Moraga’s name was added last minute. Anzaldúa had the idea for the anthology some years earlier when teaching the class “La Mujer Chicana” at UT Austin. No material from women of color was available. She had to scramble magazines and newspapers for material to teach. When working on This Bridge, Moraga divided it into four thematic sections to which she wrote brief introductions; Anzaldúa was in charge of the rest. During the editorial process, Anzaldúa was seriously ill at times. Without Moraga, it would have been difficult to complete the anthology (Anzaldúa 2000, 55; 2015a, 263, Vivancos Pérez 2013, 1). From 1985 to 1987, when Anzaldúa was writing Borderlands, editor Joan Pinkvoss visited Anzaldúa in Oakland once or twice a week. The editor read the output while the writer continued her work. Pinkvoss pushed, cajoled, and asked the questions she found relevant to stimulate Anzaldúa’s creative process (Pinkvoss 2007, n.p.). In the 1980s, Anzaldúa waited in

20 

R. RADLWIMMER

vain for another volume like This Bridge Called My Back to appear, and consequently published Making Face, Making Soul in 1990. This time Anzaldúa figured as sole editor. She worked “around the clock frantically locating, reading, copying, compiling and organizing material,” and finally sat down with Chela Sandoval on her living room floor to look together through the six piles of paper she had accumulated. What was left after discarding was the basis of the book (Anzaldúa 1990, xvii). In 1991, Anzaldúa met young AnaLouise Keating and started to asked her for detailed feedback about her work. Eleven years later, Keating was Anzaldúa’s co-editor of this bridge we call home, and in 2015, the editor of Anzaldúa’s posthumously published Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. As Keating explains in her “Editors Introduction,” she found Light in the Dark’s performative production process to be complex and confounding. Envisioned as a hybrid between book and dissertation, Light in the Dark grew over the years, in different phases, versions, and pre-drafts. When Anzaldúa passed away, the book was almost, but not completely finished. Keating delved into Anzaldúa’s computer files and examined them together with her writing notes located on the hard drive. Keating encountered numerous unfinished sections, unrevised text pieces and indications for future modifications, which she moved, in some occasions, to the endnotes and appendixes. These additions contain “important clues about Anzaldúa’s theories (especially the directions she might have pursued had she been given more time) and about the concepts she was drawing from but in the process of rejecting” (Keating 2015b, xx). Even more than other Anzaldúan texts, Light in the Dark has to be appreciated as dynamic montage, written and assembled by Gloria Anzaldúa, yet put in its final form by AnaLouise Keating. The collective revisions and editing of all her work complicate a simple understanding of the materiality of Anzaldúa’s conceptual work. She invented a fragmented discourse and shaped it in vivid interaction with others.

Stories and Drafts Gloria Anzaldúa thought of concepts and theories as stories, and of stories as acts, as performances which were enacted every time they were spoken aloud or read silently. She wanted to make the fleeting process known; she wished to create a virtual reality of the ephemeral experience so that readers could go through it as well, but she was aware of the difficulties to

2  SCISSORS AND GLUE: MATERIAL WRITING DYNAMICS 

21

stabilize performative concepts, as processes are arrested when one stops to watch them (Anzaldúa 2007, 89, 2015b, 66, 95). All her life, Gloria Anzaldúa was an eager and productive writer. She wrote every day. She wrote early on. As a girl, she kept a journal. When she was bored at school, she hid her journal under a textbook and continued writing. Anzaldúa started to call herself a writer in 1974. She became a full-time, self-employed writer in 1977, after moving from Texas to California. Everything she ever did in life, she said, was directed toward writing. Anzaldúa thought of writing as an ongoing relationship, as her lover or her Musa Bruja [Bewitching Muse]. She felt she was married to writing and often chose writing over a relationship. Anzaldúa wrote in four- to six-hour blocks, preferably at night, but also during the day, depending in her internal clock. Sometimes she didn’t eat because she was writing. Her writing habits changed when she was diagnosed diabetes. She started to take breaks, to eat, to exercise. When she lived in Santa Cruz, she went for walks to the ocean to reflect on writing concerns. Anzaldúa usually worked on several projects at once. If she wasn’t experiencing one of her painful writing blocks, she simultaneously tackled numerous drafts of various texts, an extensive revision of each draft, while reworking links and repetitions among different projects and incorporating feedback and comments from others. She created three to six pre-drafts before elaborating a first draft; she frequently missed required word count and deadlines from editors. Anzaldúa distinguished between fiction and poetry on one hand, and theory, which she thought to be more restricted, on the other; at the same time, she referred to theorizing as creative act for which she employed similar methods as for fictional writing. Her texts are consequently a blending of theory and narrative, fact and fiction (Anzaldúa 2000, 23, 51–75, 258, 2015b, 235–236; Keating 2015b, xi) In “Speaking in Tongues,” Anzaldúa sought to establish criteria to perform the act of writing, affirming that texts worked when their subject metamorphosed, when change happened in them. The legendary feminist essay dealt with the precarious conditions of women of color writers and described writing a continuous performative process, which Anzaldúa presented as a practical fact. Writing was simply part of everyday life. Paraphrasing Virginia Woolf’s famous quote, Anzaldúa asked women of color to forget “the room of one’s own—write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping and waking” (Anzaldúa 2015c, 168). The essay printed in 1981, however, was a space too limited for Anzaldúa’s

22 

R. RADLWIMMER

incessant conceptualization of writing and theorizing. In Borderlands, she decided to set up chapter six, “Tlilli, Tlapalli/The Path of the Red and Black Ink,” as an extension of “Speaking in Tongues.” “Tlilli, Tlapalli” defined stories—concepts—as shamanic acts. In a deeply decolonial way, they defended sacred tribal creating and went against dominant Western individualist, perfectionist, virtuous aesthetics. Her stories-concepts were meant to transform the storyteller and the listener. They were invoked, enacted, hardly ever at rest, always in performance. These concepts produced amosaic pattern, they became visible as weaving, thin and thick patterns. Anzaldúa combined her theory of performative writing with the performance of her writing theory. As María Lugones observed, Anzaldúa constructed Borderlands “not in the sense of interpreting or representing the world,” but rather, “like the tlamatinime, the Mexica wise men, she enacts, performs, lively creations and re-creations” (Lugones 2006, 80). In her later writings, Anzaldúa continued to talk with images and stories, not about them, to evoke their spiritual and ritual dimension (Anzaldúa 2015b, 5). “Tlilli, Tlapalli” starts out with Anzaldúa’s childhood memories of storytelling in the borderlands, with her grandmother’s and father’s legends about coyotes and giant dogs, with books she secretly read at night, with her sister as her first audience. The chapter is situated in the darks spaces where writing happens, and at Anzaldúa’s computer and her altar. It defines the anxiety of writing blocks as Coatlicue State, and the boundless, floating limbo of writing and theorizing as trance-like Shamanic state which transforms everything, transforms her into desert sand, mountain, or mosquito. Anzaldúa transferred the notion of writing as shifting from Borderlands to all her later texts. Again and again, she affirmed writing was an epistemological act of building bridges to other phases, places, or cultures, and reflected on writers’ attempts to re-create the shifts they experienced through writing. In the 1990s, Anzaldúa advanced her performative epistemologies and ontologies when elaborating what would become Light in the Dark. Her posthumous book deals with processes and acts in reading, writing, creating, and identity constructions. Light in the Dark’s fifth chapter is Anzaldúa’s third systematic account on writing, and the most detailed one. After the publication of Borderlands, Anzaldúa felt that she had written chapter six too fast, that it had come out too rough. She thought she had not unraveled the ideas fully and kept working on them (Anzaldúa and Reuman 2000, 4). In Light in the Dark, Anzaldúa took up the

2  SCISSORS AND GLUE: MATERIAL WRITING DYNAMICS 

23

questions on how to create and how to theorize, yet centered less on writing as the everyday-life political task to respond to intersectional exclusion of “Speaking in Tongues,” or on the invocation of shamanic performativity introduced in “Tlilli, Tlapalli.” Anzaldúa now engaged with the epistemological and spiritual components of writing by employing the allegory of the Aztec goddess Coyolxauhqui. According to the legend, Coyolxauhqui was decapitated and torn into pieces by her brother Huitzilpochtli, and became the moon. The essay’s title, “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together,” refers to the materiality of writing, to the cutting and pasting, shuffling, and reordering: “You will have to take the text apart bone by bone, again go through psychic dismemberment, fly apart, implode, splinter once more. […] The second time you re-member the bones, Coyolxauqhui emerges less malformed” (Anzaldúa 2015b, 107). Yet, the title also indicates—continuing a notion of Borderlands—that a text is not just a technical operation, but a living—a decolonial and spiritual—organism which goes beyond the mere configuration of components. “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together” is, as Anzaldúa described it, a writing about writing; it is a metanarrative which tracks the phases of creation to reach awareness of the processes at work during writing. Once again, Anzaldúa wanted her readers not only to understand, but to experience her concepts. Through this socially engaged understanding of performativity, Anzaldúa hoped to reach people, to touch their lives and eventually alter their realities. As she had “only words” to prepare a performative reading experience, she sought to write another a performative text. To do so, she used three specific literary devices. Firstly, she narrated the described phases of her writing process in present tense, as if she experienced them in the actual moment of reading. The dominant overlapping, in Gerard Genette’s terminology, of narrated time (the time span narrated in the text) and time of narration (the time needed to read the text) allowed readers, secondly, to follow her steps directly. By introducing a second-person narrator, Anzaldúa connected, thirdly, with the readers and seemed to address them directly, even though the employed “you” was autobiographical. The essay’s setting is the house and writing studio at the coast of Monterrey bay where Anzaldúa lived. Her repeated walks along the ocean reflect the writing phases she goes through and describes. “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together” starts and ends with the autobiographical writer who has an idea and heads back home from at the seashore to bring it to paper. This circularity suggests that for writers as for Anzaldúa, writing

24 

R. RADLWIMMER

processes are perpetual. They do not stop with a finished project, but will be continued, just as the ocean continuously brings about new waves. Each end is the beginning of more writing, in a large, lifelong dynamic. The first period of writing, described on the first pages of the essay, gives little indication on the painfully hard work of several months which lies ahead of the writer; but as the readers have arrived at the last page and at her newly beginning writing project, it has dawned on them that the process will not be easy or quick. Every project starts with the inner call of a potential story or concept, and the hopeful longing to write it down, followed by an assessment of the situation, the timeline, the strategy, the possibilities of failure or success, the personal situation. Afterward, the writer, Anzaldúa, dives into nepantla, the space-in-between, waking up two days in a row with an inner stream of images, a load so heavy she has to stay in bed. At the third wakening, familiar doubts arise whether or not to write. Everyday chores and a walk to the sea finally lead to the first pre-­ draft which causes euphoric inspiration. She listens to the rhythm of words, sees the flow of images. A structure evolves, combining pieces of information. Again at the sea, questions about how to write come up, a phase Anzaldúa calls the idea-generating dreaming which unfolds the layers of meaning. After a phase of resistance to writing and the urge to write perfectly, the next pre-draft follows. Writing means drafting, revising, reading, taking notes, envisioning and conceptualizing, and it is hard work. Spiritual rituals and music, Bach’s cello suites, help to “re-member” the text, to resolve questions of genre, style and its ethics, and to let go of the ego of virtuosity. Coyolxauhqui accompanies the writing at night, the pleasures of freewriting several pages. The writer, Anzaldúa, connects to Naguala, the spirit accompanying her, which allows otherworldly transformations and metamorphoses. The reading and restructuring of the hard-­ copied pre-draft takes place in the kitchen, when electricity fails. A writing date with comadre Irene motivates her to start with the first draft. She writes the story like putting together the bones of a body, re-member-ing Coyolxauhqui. On the next day, the moon goddess looks like a grotesquely written figure. When trying to rewrite the draft, the writer moves through nepantla, from unease to ease and back. After working on the second draft for some days, it is too long, nearly 15,000 words, and she will have to cut half of the text. At this stage of writing, she asks how the different written parts interact and if they are in balanced proportion, which leads to a long phase of reworking, pulling Coyolxauhqui apart several times, in new drafts. Months later, at the tenth draft, nothing works any more. The

2  SCISSORS AND GLUE: MATERIAL WRITING DYNAMICS 

25

pressure to produce, to meet deadlines, to be innovative and subversive causes doubts, fear, and anger. The walks to the ocean have become desperate, months of rain have turned the paths into marsh: she projects her inner processes into nature and landscape. Resistance to writing and tension grow until she dismisses the whole project. The blocks are only removed after talking to Liliana an Irene, artistic comadres who give her back confidence. A new reworking cycle starts, but she has to let the piece ferment in dark caves. She recalls that painful blocks are in her way whenever finishing a project. She hardly ever meets her own expectations of producing painlessly. Three more months later, she is ready to rework the latest draft again and reenters nepantla. Finally, the text starts to make sense, to be alive, to dance. Even though the piece will remain eternally unfinished, she is finally able to send it to the editors. A new cycle of creation begins with a call of a new story at the seashore. Throughout her three accounts on creative and conceptual writing, Anzaldúa maintains a decolonial and feminist understanding, but changes its focal points. “Speaking in Tongues” is decolonial and feminist as it affirms, contrary to Spivak’s assumption, that the subaltern female can speak. In a decolonial turn, “Tlilli, Tlapalli” delves into Aztec aesthetics which happen through the feminist writer. “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together” rewrites the legend of the Aztec goddess from a feminist stance, and applies it to contemporary decolonial writing conditions. In spite of the differences between the three essays, all of them introduce a dynamic corporality which discusses the various aspects of writing.

Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1990. Haciendo caras, una entrada. An Introduction by Gloria Anzaldúa. In Making Face, Making Soul. Haciendo Caras. Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa, xv–xxviii. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 2000. Interviews. Entrevistas. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007 [1987]. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 2015a [2001]. Counsels from the Firing… Past, Present, Future. Foreword to the Third Edition. In This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 261–266. Albany: SUNY.

26 

R. RADLWIMMER

———. 2015b. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015c [1981]. Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers. In This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 165–174. Albany: SUNY. Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Ann E.  Reuman. 2000. Coming into Play: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa. MELUS 25 (2): 3–45. Dahms, Elizabeth Anne. 2012. The Life and Work of Gloria Anzaldúa. An Intellectual Biography. Theses and Dissertations Hispanic Studies 6. https:// uknowledge.uky.edu/hisp_etds/6. Accessed 20 February 2020. Keating, AnaLouise. 2015a. Appendix 5. In Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, 190–199. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015b. Editor’s Introduction. In Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, ix–xxxvii. Durham: Duke University Press. Lugones, María. 2006. On Complex Communication. Hypatia. A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21 (3): 75–85. Pinkvoss, Joan. 2007 [1987]. Editor’s Note. In Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa, n.p. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Vivancos Pérez, Ricardo F. 2013. Radical Chicana Poetics. New  York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 3

Bones and Skin: Anzaldúa’s Bodymindsouls

Hormones and Oranges Gloria Anzaldúa defined writing as corporeal practice and the creation of concepts as a bodily act: For me, writing is a gesture of the body, […] a working from the inside out. My feminism is grounded not on incorporeal abstraction but on corporeal realities. The material body is the center, and central. The body is the ground of thought. The body is a text. Writing is […] about being in your body. The body responds physically, emotionally, and intellectually to external and internal stimuli, and writing records, orders, and theorizes about these responses. For me, writing begins with […] words that travel through the body. (Anzaldúa 2015a, 5)

In her writing, bodies appear as metaphors, allegories, symbols, or concrete persons. As she explained in “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together,” Anzaldúa wanted to recreate the neuromuscular, respiratory, cardiovascular, hormonal reactions she experienced. She worked on inert, abstract notions until they became embodied, and constructed ideas as archeological bodies that allowed access to their innards. Out of her own physical history, the body and its ever-changing functioning was of utmost importance to Anzaldúa. She acknowledged that

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Radlwimmer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity, Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5_3

27

28 

R. RADLWIMMER

her body had shaped who she was, and that illness and pain had impacted her in an absolute sense. The biography of her own transformable body was the ground on which her concepts could flourish. Early in, her body was pressed into the colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative structures which she described in her theories to overcome them. As a child she experienced constant pain due to a hormone imbalance she was born with. She started bleeding when she was an infant; her breasts grew when she was six. Her body was stigmatized in school and at home. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in the Mexican cultural context of South Texas, her mother was, unsurprisingly, strict about her not showing her body. Anzaldúa internalized the collective shame, but she sensed it was something learned and taught. For the first thirty years of her life, until 1970s radical reformulations of the body, she repressed and rejected her physical forms. She was in constant pain until she underwent hysterectomy in 1980, when she was thirty-eight. Then, at a moment when “I had all this energy, my writing was going great” (Anzaldúa 2000, 289), Anzaldúa was diagnosed with diabetes. It was the early 1990s, she had bought a house, was working on her second attempt to complete her PhD (which would eventually become Light in the Dark), was traveling six months a year all over the world. For a year, she stopped all activities to take care of her ill body, in a survival mode which she learned to live with, but which continued for the rest of her life. Her disease greatly affected her health, her eyesight, her immune system, her weight (Anzaldúa 2000, 29–34, 93, 288–290). The new bodily challenges also shifted Anzaldúa’s concepts. In “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together,” Anzaldúa weaves the complications of her illness into her contemplations of the physical act of writing. She describes her precarious health and the fluctuations of blood flow which cause the arteries to break and to bleed. On a regular writing morning, “you heave your body out of bed, prick your fingers, and squeeze a drop of blood in the glucose meter,” shooting “insulin in your stomach, eat, go for a walk” (Anzaldúa 2015a, 100). She now applied the knowledge about her chronic illness to the creative process, as she understood the change in one part or organ triggered adjustments in all other parts. Not much later, in 2004, Anzaldúa died of diabetic complications in the same house depicted in the essay. When theorizing her life experience—a practice she called autohistorias-­ teorías, Anzaldúa often referred to her own body. In “Border Arte,” her feet hurt after walking the Aztec exhibit and evaluating border art. When

3  BONES AND SKIN: ANZALDÚA’S BODYMINDSOULS 

29

the rattlesnake bites her boot in Borderlands’ cotton fields, she smells fear in the back of her neck, under her arms and between her legs. The serpent’s body, capable of transformation, becomes Anzaldúa’s ambiguous decolonial symbol for female sexuality. As a girl, her mother warned her of the dark where snakes could make her pregnant. However, she rewrites the rape narrative affirming that only imagination can make her pregnant with stories (Anzaldúa 2015a, 26). Anzaldúa once criticized feminist theory’s tendency to ignore the body, and she wanted to do it differently. In a 1982 interview, at a time when French feminists had recently explored the body’s potential for writing, she found their ponderings too abstract: They ignore the body. It’s like they’re from the neck on up. Even though it’s about lesbian sexuality, it’s like they don’t have any words. No vocabulary. They don’t describe the movements of the body. I don’t know of anyone who writes through the body. I want to write from the body; that’s why we’re in a body. […] Monique Wittig does it [writes from the body], but in a very abstract, detached way – it’s almost like looking at a movie rather than being in a movie. […] People don’t deal with the body, and yet they don’t deal with the spirit. They deal with the head. The mind. (Anzaldúa 2000, 63–64)

Anzaldúa’s psychoanalytical approach to bodies differed from French-­ Lacanian feminism since she developed, as Norma Alarcón showed, her concept-metaphors by drawing on Jungian notions of the psyche-spirit (Alarcón 2012, 190).Anzaldúa’s entering of the serpent or her transformation into serpent, for instance, resembles C.G. Jung’s pondering on the animal’s ambiguous, archetypal force between dream and wakening. Anzaldúa’s Coyolxauhqui could be linked to Lacan’s fragmented body of the mirror state, however, she gives the Aztec goddesses’ dismembered body a feminist and decolonial twist and sends the notion back and forth between psychoanalysis, constructivism, materiality and spirituality. In Anzaldúa’s ambivalent mirrors of double vision, the soul can cross over to afterlife. They are made of obsidian, volcanic glass used by native seers revealing the tribe’s future. Her mirrors stimulate a contradictory “seeing through” linked to Aztec goddess Coatlicue (Anzaldúa 2007, 64). Benigno Trigo compared Anzaldúa’s mythological mother figure Coatlicue to Julia Kristeva’s maternal semiotic structure. Anzaldúa’s enactment of embodied writing through Coatlicue was, with Trigo, a decisive turn

30 

R. RADLWIMMER

toward performativity (Trigo 2006, 97). Robyn Henderson-Espinoza argued that neither French feminists’ imaginary body, nor Judith Butler’s mere discursive body performance could capture Anzaldúa’s both discursively and materially performative, unstable “queer mestizo” body (Henderson-Espinoza 2012, 43). AnaLouise Keating, who analyzed how Anzaldúa’s and Hélène Cixous’ projects overlapped, defined Anzaldúa’s decolonial spirituality as central difference between both embodied metaphoric languages. By developing her theory of writing specifically for women of color, Anzaldúa expanded “her definition of ‘writing the body’ to encompass ‘writing the soul’” (Keating 1996, 121). To Anzaldúa, the soul was an invisible body. In Borderlands, Anzaldúa explained that the human soul could only be transformed through the body, and that both are intertwined in writing, an activity which concretizes the spirit and etherealizes the body (Anzaldúa 2007, 97). In the essay “now let us shift …,” she introduced the idea of a “bodymindsoul” as a hermetic vessel where transformation takes place takes place (Anzaldúa 2015a, 133). To situate the soul in the body, Anzaldúa described suffering bodies and their urge to heal. She did not see the spiritual body as an abstract notion, but as a concrete fact which she articulated using the techniques of surrealism and Latin American magic realism. In Interviews, she recounts an early childhood memory about the tripling of her body. She was about three years old and wanted to grab oranges on a table above her, when she felt her arms becoming long. Suddenly there were three bodies, “like I was three of me” (Anzaldúa 2000, 26). At this point, her spiritual awareness started. When she was sixteen, Anzaldúa had an intense fever which she attributed to a spirit entering her body. Afterward, her hair turned white and for the rest of her life, she dyed it black. Through her body, Anzaldúa felt connected to everybody and everything. One day she sat at a picnic in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in New York City. People were smoking and putting their cigarettes out on the grass. Her whole body reacted, and she could feel the pain of the grass, a situation which urged her to learn how to protect herself from outer influences. Through these autobiographic narrations, Anzaldúa seeked to tell untold stories about commonly silenced experiences, and blended them with her concepts (Anzaldúa 2000, 17–36). Out of her spiritual body understanding, Anzaldúa articulated her theory of interconnectedness: “We are all strands of energy connected to each other in the web of existence. Our thoughts, feelings, experiences affect others via this energy web. Our pervasive, excessive sense of woundedness compels us to erect barriers that erect knots on the web and block

3  BONES AND SKIN: ANZALDÚA’S BODYMINDSOULS 

31

communication” (Anzaldúa 2015a, 83). Through this connected approach, Anzaldúa theorized 9/11 in “Let us be the Healing of the Wound.” The trapped and suffocating bodies of the victims become everybody’s body; unable to detach from their pain, she sounded out the personal and political options of healing. Anzaldúa’s move from body pain to a transcendent spiritual experience became her dominant epistemological habit, so much that in 1993, Cherríe Moraga detected a lack of desire in Borderlands’ approach to bodies. Moraga reproached that Anzaldúa presented lesbianism as a political position, not as a corporeal longing, and that she therefore separated queerness from the body and from what Moraga had come to call “Theory in the Flesh” (Moraga 1993, 154–155). Anzaldúa, who saw sexuality as a spiritual experience and who explicitly declared sexuality a public affair, openly talking about her own lesbianism and erotic phantasies, rejected Moraga’s point of view. She found that it did not reflect her ideas as a whole. And yet, as Amy Sarah Carroll analyzed, Borderlands “locates writing as auto/collective eroticism,” and its embodiment materialized as textual explosion and consequent reconfiguration (Carroll 2015, 198, my emphasis). Borderlands’ transfer of eroticism from the level of the signified to the level of the signifier, to speak in semiotic terms, might constitute one of the main differences between Moraga’s and Anzaldúa’s positions on bodies and embodiment. The body is already central in Anzaldúa’s early publications, and as other concepts, shifts its semantics with her rewritings, new manuscripts and new publications. In “Speaking in Tongues,” Anzaldúa evokes her own naked body in the sun as opening line when addressing herself to other women of color writers. The message is clear. It is 1981, this is the first publication of its kind. Finally, the woman of color writer has come out of the shadows into the sun—light in the dark—, typewriter against her knees, talking about herself, her body, and her feminist writing condition without censorship. She hears the white man’s threats that she can eventually be a writer “if you scrape the dark off your face” or “if you bleach your bones,” but she revolts, talks back to him, no longer accepts the white male imprints. She urges women of color to write “the sensation of the body” and states that it is “not on paper that you create but in your innards, in the gut and out of living tissue” (Anzaldúa 2015b, 164, 170–171). In Borderlands, Anzaldúa continues these conceptualizations and performs them. Her own fingers grow feathers and write with Aztec blood, in a perpetual, daily sacrifice ritual. More than writing the body’s

32 

R. RADLWIMMER

sensations, she makes the body’s sensations come to live, allows the reader to experience through this queer mestiza body she theorizes and which guides the way through the borderlands. The book’s first location is the Border Field Park in San Diego, California, where Tijuana becomes visible through a fence. Into the poem, Anzaldúa infiltrates the brown blood in her veins, her heart, her fingers feeling the gritty wire, the pressing of her hand to the steel curtain. Just like herself, the border zone has a body. Its “skin of the earth” bears the—often-quoted—“1,950 mile-long open wound” which collides with her body, which coincides with the wound “running down the length of my body / staking fence rods in my flesh / splits me splits me / me raja me raja” (Anzaldúa 2007, 24–25). Throughout the next pages, skin color, gender, and sexuality determine the way bodies are looked at and classified, and how they rebel against violence and prejudice. Her body is split open by judgmental eyes, it is sweating, with a headache, has an untamable tongue. This mestiza body is capable of transformation, is able to cross over into Aztec mythology, to enter serpents, to be entered by serpents, to become serpent, to become the priestess of the crossroads who transforms herself and her world. In her quest to present abstract notions as embodied experiences, Anzaldúa turned to allegory. Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess with a serpent head and a skirt of twisted serpents, symbolized contradiction and psychological turmoil. Coatlicue’s daughter Coyolxauhqui played a subordinate role in Borderlands, but became Anzaldúa’s most significant allegory of body knowledge ever since the publication of the essay “Border Arte” in 1993.Throughout different texts, the moon goddess is presented piece by piece: Coyolxauhqui moves through Anzaldúa’s drafts and publications and guides the way through Light in the Dark. She symbolizes an ongoing process of making and unmaking of material and abstract pieces. The moon goddess represents traumatic, violent experiences, and the urge to heal. Her dismembered and “re-membered” (in its double meaning of memory and body members) body rewrites “stories of loss and recovery, exile and homecoming, disinheritance and recuperations, stories that lead out of passivity and into agency, out of devalued into valued lives” (Anzaldúa 2015a, 143). In the essay “now let us shift …,” Coyolxauhqui represents the fifth stage of consciousness in an epistemological journey, when the fragmented pieces can be put together to new personal and collective stories. Anzaldúa also connects Coyolxauhqui to her hysterectomy, to the day she woke up in hospital without her ovaries and uterus: “Scattered around you in pedazos is the old story’s corpse with its

3  BONES AND SKIN: ANZALDÚA’S BODYMINDSOULS 

33

perceptions who you used to be” (Anzaldúa 2015a, 138). Leaving behind the old, the once ailing body becomes a site of transformation, a road to consciousness. The essay “Let us be the healing of the wound” bears the subtitle “The Coyolxauhqui imperative—La sombra y elsueño,” and deals with the aftermaths of 9/11. The essay starts with the soul frightened out of the body (a Mexican folk concept Anzaldúa describes in various occasions) and ends with a melody which calls the soul back into the body. The first-person narrator falls into pieces while watching the broadcasted images of the falling towers. She sees bodies on fire, bodies falling through the sky, bodies crushed by stone and steel. The moral obligation to bear witness, to speak this open wound, passes through Coyolxauhqui, formulating a poignant critique of the government’s reactions and US imperialist politics. The Coyolxauhqui imperative seeks reintegration of shattered pieces through an ongoing process of destruction, deconstruction, and reconstruction.

A Continual Doing Anzaldúa did not see the body as a stable entity, but as a shifting, transformative substance. Bodies, she argued, are geographies of diverse zones which constantly communicate with each other and with external temporalities, environments, people and objects. Therefore, identity constructions are projected onto bodies, and bodies enact and modify identities. “My body is sexed,” she said. “My body is raced; I can’t escape that reality, can’t control how other people perceive me, can’t de-race, e-race my body” (Anzaldúa 2015a, 65). Investigating the links constructed between bodies and identities, she proposed performative identity politics which were based on embodied realities, but deconstructing them. Anzaldúa’s identity politics reflect a continual doing, a perpetual reevaluation. In her early writing, Anzaldúa focused primarily on intersectionality. Just as other decolonial theorists, she rewrote limiting labels from the perspective of the excluded. She explored how people are judged and treated depending on their gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, education, able-bodied-ness, or age, and how these categories serve as oppressive tools or as subversive empowerment. With the years, Anzaldúa elaborated a stronger spiritual emphasis on the transformations of identity, replacing heteropatriarchal definitions by inventing completely new ones. Even though Anzaldúa shifts from an intersectional to a transformational understanding of identity, both are intertwined and interact in

34 

R. RADLWIMMER

different intensities in her work. Both are performative. Anzaldúa’s treatment of intersectionality is performative as it consciously moves through different labels of identity and stirs them up, turns them around and upside down. It rewrites society’s hierarchical categorizations through feminist, queer, brown, decolonial, artistic, spiritual interventions, in waves of construction and deconstruction. Her employment of transformative elements is performative as it goes beyond traditional layers of identity and moves into unknown levels. Moreover, Anzaldúa used the performative to generate transformation. Anzaldúa defined transformational identities which are “‘moving’ from a sexed, racialized body to a more expansive identity interconnected with its surroundings” (Anzaldúa 2015a, 66). In this context, “Raza” was, for instance, no longer a concept defined by ethnicity, but a set of attitudes and expectations, and without geographical limits. Critics have highlighted the performative potential of Anzaldúa’s identity politics. This Bridge Called My Back was, according to AnaLouise Keating, “enacting intersectionality,” but it was also “an early enactment” of Anzaldúa’s “politics of interconnectivity” (Keating 2013, 30, my emphasis). Chela Sandoval underscored that “Bridge was performative. It summoned up the very politics for which it called;” the “same ‘live action’” occurred in this bridge we call home, “offered twenty years later. It too enacts the collective ‘I’ for which Bridge called” (Sandoval 2002, 25). Anzaldúa’s earlier publications’ performative intersectionality, and its ethical imperative of transformation, arise out of her community-based activism and her personal history as a farmworker’s daughter and academically trained intellectual. In order to live the varying aspects of who she wanted to be, one group affiliation or orientation was not enough. She passed through the Chicano movement and through feminist and lesbian groups, through literary and artistic circles, performing different layers of identity. Anzaldúa got familiarized with Chicano culture in 1965 when she read Yo Soy Joaquin and when she heard about César Chávez. She started a more profound research on Chicanos with her first teaching assignments in the late 1960s. At this time, her brother came back severely injured from Vietnam. She participated in the antiwar movement, in the farmworker’s movement, and in MAYO, the Mexican-American Youth Organization. In the early 1970s, she worked as a bilingual consultant for public schools in South Bend, Indiana, where she was introduced to feminist thinking and started writing poems, stories, and a novel. From 1974 to 1977, when she lived in Austin to pursue her PhD, she attended a

3  BONES AND SKIN: ANZALDÚA’S BODYMINDSOULS 

35

lesbian reading group at a place called Woman Space. In 1976, she started working for the Chicano literary magazine Tejidos where she proof-read Chicana’s texts. Moving to San Francisco, she delved deeper into feminism and felt that in feminist communities more parts of her were “allowed,” for the 1970s Chicano Movement hardly accepted her queer or spiritual thought. When Anzaldúa and Moraga edited This Bridge called My Back, they called the attention to the unaddressed racism they observed in the feminist and lesbian movement. Both women had attended the Feminist Writers Guild and had not been able to introduce questions of ethnicity and class into a circle of mainly white upper-class women writers. Moraga, who had recently identified as a Chicana, expressed her concerns openly, whereas Anzaldúa was less outspoken, since she felt a repetition of the story of her lifetime. Anzaldúa had experienced racism ever since she was a child. She grew up on ranches in the highly racialized context of South Texas of the 1940s and 1950s. Her father was a sharecropper whose family had lost their land to Anglos through tax manipulation. To maintain a living, his four children worked in the fields. Anzaldúa loved the peace, the sky, the trees, even the dirt of her environment, but she detested the mechanic physical activity of picking crops. It held her back from reading and writing. No one in her family had ever gone to high school, but her father encouraged her that one day she would go to college. When she was seven, she entered primary school in Hargill. Her class of about forty-five students was Mexican only, Anglo children were bussed to Edinburg where school facilities and the teaching was better. Her teachers were white, and most of them were racially biased, dismissing their students’ intelligence. In high school, Anzaldúa once thought about being a doctor, and the counselors told her to become a nurse instead. Anzaldúa was among the best students and in classes for gifted children, but she was the only Mexican and was often ignored. She went to the Texas Women’s University with mostly white students, but after a year, she dropped out because school was too expensive. She worked for two years, then went to Pan-American University close to her home. She graduated in 1969 and became a teacher. She wanted to teach high school level, but was only allowed to teach preschool and children with disabilities because she was Mexican. She insisted at the superintendent’s office until in 1971 she was moved to a high school position. She taught English full time and on the weekends she continued working in the fields. From 1969 on, during summertime, Anzaldúa worked on her master’s degree at the University

36 

R. RADLWIMMER

of Austin. In 1974, when she pursued her PhD at the same institution, out of 47,000 students, 1846 were Chicanos, 143 of them in graduate school, 60 of whom were women (Anzaldúa 2000, 23–57, 89–90). Her own history of discrimination forced Anzaldúa to keep moving from place to place and from group to group and prepared her performative identity politics. With This Bridge Called My Back, Anzaldúa concentrated on the ability to transform others which she detected in the writing of women of color. By “enacting intersectionality,” the first anthology was, as AnaLouise Keating rightfully observes, “ahead of its time” (Keating 2013, 30). Nearly a decade before Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble deconstructed gender as a performative category in 1990, This Bridge Called My Back enacted gender’s performativity by attempting to bridge the contradictions women of color live through. It accentuated the ongoing task of deconstructing and reconstructing gender, sexual, and ethnic identities through speech acts: “We do this bridging by naming our selves and by telling our stories in our own words” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015, 19). Before Kimberlee Crenshaw theorized intersectional identities in 1989, before Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak published the influential essay Can the Subaltern Speak in 1988, before Sara Castro-Klarén talked about the double negativity of Latin American women as both female and mestiza in 1985, This Bridge articulated the large spectrum of experienced otherness: “We are the colored in a white feminist movement. We are the feminists among the people of our culture. We are often the lesbians among the straight” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015, 19). This Bridge Called My Back highlighted the movements and shifts taking place between different aspects of identity. In more literary terms than Crenshaw’s analytical approach, it illustrated phenomena of overlapping identities facets, and showed that they were constantly in the making. Contrary to Castro-­ Klarén’s focus on two-dimensional exclusion, and to Spivak’s denial of subaltern women’s ability of articulation, This Bridge presented difference and otherness as a multilayered process toward empowerment, accentuating the performative aspects of identity and conceptually preparing the decolonial theory scene of the new millennium. Anzaldúa continued to explore the intertwined focus on bodies and identities of This Bridge in Borderlands. She used a terminology which Susan Stanford Friedman criticized as “the ‘brown’ and ‘white’ of Anzaldúa’s borderlands […] binary thinking” and as essentialist categories which created “dead ends” (Stanford Friedman 1998, 39–40). However, Borderlands moved between theory and art and hence performed polarized

3  BONES AND SKIN: ANZALDÚA’S BODYMINDSOULS 

37

identities to overcome them. Like performance artists who ambivalently work with shocking truths, Anzaldúa introduced labels out of an awareness of the ongoing racial, sexual, gender and class differences which created political inequality. She operated with them to assert those aspects of identity which were often overlooked, such as spirituality or queerness, and which diminished people who identified with them. Simultaneously, she worked toward a time when labels would no longer be necessary. In the 1990s, Anzaldúa invented a new vocabulary to move beyond categorizations of race, gender, sex, class, ability, or age, which she started to see as limitations, even when they were rewritten from the point of view of the marginalized. this bridge we call home marks the shift from transformative intersectionality to intersectional transformations, which Anzaldúa declares emphatically as a permeable and flexible “displacement”: While This Bridge Called My Back displaced whiteness, this bridge we call home carries this displacement further. It questions the terms white and women of color showing that whiteness may not be applied to all whites, as some possess women-of-color consciousness, just as some women of color bear white consciousness. This book intends to change notions of identity, viewing it as part of a more complex system covering a larger terrain, and demonstrating that the politics of exclusion based on traditional categories diminishes our humanness. Today categories of race and gender are more permeable and flexible than they were for those of us growing up prior to the 1980s. (Anzaldúa 2002, 2)

The new anthology underlined the similarities of different kinds of people, women of color, underrepresented groups such as transgendered people or Arab and Asian Americans, men and women of different ethnic, national, sexual backgrounds, of different classes, genders, and ages. By focusing on their common interests, the anthology proposed to complicate feminist theory’s regional and international debates on an academic and communal level. Anzaldúa called these politics of inclusion “new tribalism.” She introduced other neologisms which she further elaborated in Light in the Dark: nos/otras, Spiritual Activists, or Nepantleras are Anzaldúa’s legacy of inclusive identity politics. These concepts accentuate different aspects of individual and collective identities, but they are interlaced, shape each other, relate to each other and overlap in a performative—not stable—way through Anzaldúa’s writing.

38 

R. RADLWIMMER

In nos/otras, the Spanish female form for “we,” “nos” [us] and “otras” [the others] are divided by a slash in the middle which represents a bridge. Nepantleras, who are familiar with the space-in-between, nepantla, bridge between divergent reality constructions and points of views. In an apparent paradox, Nepantleras’ stability of perspective relies on liminality and fluidity. They envision a time when the bridge will be obsolete, when “nosotras” will be written without slash, because—Anzaldúa uses the same idea as Julia Kristeva—we “are the other and the other is us” (Anzaldúa 2015a, 151). Nepantleras acknowledge the unmapped common ground with the other’s humanity and understand that, as Kristeva said, if we flee the strange and the other, we fight against own subconscious selves (Kristeva 1991, 191). Like Kristeva, Anzaldúa approaches the dichotomy us/other from a psychoanalytical, feminist perspective, but rereads it in a decolonial and performative way as she links the binary “us/ other” to the continual doing of Nepantleras. “Nos/otras” (with slash) represents the act of mediating through naming, and “nosotras” (without slash) the act of integrating and connecting through words. Nepantleras act on the slash between “us” and “others.” They live with the scars of intersectional labeling and try to heal them. They identify as mestizas, women of color, or as whites who have acknowledged ethnical and racist assumptions linked to the body. They link identity’s empowerment to its embodiment, and encourage a corporeal feeling of interconnectivity. Nepantleras propose spiritual techniques together with activist tactics, which connects them to Anzaldúa’s next performative identity concept, the Spiritual Activists. Spiritual Activists are liminal people and like Nepantleras, they live on thresholds, forever between realities. Moreover, Nepantleras perform the role of, they are, Spiritual Activists when they engage in struggles for social, economic, political justice, while working on their own spiritual transformations. Despite these overlapping definitions, Anzaldúa uses the term “Nepantlera” when she refers to identities which enact repairing in the interstices, and “Spiritual Activists” for identities who unify the common separation between the spiritual and the political, who take an activist stance that explores spirituality’s social implications. Anzaldúa first merged spirituality and activism during periods of constant traveling to do speaking gigs. Her own activism subjected her to “the rush of continual doing,” to a harried, hectic, frenzied pace which she saw as a pervasive form of modern violence (Anzaldúa 2015a, 154). To be able to deal with ignorance, frustration, self-destructiveness, powerlessness, poor imagination and other side effects of her activist life, Anzaldúa

3  BONES AND SKIN: ANZALDÚA’S BODYMINDSOULS 

39

decided to turn to spirituality and to her body. Her spiritual practice include deep breathing, a dropping down through skin, muscles and tendons and into the bones marrow to flee the soul’s ballast. By doing so, she reconstructed herself as Spiritual Activist, as a Nepantlera on the slash of nos/otras, as body mindsoul where transformation happened.

Bibliography Alarcón, Norma. 2012. Anzaldúan Textualities: A Hermeneutic of the Self and the Coyolxauhqui Imperative. In El Mundo Zurdo 3. Selected Works from the 2012 Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, ed. Larissa M. Mercado-­ López, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and Antonia Castañeda, 189–208. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2000. Interviews. Entrevistas. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. Preface. (Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe Spaces. In this bridge we call home. radical visions for transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, 1–5. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007 [1987]. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 2015a. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015b [1981]. Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers. In This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 165–174. Albany: SUNY. Carroll, Amy Sara. 2015. Lesbianism-Poetry//Poetry-Lesbianism. In The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, ed. Jodie Medd, 188–203. New York: Cambridge University Press. Henderson-Espinoza, Robyn. 2012. El cuerpocomo (un) espacio de frontera: The Body as (a) Borderland Space. In New Frontiers in Latin American Borderlands, ed. Leslie G. Cecil, 41–48. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Keating, AnaLouise. 1996. Women Reading Women Writing. Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 2013. Transformation Now! Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991 [1988]. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Colombia University Press. Moraga, Cherríe. 1993. Algo secretamente amado. In The Sexuality of Latinas, ed. Norma Alarcón, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga, 151–156. Berkeley: Third Woman.

40 

R. RADLWIMMER

Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa. 2015 [1981]. Entering the Lives of Others. Theory in the Flesh. In This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 19. Albany: SUNY. Sandoval, Chela. 2002. Foreword: After Bridge. Technologies of Crossing. In this bridge we call home. radical visions for transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, 21–26. New York: Routledge. Stanford Friedman, Susan. 1998. Mappings. Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Trigo, Benigno. 2006. Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women’s Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

Colors and Shapes: From Borderlands to Nepantla

Hot Pink Houses, Red Pepper Fields Anzaldúa’s frequent invitations to speaking events came along with the popularity of Borderlands, the book which lifted her into the Mount Olympus of postcolonial theory. Whoever checked the libraries in the late 1980s and early 1990s for the term border, “it didn’t matter which database” they “went through, the result was always the same: Gloria Anzaldúa” (Tabuenca-Córdoba 2009, 11). In Borderlands, Anzaldúa colorfully portrayed Rio Grande Valley’s hot pink and lavender-trimmed houses, the unpainted lumber shacks of corrugated aluminum, the artificial flowers blooming on Mexican cemeteries, white cotton and red pepper fields, green aloe veras, the yellow clouds of dust behind a speeding pickup truck. Borderlands became unchangeably Gloria Anzaldúa’s best-­ known, euphorically embraced concept which evoked the national categories of Mexico and the US and the landscape of South Texas: the heat, the rattlesnakes, the coyotes, la migra, crossings, corrido and ranchera music, tortillas, and spicy menudo. Borderlands was in consequence often seen as spatial concept which dealt with the integration of two sides. Yet, Anzaldúa did not propose a static duality, but the dynamic deconstruction and reconstruction of binaries: “Gloria was not saying: well here are these two opposites and out of this contradiction comes a new, third way. No, no … she was saying that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Radlwimmer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity, Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5_4

41

42 

R. RADLWIMMER

these oppositions had to be kicked out from under—they were not a foundation, but only got in the way of creating what she was after” (Pinkvoss 2007, s.p.). Anzaldúa introduced two-dimensional visions as the simplifications of liminal realities which fostered experiences of otherness and exclusion. In her childhood she “already felt on the other side of the other side, of the other side within the other side” (Anzaldúa 2000, 170). These various “other sides” were artificially separated entities which described the levels of painful difference she lived early on. She did not experience them as mere binary exclusions, but as complex possibilities of existence which could appear and disappear, overlap, or drift apart. In college, she still felt awkward, but understood that she was not the only one caught in these logics. Slowly, she started feeling better about being on the other side because there were also others on the other side. Borderlands’ performativity implies a radically open structure for different genres, an undecidedness between multiple options of thinking, and a processual development of ideas. Its shifting concepts, its multilayered notions were not always recognized as performative, yet stimulated diverse, even contradictory readings which further attest the hardly tangible quality of this text in motion. Borderlands was criticized as too complex and too simplistic, too metaphoric, too concrete, too spiritual, not spiritual enough. It was described as “highly abstract […] theoretical approximation to Border theory” (Castillo 1999, 185), but also as a simplistic solution which did not “do justice to the complex society in which we live” (Alire Sáenz 1997, 86). It was praised as a significant reference for the metaphorization of cultural phenomena, yet its frequent reuse turned the border into a ubiquitous, “fashionable metaphor” (Saldívar-Hull 2000, 59) which soon became “hollow” (Gómez-Peña 1991, 9). Its spiritual dimension was bypassed (Keating 2000, 7), was judged as “an escape” (Alire Sáenz 1997, 86) or as “the privileged locus of hope for a better world” (Johnson and Michaelson 1997, 3). Borderlands was taken as a basis for decolonial theory: María Lugones read its interplay between oppression and resistance (Lugones 1992, 31); Walter Mignolo defined its double—mestiza—consciousness as a consequence of colonization and as intrinsic cultural condition of the Americas (Mignolo 2001, 25). Even though Borderlands does not romantically celebrate mobility, but enacts painful struggles for transformation, a postmodernist trend used it as “a rich terrain of support for their own analyses of subjectivity” (Contreras 2008, 113–114) and celebrated the mestiza’s “enhanced capacity for

4  COLORS AND SHAPES: FROM BORDERLANDS TO NEPANTLA 

43

cultural translation and flexibility” as “political and theoretical antidote to essentialism” (Martín Alcoff 2006, 256). Gloria Anzaldúa defined the borderlands as a performative space, as a constant state of transition which generated a perpetual, precarious movement for those who cross over, pass over, trespass, do not fit in. Even though Anzaldúa did not see any safe spaces—“Woman does not feel safe when her own culture, and white culture, are critical of her […]. Petrified, she can’t respond, her face caught between losintersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits” (Anzaldúa 2007, 42)-she insisted on the creative life force lying in the spaces in-between and in the capacity to move through them. Borderlands envisioned a not-­ dichotomized liminality full of crossings and vagueness (Lugones 2006, 79–80). The first chapter, “The Homeland, Aztlán. El otro México,” physically outlines the borderlands. Anzaldúa gives a historical overview of the Southwest, however, she does so as a poet and cultural philosopher, less interested in exact historical details than in a flexible narrative constructed around them. Through political and personal explanation, Anzaldúa invites readers to walk with her and her family through South Texas to comprehend their cultural conditions. She paints images of the brushland’s droughts, of dead cattle’s white bellies ballooning to the sky, of the irrigation of arid land cut up in rectangles and squares in the 1950s. She remembers harvest time, life on a dairy farm and on a chicken farm, the packaging thousands of eggs. She recalls the cookbook with recipes from Mexican women which Rio Farms Incorporated, the cooperation exploiting their labor force, printed, including her mother’s recipe for enchiladas coloradas. In the process, the chapter introduces Borderlands’ performative set-up in several ways. Instead of one clearly defined subject or theme, it incorporates different topics and conceptual impulses. It also stays undecided about its form. What kind of theoretical text starts out with a poem? A performative text which focuses on processes, movements, and liminality, and which does not bother about discursive limitations. Anzaldúa introduces Borderlands with two quotes on Chicana/o discourse of Aztlán, then continues with the poem of the Border Field Park, the place where she sees silver waves marbled with spume and the gray haze of the sun. The border fence separates San Diego from Tijuana, but the constant movement of the elements, the wind and the ocean, unites both places. Even the static border fence is put in motion when blown down by Yemayá, the sea goddess of Cuban Santería and Brazilian Candomblé.

44 

R. RADLWIMMER

Throughout the chapter, the interacting poems, songs, narratives, and concepts reflect the movement of elements, structures, persons, entities, colors, and shapes which Anzaldúa depicts. The Chicana writer maintains the epistemological focus on the performative throughout the entire book and expands it to her other texts. In the first chapter of Borderlands, Anzaldúa traces the migratory movements in the Southwest and links them to present times. As her aunt warned them, those who move are identified by the dominant order as aliens, and Pedro, who ran in the fields, is deported to Guadalajara by plane and walks his way back. Today’s border crossing appears as the historically legitimate approach of inhabitants of the Americas and the Southwest, exemplified by the migrants of the Bering Strait or the legend of Aztecs looking for the eagle with the serpent. Movement also signifies the Spanish colonization of the 1500s and the illegal Anglo migration into Texas in the 1800s; it is thus not strictly fixed to one group or specific political or military interests. Colonization and occupation lead to the political movement of exile, “El destierro/The Lost Land.” In 1848, it is the border that moves, “pushed” from North to South through Anglo expansion, which motivates more movements: illegal crossings, “el cruzar del mojado” [wet-back’s crossing], travesías [crossings], refugees, migrations, returns, the floating on drafts on the Río Grande, swimming, wading, border hunts, being kicked back across the border. Anzaldúa describes the border crossings as performative acts, with migrants who “enact their rites of passage” (Anzaldúa 2007, 34). The second chapter’s title, “Movimientos de Rebeldía y culturas que traicionan,” emphasizes the performative quality of borderlands and invokes the movements of rebellion of Mexican blood circulation toward oppressive structures. The chapter deals with the question how these oppressions perpetrate her own culture. It recounts her growing up in South Texas, her resistance against patriarchal, heteronormative beliefs, and her struggle for education and freedom. Anzaldúa pictures her life in performative terms, as movements away from what she knows. She left home in order to find herself, but she took the land, the Valley, with her, slowly but continuously walking like the turtle who carries home wherever she goes. The predawn orange haze and sleepy crowing of roosters introduce the third chapter, “Entering into the Serpent.” In the half-light, she avoids the snakes under the porch. The chapter explores the image of the serpent. It proposes a renegotiation of fearful images in Chicano culture and a new spirituality arising out of Aztec, matriarchal cultural memory. By entering

4  COLORS AND SHAPES: FROM BORDERLANDS TO NEPANTLA 

45

into the serpent, the chapter searches for different kinds of snakes that cross her path, mind, spirit, history in the Rio Grande Valley and in Aztec mythology. In the process, those who constantly cross over develop La Facultad, a capacity to see phenomena below the surface which causes shifts in perception. Chapter four, “La herencia de Coatlicue/The Coatlicue State,” deals with Coatlicue, the Aztec serpent goddess who represents blocks in the performative process. She signals the “reluctance to cross over, to make a hole in the fence and walk across, to cross the river” (Anzaldúa 2007, 71). The Coatlicue State is dark, dumb, windowless, with no moon. It stimulates an increment of consciousness, steps forward into a new territory, impeding to stay in the same place. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” chapter five, presents the constantly moving tongue of the child at the dentist, the “wild tongue” Chicana/o Spanish, advocating for a performative use of language through women’s voices, sexual voices, poets’ voices to overcome the tradition of silence. Anzaldúa evokes the hot, sultry evenings when corridos, border songs of love and death, reverberated out of the cheap amplifiers of the local cantinas into her bedroom window. Throughout the chapter, norteño and conjuntos musics’ guitars, bajo sexton, drums and accordions accompany the rhythm of Chicana/o tongues. Chapter six, “Tlilli, Tlapalli/The Path of the Red and Black Ink,” introduces performative writing, a state of psychic unrest which makes poets write and artists create. (In her essay “Border Arte,” this will be one of Anzaldúa’s main arguments.) The seventh and last chapter of Borderlands’ prose section, “La consciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness,” creates a performative epistemology with the mestiza as the priestess of crossroads and the borderlands. Shortly after the publication of Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldúa opted for a terminological change which caused a profound theoretical development of her idea of the interstices. As she found people using borderlands in a more limited sense than she had meant it, she introduced the term nepantla. With nepantla, she left behind the Valley’s hot pink houses and red pepper fields and embraced a wider and more abstract space. Nepantla was no longer shaped like the Mexico-US border; it interrupted binary, static interpretations of Anzaldúa’s thinking, yet included multiplied border zones as one of its manifold manifestations. Nepantla’s multi-faceted liminality stretched out rhizomatically into many directions at once, connecting, staggering, and dissolving different places, bodies, focal points. As the concept expanded the moveable quality of borderlands, it

46 

R. RADLWIMMER

incorporated the vivid, kaleidoscopic depiction of South Texas into its visual repertoire, as one of its infinite options. Nepantla combined transcendent contemplations with manifest enactments, as its hypotheses emerged in interaction with artists’ work, with the images they produced. Thus, Anzaldúa’s nepantla introduced a new visuality. It generated new colors, modeled new shapes. Nepantla, the Nahuatl word for in-between space, accompanied Anzaldúa persistently. Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, she added more and diverse conceptual layers to it, deleted and discharged others. As she explained in Light in the Dark, she constantly shifted positions in theoretical writing. With this methodology, Anzaldúa converted nepantla into a moveable concept which stands exemplary for her performative way to produce theory. As with other Anzaldúan concepts such as Coyolxauhqui, nepantla’s elementary—interstitial—components stay the same over the rewriting processes, and yet, they are turned around, moved from one place to another, back and forth, upside down. The history of Anzaldúa’s redefinitions of nepantla can be tracked in her drafts, manuscripts, and published texts. The Anzaldúa Papers show a chronology of Anzaldúa’s elaboration of the concept since 1991. Box 70 stores “‘En Nepantla,’ manuscript drafts, 1991–1992;” box 61 “Nepantla: the Theory and Manifesto, 1995;” box 65 “‘Violent Space, Nepantla Stage,’ manuscript, 1996 March 20.” Box 55 houses “Nepantla: In/ Between and Shifting, 1997 October 31” as well as “‘Nepantla and the Creative Process,’ 2002 November 13.” Anzaldúa’s constant reformulations enter in dialogue with Latin American and Chicana literature. Nepantla did not appear in This Bridge called My Back or in Borderlands, but one of the contributors of Anzaldúa’s 1990 edition Making Face, Making Soul, Tey Diana Rebolledo, referred to Sor Juana’s nepantla, the space-in-between. Feminist icon Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the baroque writer, was allegedly born in a village south of Mexico City called Nepantla, but it was really Mexican feminist writer Rosario Castellanos who elaborated and presented Sor Juana’s nepantla as the land in the middle, as the place of lacking orientation (Castellanos 1984, 30). Chicana theorist Norma Alarcón, who was part of Anzaldúa’s PhD committee in California, had written her own dissertation on Rosario Castellanos and translated it to Spanish in 1992. Alarcón uncovered Castellanos’s work on Sor Juana and on nepantla, the land or earth in between, and analyzed nepantla in Castellanos’ poetry collection En la tierra de en medio (Alarcón 1992, 9, 149). Whether or not Anzaldúa was

4  COLORS AND SHAPES: FROM BORDERLANDS TO NEPANTLA 

47

familiar with Alarcón’s solid research, Chicanas talked about nepantla in the early 1990s. In 1993, Pat Mora used it as the title of her book Nepantla. Essays from the Land in the Middle. Mentioning Sor Juana in the introduction, Mora interprets nepantla not as “in-between,” but as “in the middle,” giving it a slightly different meaning. Mora’s autobiographical essays deal with her life as a South Texan Chicana in Cincinnati and engage with Chicana feminist readings. She maintains a poetically vague understanding of nepantla as the middle, but also as two or multiple spaces. Anzaldúa owned a copy of Mora’s book, as can be seen in box 202 of the Anzaldúa Papers. While other Chicanas mentioned nepantla briefly in their writings, Anzaldúa started to see it as one of her key concepts. In the early 1990s, Anzaldúa still used the term borderlands, but slowly replaced it by nepantla. With the new concept, she accentuated the psychoanalytical and spiritual dimensions and the native resonances of the interstices. Anzaldúa’s first publication on nepantla is the essay “Border Arte,” printed in a 1993 San Diego museum catalogue on the topic La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience. In her later writings, she drifted further away from borderlands and deeper into nepantla, but now she intertwined both concepts, stating that she was born and lived in the in-between space of nepantla, the borderlands. Throughout the essay, Anzaldúa uses nepantla and borderlands as synonyms, as partly overlapping, or as quite different from each other. She describes nepantla as a state of being in the borderlands, and the border itself as a constant nepantla state. Mexican migrants who pass over to the US enter nepantla and cannot escape it. Anzaldúa compares borderlands to Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, the one spot on earth containing all other places within it. In the publications following “Border Arte,” she will move this definition toward nepantla and slip it over the new concept. The essay’s double use of borderlands and nepantla seems like a strategic—didactical—maneuver to familiarize readers of Borderlands with the new notion and to respect the museum catalogue’s overarching theme. As Anzaldúa explores how nepantla relates to borderlands, she constructs a liminal conceptual space nurtured by both. Just like borderlands, nepantla is a state of transition, but also a transitional space, an uncertain terrain shaped through movements. The time-space continuum of the moment when a migrant crosses the border defines nepantla. Nepantla is, in all senses, a performative category which manifests either ontologically, spatially, or temporally: as a way of being, as a territory, as a transition, or as

48 

R. RADLWIMMER

two or all three. In nepantla, spatial disorientation appears as the “normal,” sane way of coping with the accelerated pace of the planet’s complex interdependence. The world’s velocity shapes nepantla’s temporality, and so does the historic dimension of the Nahuatl term. In “Border Arte,” Anzaldúa describes an Aztec exhibition as nepantla zone between historic periods, where ancient and present cultures impact each other, where Aztec art is arranged through contemporary eyes, and where today’s artists incorporate elements of the past into their work. Nepantla connects artists to an old, unconscious reservoir of meaning. Anzaldúa sees the ontological-spatial-temporal performativity of nepantla as the “natural habitat” of the often binational, multi-tradition-rooted border artists. They live in the liminal space where art and la frontera intersect. When they enter nepantla, they face outside obstacles, such as appropriations by dominant culture and economic depressions. These external dangers will be a less significant conceptual line in Anzaldúa’s later definitions, when inner changes will be one of nepantla’s central axes. Now she only touches on them shortly, describing nepantla as a dark cave of creativity where border artists turn themselves upside down to see from another perspective. Through the years, Anzaldúa continued to employ nepantla to comprehend diverse, complex phenomena. Soon the concept became more intricate.

Canvas and Clay After the varicolored borderlands, nepantla’s traces testify the strong visuality of Gloria Anzaldúa’s work. The Chicana theorist generally linked her own writing to pictures she saw and imagined, which she translated into words. As a child, she wanted to be a visual artist. She started sketching and became attentive to light, movement, shadow, and shape, which she tried to recreate. Growing up on the ranches, Anzaldúa liked to draw horses, an animal she would later associate with sexuality and desire. As an acclaimed theorist, she turned again to images. For her 1990s talks, she produced pictograms to illustrate her ideas and projected them on transparencies to make abstractions palpable to her public. She thought of this activity as a continuation of ancient teaching practices of native codices (Anzaldúa 2000, 22, 60). In fall 1995, Anzaldúa organized the artist-in-residency “Entre Americas: El Taller Nepantla” at the Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California. During six weeks, she worked collectively with four other artists on

4  COLORS AND SHAPES: FROM BORDERLANDS TO NEPANTLA 

49

nepantla, molding the concept through visual arts. She put it in direct exchange with those who were able to manifest nepantla on canvas and paper, with ceramics and clay, who could enact it through brush and pencil, who captured its movements in color and light, shape and form. Two years prior Anzaldúa had published another version of “Border Arte” in the NACLA Report on the Americas which shaped nepantla slightly differently. Some explanations were missing or shuffled around. She deleted her earlier focus on nepantla’s liminality and modified the concept through a restructured form, changing, for instance, from active to passive voice in the paragraph on the dangers of nepantla. She left nepantla’s external obstacles aside, but refined her idea of the internal transformations caused by nepantla, on the blocks it can cause for those who stay to long in it. Two paragraphs, one on the border as occupied site, another one on border artists’ capacity to change perspectives, had not been directly connected to nepantla in the museum catalogue. Now they were placed in the midst of nepantla explanations, with the effect of connecting the concept stronger with the border and its art. Moreover, Anzaldúa strengthened the intersectionality of nepantla. In the museum catalogue, Anzaldúa had described the shifts between sexual and racial positions—a familiar thought from Borderlands—as disorientations caused by nepantla. In the NACLA Report, she included people crossing between classes and in and out of privileges, as well as women artists for whom nepantla was the norm. In the NACLA Report, Anzaldúa replaced the terms “artists” and “mestizo border artists” from the museum catalogue by “women artists” and “mestiza border artists.” For the 1995 workshop, Anzaldúa identified female border artists whose nepantla experiences she accentuated in the NACLA Report. She invited Mexican and US-based visual artists, the Chicana Santa Barraza, Chilean-born Liliana Wilson and Cristina Luna Elizarraras from México City, as well as the writer Isabel Juárez Espinosa from Chiapas. In her October gig at the Villa, she presented them her Nepantla: Theory and Manifesto which she had created and which introduced the artists to the concept. During daytime, all women worked individually; in the evening, they came together to discuss nepantla through their day’s work. They covered art, gender, and politics, with one main focus being the marginalization of women. As they later described in their own books, both Barraza and Wilson saw the nepantla workshop as decisive step in their artistic path. Barraza produced relevant paintings such as Nepantla; Wilson

50 

R. RADLWIMMER

shifted from male to female and androgynous representations (Wilson and Castañeda 2015, 27–28; Barraza 2001, 7–11). After the workshop, Anzaldúa continued to shape nepantla through art work, at times ascribing it to concrete illustrations of the borderlands, at times finding it in abstractly painted spaces. In 2002, Anzaldúa wrote the essay “Bearing Witness. Their Eyes Anticipate the Healing” for the catalogue of an art exhibition of Liliana Wilson at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, a community-based Chicanx cultural association. Bearing Witness was also the name of the acrylic Wilson had painted in the same year while visiting Anzaldúa in Santa Cruz (Fig. 4.1). Anzaldúa saw the painting’s undefined space, the woman inhabiting it, and the eye transporting another reality, as a representation of nepantla. In Wilson’s Bearing Witness, dark colors dominate. Any indication of the Mexico-US border is eliminated. The frontal image of a woman with brown hair and a dark blue long-sleeve shirt appears before an arched, dim background. Her silhouettes are hardly visible, only her face is clearly lit. Fig. 4.1  Liliana Wilson: Bearing Witness (2002). Courtesy of Liliana Wilson

4  COLORS AND SHAPES: FROM BORDERLANDS TO NEPANTLA 

51

Her brown eyes softly look down into a dark vastness. To her right, where the single eye and eyebrow in the same size of her eyes appear, the background turns red. Anzaldúa interprets the woman’s detached seeing as a double consciousness displayed by the interiority of the figure and the third eye. In her essay, Anzaldúa praises how Wilson depicts nepantla as a psychoanalytical and spiritual state. Through Wilson’s art, Anzaldúa defines nepantla as a midway point where transformations are enacted between the conscious and the unconscious, both poised on the edge of balance and in palpable tension (Anzaldúa 2009, 277–278). The painting and Wilson’s art serve to further fine-tune nepantla from a psychoanalytical and spiritual perspective. Some of Wilson’s earlier paintings turn to the glowing image of the border’s fences, the brown and yellow land, and the burning sun, such as El color de la esperanza [The color of hope], which she painted in 1987, the same year when Anzaldúa’s Borderlands was published (Fig. 4.2). In Light in the Dark’s third chapter, which is again a new version of the essay

Fig. 4.2  Liliana Wilson: El color de la esperanza (1987). Courtesy of Liliana Wilson

52 

R. RADLWIMMER

“Border Arte,” Anzaldúa described this early painting as another representation of nepantla, and placed it centrally to further expand her concept. Anzaldúa now reinterprets the visual representations of the colorful borderlands through the abstract, symbolic lens of nepantla. Compared to the two prior versions of the essay, Anzaldúa added several new paragraphs on nepantla, one of them dedicated to El color de la esperanza. According to Anzaldúa, the painting captured nepantla’s characteristic tension. It shows a young person with short hair (Anzaldúa says, “a modern day girl”) sleeping in front of what Anzaldúa interprets as the US side of the border. On the other side, a sun (to Anzaldúa, “the giant ancient sun,” Tonatiuh) and the Vírgen de Guadalupe, two figures “grounded in ancient indigenous Mexican spiritual history,” guard her (Anzaldúa 2015, 56). With her portray of the painting, Anzaldúa returns to the concrete, applied dimension of nepantla at the Mexico-US border which is essential in her essay. At the same time, Wilson’s allegoric depiction leads to the abstractions of nepantla where Anzaldúa sees two or more forces clash: These tensions between extremes create cracks or tears in the membrane surrounding, protecting, and containing the different cultures and their perspectives. Nepantla is the place where at once we are detached (separated) and attached (connected) to each of our several cultures. Here the watcher on the bridge (nepantla) can “see through” the larger symbolic process that’s trying to become conscious through a particular life situation or event. (Anzaldúa 2015, 56)

This time, Anzaldúa sees the interiority of nepantla from a relational perspective, focusing on the ways of connecting with and disconnecting from the world. Who is, in this context, the watcher on the bridge, nepantla? The sun, the Vírgen, the sleeping person, the painting’s viewer, or some instance between them? The sun’s eyes are opened, they are soft and sad. The Vírgen’s eyes are closed, as are the girl’s eyes, and yet, the two calm faces seem to see each other and to see the colors of hope beyond the fence’s and the dry landscape’s reality. As if Anzaldúa reconnected El color de la Esperanza to Bearing Witness, she concentrates not only on the physical space and the Mexican ornaments of the painting, but on the figures’ sense of sight. Anzaldúa highlights the ability to see below the surface, which in Borderlands she called La Facultad, in Wilson’s allegorical depiction of nepantla. Suddenly Anzaldúa reuses one sentence of

4  COLORS AND SHAPES: FROM BORDERLANDS TO NEPANTLA 

53

“Bearing Witness” (or the other way round?), when she explains Wilson’s nepantla as “the midway point between the conscious and the unconscious, as a place where transformations are enacted” (Anzaldúa 2015, 56). This repetition or reuse of sentences shows, once more, how Anzaldúa constructs nepantla as a flexibly moving concept which connects different texts to each other. Its definition is a performative process. The other chapters of Light in the Dark employ nepantla dominantly and offer new conceptual layers to it throughout the entire book. They continue to link nepantla to artistic creation. In the preface “Gestures of the Body,” Anzaldúa becomes conscious of various nepantlas—finally in plural!—through her artistic practice. They appear next to each other, they are linguistic, geographical, gender, sexual, historical, cultural, political, or social nepantlas. In “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together,” nepantla’s transitional process of creation is confusing, maddening, frustrating, until it creates a wider space in the mind which allows to make connections. Nepantla shapes Anzaldúa’s reading of her own texts, it is the place between ambiguity and control, between confusion and clarity, where she finally starts to recognize which pieces belongs together. In “now let us shift …,” nepantla occupies a dominant position in the epistemological process which defines the transformational cracks between the two millennia. The essay was first published in 2002 in this bridge we call home, and republished in 2015 in Light in the Dark with the modified subtitle “conocimiento … inner work, public acts” (“conocimiento” instead of “the path of conocimiento”). Both versions differ in very slight formal aspects, a comma, a left-out word. The way to conocimiento means a feminization of knowledge, a shift away from the colonization of life, an inward-turn, and it is reached via creative acts—writing, art-making, or dancing. In this essay, nepantla is the second of seven epistemological stages to conocimiento: the arrebato, a rupture and fragmentation of consciousness, causes nepantla, where one is torn between ways. Nepantla leads to the other stages, first to the Coatlicue State in which one does not want to know (which Anzaldúa calls desconocimiento), then to a crossing of bridges as point of transformation, and further to Coyolxauhqui’s new realities. Before an epistemological catharsis becomes possible, Nepantleras need to build bridges with the outer world. If they succeed, they can overcome the binaries and transformation happens. Thus, the experience of outside events (arrebato) leads to an inner struggle (nepantla, desconocimiento), only to surface again in the public, causing new clashes, but finally transforming realities through an inner shift.

54 

R. RADLWIMMER

“now let us shift …” starts its reflections on nepantla with a quote by Rosario Castellanos, which Anzaldúa translates from Spanish, on Sor Juana’s colonial condition and nepantla as spiritual isolation. She connects this thought to her autobiographic experience as the only Chicana in the doctoral program at UT Austin, where her oppositional—academic and working class—realities lead her into nepantla, the zone where she struggles with change, with its outer expression and her inner relationship to it, longing for transformation while fearing and fighting against it. As nepantla interacts with the other epistemological stages, the concept appears stronger determined by them than in other texts: nepantla now is one phase in a performative process of knowing. Passing through nepantla means entering other stages of consciousness. However, these epistemological stages are not in a stable or linear order, but interchangeable. In 1994, Anzaldúa had linked nepantla to Borderlands’ epistemological blocks, the Coatlicue state. Nepantla was the phase after the Coatlicue state and appeared as the passageway where reconfigurations happened (Anzaldúa 2000, 225–226). In “now let us shift …,” nepantla leads into the Coatlicue state, and the blocks of knowing no longer cause nepantla, but are its consequence. Through the varying conceptual lens of nepantla, Anzaldúa’s conocimiento proves to be a performative model in which all epistemological stages can be enacted in a fragmented, non-linear sense. Anzaldúa concludes “now let us shift …” with nepantla as the only place where change happens, as a constant, unsafe transition and true home. At different other points of Light in the Dark, Anzaldúa ties nepantla prominently to the arts. She compares the concept to the Árbol de la Vida, the traditional Mexican clay sculpture of the Tree of Life. Nepantla is like the tree, Anzaldúa says in Chap. 3, “Border Arte,” for it crosses all dimensions, including spiritual spaces, the underworld, and concrete reality. In this redefinition of nepantla, Anzaldúa does not mention any artist’s name. However, she was inspired by sculptors like Verónica Castillo, a San Antonio-based ceramicist from the state of Puebla, México, and 2013 Fellow of the National Endowment of the Arts. Verónica Castillo and Gloria Anzaldúa did not know each other personally, but they occupied the same South Texan artistic space. They both arrested abstract notions through a hands-on approach. They both produced the same shape of the Árbol de la Vida, the one with words and metaphors, the other one with clay and color. Verónica Castillo’s Árboles de la Vida illustrate Anzaldúa’s new definition of nepantla. One of Castillo’s delicately formed, decorated, and painted trees is firmly rooted in the blue planet (Fig. 4.3). The piece

4  COLORS AND SHAPES: FROM BORDERLANDS TO NEPANTLA 

55

Fig. 4.3  Verónica Castillo: Protectores de la Madre Tierra (2015). Courtesy of Verónica Castillo

from 2015 is called Protectores de la Madre Tierra [Mother Earth’s Protectors]. People in traditional Mexican dresses at the foot of its trunk are connected to all branches. The branches are never ending, but joined together in circular shapes. Flowers, birds, butterflies are part of the same web of connection. In the middle, a red heart grows out of the green. According to pre-Colombian folk knowledge, a natural tree of life gave fruits with a read heart that symbolized friendship and life. On top of Castillo’s sculpture, a sun rises which represents the pre-Hispanic sun-god (Castillo 2013). Another representation of Castillo’s Tree of Life from 2017 is entitled Mujeres abrazando a la madre tierra [Women Embracing Mother Earth].

56 

R. RADLWIMMER

It shows its trunk as a green and brown Mother Earth (Fig. 4.4). Her arms and gaze are raised toward the sky, leaves and branches grow out of her. Flowers are blossoming; yellow-orange-black butterflies, black-and-green toucans, red-and-blue parrots, and multicolored hummingbirds are nesting. Persons in traditional dresses form a circle around the trunk, others sit peacefully on the grass and plant trees. In a third sculpture from 2013, the tree is allegorically represented through Madre Tonantzín [Mother Tonantzín] who gives the piece its title (Fig. 4.5). Castillo dedicated the piece to women, their forgotten work and love for the earth symbolized by Tonantzín, the pre-Columbian mother goddess which Anzaldúa evoked together with other native female deities as the divine within herself (Anzaldúa 2007, 72). On Mother Tonantzín’s head, five agitated flames rise up as if they were bright-red branches. Under a green, embroidered cape, the figure’s bright pink dress shows three images of a woman planting trees, collecting crops and weaving them to cloth. In her left hand, she holds a white dove, in her right, the tree’s red heart. Next to it, a third eye watches over six everyday-life scenes which place female figures central in interaction with others: a teacher of love and respect, a mother sharing her skills, a grandmother showing healing herbs, a grandmother telling Fig. 4.4  Verónica Castillo: Mujeres abrazando a la madre tierra (2017). Courtesy of Verónica Castillo

4  COLORS AND SHAPES: FROM BORDERLANDS TO NEPANTLA 

57

Fig. 4.5  Verónica Castillo: Madre Tonantzín (2013). Courtesy of Verónica Castillo

stories, a grandmother teaching how to embroider. They are all connected to Tonantzín through the trees carefully decorated blue, red, black, and white circular-shaped branches, as are the red, yellow, and purple flowers and blossoming cacti. In “Flights of the Imagination. Rereading/Rewriting Realities,” Light in the Dark’s second chapter, Anzaldúa declared that the Árbol de la vida was an image she had written about many times. She decided to shape the entire chapter like an Árbol, structuring its sections “from the root to the ground and up its trunk to the branches and on to the sky, a journey from the depths of the underworld that ascends to the concrete physical world, and then to the upper realities of spirit” (Anzaldúa 2015, 25). These worlds are not separate but overlapping. They occupy the same place. Far from being the static, inflexible tree through which Deleuze and Guattari criticized Western thinking structures, Anzaldúa envisioned the Tree of Life’s descending and ascending movements rooted in indigenous thinking. Anzaldúa referred to Deleuze and Guattari in Light in the Dark’s chapter four, “Geographies of selves—Reimagining Identity,” which like chapter two presented previously unpublished material. She saw their rhizome as a similar structural model than hers, since the Tree of Life

58 

R. RADLWIMMER

connected everybody and everything. The tree’s movements, its circular branches symbolize nepantla, linking the concept to the spiritual dimension of interconnectedness. Through the Árbol de la Vida, nepantla becomes a place which is not a place, a space that simultaneously exists and does not exist. It connects nepantla to afterlife and liminality. Anzaldúa cites the murals of Teotihuacán, where afterlife was depicted as nepantla, and Victor Turner’s concept of liminality, adding the dimension of ritual performance to her own concept. Nepantla no longer is the resistance to contradictory tensions, but a connective tissue, a bridge, a point of contact, a midground between spirituality and the soul, the site of transformation and rebirth connected to native Mexican spirituality. Anzaldúa’s nepantla is a performative concept. It splits up in several directions. Nepantla can be easily summarized as interstices, yet it cannot easily be grasped. Through collective definition processes, in dialogue with artists and art, Anzaldúa developed nepantla’s complexity, defining it alternatively as state of transition, liminal space, as place where transformations are enacted, as stage of conocimiento, as hindering or creative passage way. Throughout the years and with every new text, Anzaldúa overlapped, repeated, reformulated the concept’s disseminating semantics. In her first version of “Border Arte” in 1993, nepantla is a liminal, however material category, partly coinciding with borderlands, which poses external obstacles from society. In the version following shortly after, Anzaldúa emphasized nepantla as an intersectional category, with a stronger focus on women and new dimensions to identity, such as class. In 1994, she underlined nepantla as a contextual category, which has to be read together with the Coatlicue state. From 1995 on, when she reworked nepantla together with other artists, she accentuated nepantla as a psychoanalytical category of conscious and subconscious elements. In “now let us shift …,” nepantla is an epistemological category. In other chapters of Light in the Dark, nepantla is a relational category of attachments and detachments (“Border Arte”), a multiplied category of creating and of reading (“Gestures of the Body,” “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together”), and a spiritual category, further connected to liminality and Aztec mythology (“Flights of Imagination”). These different dimensions negotiate with each other, they contain the possibility of becoming all other dimensions. Anzaldúa’s nepantla is confusing and comforting. It is comprehendible, yet its meaning slips away. Nepantla plays a chore melody without deciding which are the leading instruments. It allows readers to interact playfully with its polyphone vocality and to extract its notions associatively. It

4  COLORS AND SHAPES: FROM BORDERLANDS TO NEPANTLA 

59

invites to simplify and to rebuild its complex ideas as a solid path to walk on. Its concrete abstractions build stable steps and lack them; they give clear directions and refrain from them. Nepantla’s performativity introduces an ordered chaos. It is a single concept, but it moves from within and communicates with images. It fuses pictures and words, it exchanges ideas and symbols only to replace them with themselves. Sculptures, paintings and drawings shape nepantla and provide it with colors, forms, and graphic dimension.

Bibliography Alarcón, Norma. 1992. Ninfomanía: El discurso feminista en la obra poética de Rosario Castellanos. Madrid: Pliegos. Alire Sáenz, Benjamin. 1997. In the Borderlands of Chicano Identity. In Border Theory. The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelson and David E. Johnson, 68–96. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1990. Haciendo caras, una entrada. An Introduction by Gloria Anzaldúa. In Making Face, Making Soul. Haciendo Caras. Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa, xv–xxviii. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 2000. Interviews. Entrevistas. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007 [1987]. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 2009 [2002]. Bearing Witness. Their Eyes Anticipate the Healing. In The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating, 277–279. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press. Barraza, Santa C. 2001. An Autobiography. In Santa Barraza, Artist of the Borderlands, ed. María Herrera-Sobek, 3–49. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Castellanos, Rosario. 1984 [1973]. Mujer que sabe latín …. México D. F.: Fondo de la Cultura Económica. Castillo, Debra. 1999. Border Theory and the Canon. In Post-Colonial Literatures. Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah L. Madsen, 180–205. London: Pluto Press. Castillo, Verónica. 2013. In Translation: Clay Artist, 2013 National Heritage Fellow. Podcast, March 27, 2014. https://www.arts.gov/honors/heritage/ fellows/ver%C3%B3nica-­castillo. Accessed 14 April 2020. Contreras, Sheila Marie. 2008. Blood Lines. Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press.

60 

R. RADLWIMMER

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. 1991. Death on the Border: A Eulogy to Border Art. High Performance 53: 8–9. Johnson, David E., and Scott Michaelson. 1997. Border Secrets: An Introduction. In Border Theory. The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelson and David E. Johnson, 1–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Keating, AnaLouise. 2000. Risking the Personal. An Introduction. In Interviews. Entrevistas, Gloria Anzaldúa, ed. AnaLouise Keating, 1–15. New  York: Routledge. Lugones, María. 1992. On Borderlands/La Frontera: An Interpretive Essay. Hypatia 7 (4): 31–37. ———. 2006. On Complex Communication. Hypatia. A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21 (3): 75–85. Martín Alcoff, Linda. 2006. The Unassimilated Theorist. PLMA 121: 255–259. Mignolo, Walter. 2001. Capitalismo y geopolítica del conocimiento: El eurocentrismo y la filosofía de la liberación en el debate intelectual contemporáneo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo. Pinkvoss, Joan. 2007 [1987]. Editor’s Note. In Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa, n.p. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. 2000. Feminism on the Border. Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tabuenca-Córdoba, María Socorro. 2009. Twenty Years of Borderlands: A Reading from the Border. In Güeras y Prietas. Celebrating 20 years of Borderlands/La Frontera, ed. Norma Cantú and Christina L. Gutiérrez, 11–16. Adelante Project. Wilson, Liliana, and Antonia Castañeda. 2015. Ofrenda. In Ofrenda. Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams, ed. Norma E. Cantú, 13–30. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Three Museums: “Border Arte’s” Multiplications

A Living Tex Beyond nepantla, Gloria Anzaldúa’s close relation to the visual arts is documented in “Border Arte.” The essay recounts her visit of Aztec: The World of Montezuma at the Denver Museum of Natural History on September 26, 1992, Anzaldúa’s fiftieth birthday and the monumental exhibit’s opening day. Aztec ran for five months, until February 21, 1993, and counted 721,000 visitors. On 35,000-square-feet, over three galleries on two floors and an atrium, it displayed more than three hundred artifacts from different museums of Mexico and the US, most importantly from the Templo Mayor and the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City (Nein 1993, 286). In her autobiographic, conceptual essay— another autohistoria-teoría, Anzaldúa links the museum space and Aztec material culture to visual border art and synthesizes them in her own conceptualizations. She approaches the exhibit’s monumentality critically, asks for the ethical entitlement of the US museum landscape to display Aztec artifacts, and ties it to questions of race and ethnicity of the viewers’ positionalities. Within the framework of native cultural memory, Anzaldúa discusses art work by Yolanda López, Marsha Gómez, Santa Barraza, Liliana Wilson, Malaquías Montoya, Irene Pérez, R.C. Gorman, Robert Arnold, Judy Baca, Juan Dávila, and Rafael Barajas. The entanglement of historic and contemporary art nurtures and sustains her notions of nepantla © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Radlwimmer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity, Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5_5

61

62 

R. RADLWIMMER

and Coyolxauhqui, which reciprocally explain the ambiguous in-between space where Aztec materiality and Chicanx art collide. Just as in Anzaldúa’s childhood memory, when her body became three bodies as she reached for oranges on the table above her, “Border Arte” multiplies. It exists in three different versions which vary structurally, terminologically, and conceptually from each other. We remember, the first version, with the subtitle “Nepantla, el lugar de la frontera,” was published in the 1993 museum catalogue La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience. The catalogue was coordinated by Katryn Kanjo. It accompanied an exhibition at the Centro Cultural de la Raza and Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, which was curated by Patricio Chávez and Madeleine Grynsztejn. The essay’s second version was printed in the 1993 NACLA Report on the Americas 27.1 under the modified title, “Chicana Artists: Exploring nepantla, el lugar de la frontera.” Both served as models for further reprints of the essay. The NACLA Report’s version appeared in Darder and Torres’ 1998 Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy and Society. The museum catalogue’s version was more frequently reedited: in Keating’s 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, in Cantú and Hernández-Avila’s 2016 anthology Entre Guadalupe y Malinche, or in González, Chavoya, Noriega, and Romo’s 2019 Chicana and Chicano Art: A Critical Anthology. Reflecting standard procedures, all editors undertook some minor changes compared to their two models. The Latino Studies Reader leaves out one question from the NACLA Report, “Adónde nos vamos de aquí.” In the Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, the last words of the museum catalogue’s essay, “con mi arte” are translated as “along with my art;” some hyphens appear differently; the italics of the original Spanish parts of the text are deleted, and the indication on the presence of a translator, Gwendolyn Gómez, of Anzaldúa’s original credits is missing. Entre Guadalupe y Malinche deletes Anzaldúa’s credits at the end of the essay, but Chicana and Chicano Art: A Critical Anthology reuses all editorial decisions and credits of the catalogue, while adding footnotes with translations of Spanish terms. All editions incorporated “Border Arte” as significant contribution to the respective theme of their anthology. As their focus was not the essay’s editorial history, they did not indicate which version they selected. Thus, they participated in the performativity which Anzaldúa created between the different versions, and perpetuated the essay’s bifurcated history.

5  THREE MUSEUMS: “BORDER ARTE’S” MULTIPLICATIONS 

63

A third version of “Border Arte” was published in 2015 in Light in the Dark. The book’s third chapter further added and deleted paragraphs and shifted the essay’s structure according to its new internal logics. The publication context contributed to the essay’s latest modifications. Editor AnaLouise Keating mentions the considerable changes of Light in the Dark’s “Border Arte” due to Anzaldúa’s incorporation of “themes she was developing in other chapters” (Keating 2015a, 193). In her depiction of Coyolxauhqui, for instance, Anzaldúa added the recurrent theme of the book, which was missing in the prior versions: the “light of the moon” which “encourages crossing over and entering the other world” (Anzaldúa 2015, 50).Through the essay’s interaction with the book as a whole, Coyolxauhqui is well-known to the reader who was introduced to the moon goddess from page one. Nevertheless, Anzaldúa reintroduces her in Light in the Dark’s following chapters as if she was a new character. Each time, Anzaldúa provides the same information on the deity’s decapitation, dismemberment, reintegration and her complicated family relations. The repetitions could be attributed to Anzaldúa’s untimely death which hindered her to fully revise these details. However, Anzaldúa’s writing was shaped by what she called her “repetition compulsion,” a performative stylistic device: there was “a lot of repetition in my work” as “I put the same thing in two or three chapters because ultimately I don’t know where it’s going to end up” (Anzaldúa 2000, 175). As a close reading shows, Anzaldúa modified almost every sentence between the three versions and restructured their logical ties. The changes are often subtle, but only a few constructions stay the same throughout the three versions. Either one of the two first versions overlaps, at times, with Light in the Dark, with the museum catalogue’s version being closer and showing a higher similarity in wording with Light in the Dark than the NACLA Report. Generally, the two earlier versions from 1993 shuffle the different conceptual pieces and reassemble paragraphs in new orders, while Light in the Dark expands the previously elaborated notions even more and adds new layers to them. The changes between the different versions arise out of various motivations and serve different purposes. Anzaldúa reworked formalities, introduced new connecting passages, reformulated and re-contextualized terms and notions, switched back and forth between English and Spanish, added or deleted longer passages and shifted the essay’s focus. She presented the exhibition’s space from three different angles, and gave the three versions a varying conceptual structure. The modified micro-level of new

64 

R. RADLWIMMER

grammatical, syntactical, and semantic decisions steered the course the essay took, and interacted with the changes performed on a macro-level, that is, with the moving and shifting concepts and ideas. “Border Arte” is no exception to Anzaldúa’s way of working. She habitually created various versions of one text and revised, polished and shuffled her ideas even after publishing (Keating 2015b, xiii; Vivancos Pérez 2013, 29). In Light in the Dark’s preface and in chapter five, “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together,” Anzaldúa explained that her writing never ended and that there were only small ends to it. Thus, whenever she read her published work, she thought it needed more revisions. This practice reflected not just Anzaldúa’s perfectionism, but the performative method of conceptualizing she cultivated. Her methodological stances and theories emerged, as she said, in the writing process. She made discoveries as she wrote, not before. With each new draft, she figured out how to craft concepts, how to formulate them on an experiential discursive level, how to follow lines of thought. She pondered on how to release a piece’s energy, how to capture its premise, ideas, counter ideas, controlling ideas, and plot, on how to shape a text’s structure and design, how to formalize and order. Each time, she considered the narrative techniques and use of lexis—Spanish or English, theoretical or vernacular language—, the person, tense, register, voice, and style to speak from (Anzaldúa 2015, 3–7, 115). She maintained ideas, but altered and fine-tuned them. By doing so, her concepts extended and shrunk through different texts as in the case of nepantla, or in one and the same text, as in “Border Arte.” For “Border Arte,” Anzaldúa reworked the syntax and lexis on a micro-­ level for style reasons and an improved readability. In all three versions, for instance, Anzaldúa starts one sentence with “I ask myself;” in the museum catalogue, she continues it with “What does it mean for me, esta jotita, this queer Chicana, this mexicatejana to enter a museum and look at indigenous objects that were once used by my ancestors? Will I find my historical Indian identity here along with its ancient mestizaje?” (Anzaldúa 1993, 107) In the NACLA Report, she changes “for me” into “to me,” adds “at this museum” and ends with the altered “among the ancient artifacts and their mestizaje [sic] linage.” In Light in the Dark, the same passage is further modified to “What does it mean for me—esta jotita, this queer Chicana, this mexicatejana—to enter a museum and look at indigenous objects that were once used by my ancestors? Will I find my historical Indian identity here at this museum among the ancient artifacts and their mestizaje?” (Anzaldúa 2015, 48). While these changes may seem

5  THREE MUSEUMS: “BORDER ARTE’S” MULTIPLICATIONS 

65

insignificant, they exemplify Anzaldúa’s general tendency to use italics to highlight Spanish in her earlier writings, but not any more in later works. They also show that Anzaldúa focused on small textual details, such as prepositions (“to me”/“for me,” “along with”/“among”) or the introduction or deletion of hyphens and commas. Even in these details, there seems to be no final text version, as Anzaldúa goes from one option to another, without decisively sticking to one. “[I]ts ancient mestizaje” transforms into “the ancient artifacts and their mestisaje [sic] lineage” and further into “the ancient artifacts and their mestizaje.” While the second and the third version suggest that mestizaje comes along with the objects displayed in the museum, the first version emphasizes ethnical crossings as part of the identity. These formal modifications lay the movable ground for the performativity Anzaldúa discusses in her concepts. Anzaldúa shifted the essay’s paragraphs between the different versions. Consequently, she invented new transitions to frame the newly combined text pieces. In the NACLA Report, Anzaldúa described the bloodied steps of a reconstructed 16-foot temple, where Aztecs flung down human sacrifices, in the third paragraph of the essay. In the museum catalogue La Frontera/The Border, she placed the same description in the fifth paragraph. In this first version, the previous paragraphs are longer and contain more philosophical reflections. In order to return the narrative from the moon goddess to the exhibit’s space, Anzaldúa introduced an audio guide which leads her to the temple. The Walkman with the voice of Chicano Edward James Olmos underlines the close connection of Chicanas/os to the Aztec world which Anzaldúa describes. In Light in the Dark, the same passage appears only in the ninth paragraph, since Anzaldúa further expanded the essay’s beginning through new paragraphs—especially the notion of Coyolxauhqui—and shifted old ones. She continues inserting new information about the temple and the technical device. “As part of the tour, I don headphones and clip on a Walkman,” Anzaldúa writes this time, then adds: “The sibilant whispery voice of Chicano actor Edward James Olmos interrupts my thoughts and snaps me from my ‘dreaming’ back to the ‘real’ world. Olmos guides me to the serpentine base of a reconstructed sixteen-foot temple where the human sacrifices were flung down, leaving bloodied steps” (Anzaldúa 2015, 50). Anzaldúa’s explanations have become longer, instead of one hypotactic sentence of the previous versions, there are three. Her shift between her inner experience and exhibition space, which was implicit in the museum catalogue’s version, has now become explicit, and Olmos, we learn, is not just a Chicano, but

66 

R. RADLWIMMER

a Chicano actor, which further accentuates the conceptual focus on border art. Another performative element Anzaldúa uses is the fluid change between English and Spanish in the three versions. As if she enacted one of her Borderlands mantras—Chicano Spanish is “a living language” and really “many languages” spoken according to the specific moment (Anzaldúa 2007, 77)—, Anzaldúa constructs “Border Arte” as a living text, as many texts, in which she code-switches to express her thought. The NACLA Report’s version italicizes, whenever both languages come together and contrary to Borderlands’ italicized Spanish, the English parts of the text, queering US publishing realities that highlight the commonly unknown. In Light in the Dark, Anzaldúa eliminates all italics for English or for Spanish, underlining that all Chicana/o codes are valid versions. She reuses a previously English-italicized sentence of the NACLA Report: “Hay muchas razas running in my veins, mescladas [sic] dentro de mi [sic], otras culturas that my body lives in and out of” (Anzaldúa 2015, 64). In the first version of the essay, however, she had used English instead of Spanish and the sentence was shorter: “There are other races running through my veins, other cultures that my body lives in and out of” (Anzaldúa 1993, 114). All three versions prioritize Spanish and English differently, but together, they complete a linguistic circle, proving that Chicana/o self-expression lies in the constant shift between linguistic barriers.

Three Museums As if Anzaldúa depicted three museums, the versions of “Border Arte” present the exhibition space in varying ways. In the shortest version, the NACLA Report, the autobiographic narrator, Anzaldúa, first stands in front of the statue of Coyolxauhqui. Throughout her visit of Aztec, she takes notes of the materials of the artworks and artifacts: clay, stone, jade, bone, feather, straw, cloth. At the serpentine base of a remodeled temple where the Aztec sacrifices are staged, she feels irritated by the white viewers’ horrified reaction. She passes by a glass case with the skeleton of a jaguar with a stone in its open mouth. In the museum shop, feathers, paper flowers and ceramic fertility goddesses are sold for much higher prices than in Mexico. She touches the armadillo pendant around her neck and thinks of border artists’ lives. Anzaldúa crosses the exhibit room with codices with hieroglyphs on the wall and sees the reconstructed statue of

5  THREE MUSEUMS: “BORDER ARTE’S” MULTIPLICATIONS 

67

a newly unearthed bat god. As she walks out of the exhibit hall, the computer table provides her with information on Aztec names, dates, and calendar systems. The museum catalogue, La Frontera/The Border, the essay’s first version, starts with the gatekeeper taking the visitors’ tickets as they enter the simulation of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. Anzaldúa takes notes of the materials used and for a while, she walks together with the Chicano kids from the Servicio Chicano Center. She wonders why they all are taught their cultural roots by whites. As she looks at videos and listens to slide presentations in the middle of a white middle-class crowd, she is bothered by their distanced behavior. Then she stops before Coyolxauhqui and reflects on her. Before leaving, her eyes return once more to the moon goddess. The audio guide, Chicano Edward James Olmos, leads her to the Aztec temple where whites are consuming the images of sacrifices. She listens to the voice and the musical recitations in Nahuatl on her Walkman. From the glass-caged exhibits of the sacred world, she walks to the open market, the Tlaltelolco, with its baskets with chiles, avocados, nopales, and petates, with its ducks hanging in wooden cages. After the glass case with the jaguar, she meanders absently from room to room, critically noticing how objects are placed together or are separated. In the Aztec Museum shop, she touches her armadillo necklace, crosses the room with the Codices on the walls and finds the bat god. When she leaves the exhibit hall, she returns the audio tape and turns to the computers for more information. After the five-hour tour, she walks out of the museum with aching feet, directs herself to the parking lot, waits for a taxi. As the taxi arrives at her hotel, she is still filled with images and thoughts of the exhibit. Light in the Dark’s version adds more layers. A native woman’s blessing, her chant and drums, introduces the essay. A diverse group participates in the exhibit’s opening ceremony, the African American mayor and former Hispanic mayor of Denver as well as representatives from Mexico. From here, Anzaldúa maintains the spatial structuring of the essay’s first version. The gatekeeper takes the visitors’ tickets, she enters the simulation of Tenochtitlan, views exhibited figures; takes notes on the materials used; sees and hears videos, slides, and guides; is angered by the comments of the white middle-class crowd; contemplates Coyolxauhqui; listens to Olmos’ voice on the tape; reaches the Aztec temple; hears the same censoring comments. Only then—at a different point than in the museum catalogue—her eyes return to Coyolxauhqui. She listens to Olmos and the

68 

R. RADLWIMMER

Nahuatl music, walks from the sacred world to the Tlaltelolco, sees all the goods of the first version, but additionally some corn, beans, nopalitos lying on petates, and the life-sized statues of people in arrested activity. After the jaguar, she continues meandering (not absently any more) and notices the museums’ limiting categorizations. Then again, the museum shop, armadillo, rooms with codices, bat god, end of the exhibition, turning in the Walkman, using computer, leaving the museum after five hours, aching feet, parking lot, waiting for taxi, back to hotel. Anzaldúa’s route through the museum changes in the three versions, but mostly in the second one. The narrative arrangement of space is, thus, not a strict autobiographical report, but serves to conceptualize native’s heritage in today’s border art and decolonial cultural memory. While Light in the Dark gives more details, it narrates the museum space similarly to the essay published in La Frontera/The Border. The NACLA Report’s version leaves out sensorial elements and presents the pieces and places in a different connection. The interaction between visitors, artifacts, figures, and simulations vary in the three versions, but are more actively depicted in La Frontera/The Border than in the NACLA Report, and most accentuated in Light in the Dark. The different spatial order reflects the essay’s varying conceptual structure. In the NACLA Report, a brief theorization of Coyolxauhqui’s philosophical characteristics comes first, introducing her timeless stillness and an energetic pushing toward the moon. The moon goddess is the eye-­ catching start to the essay and guides the thoughts to follow: Aztec’s legacy for Chicana/o artists; the folk forms in Yolanda López and Santa Barraza’s work; the links between past and present through recurring symbols and metaphors; nepantla’s disorientation and relevance to artists and immigrants; borders in the work of Latino artists Juan Dávila and Rafael Barajas; hybridity and political engagement of border art; labeling and market pressure; the meanings of the exhibit for Chicanas/os; the multi-­ subjective, split perspective of border artists. The essay in the museum catalogue La Frontera/The Border initiates with the idea of colonization. It traces the coloniality of the exhibit gestured between the two countries and describes the museum space as borderlands. With the question of Aztec’s impact on Chicana/o artists, Anzaldúa introduces Coyolxauhqui. This time, she does not focus on the goddess’s philosophical qualities, but on her political relevance, linking her to cultural fragmentation exemplified in the “slick, prepackaged exhibition costing $3.5 million” (Anzaldúa 1993, 108). Coyolxauhqui

5  THREE MUSEUMS: “BORDER ARTE’S” MULTIPLICATIONS 

69

symbolizes resistance in border art. Anzaldúa talks about Yolanda López and Santa Barraza’s use of the archetypal figures Guadalupe, Malinche and La Llorona, and their creation of spiritual retablos linked to Aztec cultures. She then dedicates long paragraphs to nepantla as liminal space where border people live, to the silent inward-movements of their art, and to their problematic political position in a world which marginalizes them. She concludes the essay with the border as occupied space to be transformed, as through Juan Dávila and Rafael Barajas’ work, and the distance between modern time Chicanas and ancient Tenochtitlan. In Light in the Dark, Anzaldúa creates a new introductory paragraph for “Border Arte,” as she does with the other chapters of the book, which prepares her main concepts introduced in the essay: the border as locus of resistance, Coyolxauhqui’s putting together of fragments, and the transitional space of nepantla. Light in the Dark’s version conceptually starts, just as in La Frontera/The Border, with the museum as colonized space, yet this time accentuating the difference between Chicana/o artists’ deep, spiritual connection to the Aztecs and white visitors’ detached view of them. In the border space of museums, ruptures, fragmentation, and reassembling happens through art, processes represented by Coyolxauhqui. Anzaldúa now significantly expands the notion, combining the moon goddess’s philosophical and political features from the two other versions. She then adds, in two previously missing paragraphs, further conceptual layers to the idea of Coyolxauhqui. Firstly, she links her stronger to the historical and ongoing neo/colonization of dismembered Mexican culture in the US. Secondly, she refers to the moon goddess in a psychoanalytical way, as the void created by traumatic experiences where the unconscious disintegrates into hundreds of pieces. Anzaldúa concludes with Coyolxauhqui’s reintegration of elements, her simultaneously incomplete, unfulfilled imperfection and integrated, complete wholeness. She then explains nepantla more detailed than in the essay’s prior versions, referring for the first time to Liliana Wilson’s art. Anzaldúa also adds to the artistic and spiritual dimension of the essay. She inserts a paragraph on retablos, the Mexican devotional tin paintings she mentioned only shortly in the previous versions, and on their rootedness in Mexican folk religion. In this context, Anzaldúa addresses misuses of the native past, and discusses the fine line between recognition and appropriation of indigenous cultures. Anzaldúa wished to expand this thought but could not finish it: according to her writing notes, she wanted to insert a section on “Non-Native appropriation of Native spirituality and

70 

R. RADLWIMMER

culture” (Keating 2015a, 193). Santa Barraza’s retablos enhance Anzaldúa’s contemplations on spirituality which she connects to sexuality. She explains the connection between the sacred ritual of making tortillas, its depiction in Chicana arts, and its connotations with the lesbian sex act. The Aztec jaguar of the exhibit inspires her to think about its spiritual quality as seeker of knowledge and its connections to the unconscious and archetypal psychology. Anzaldúa recovers the focus on intersectionality from the NACLA Report (which does not appear in the essay’s first version), especially on mestizaje which she sees as at the core of border art. She expands on racial whiteness as the silently assumed “normal” condition of an artist, and on border art’s adjectives which ascribe art to an identity label. In some occasions, Anzaldúa replaces the term “white” of the previous versions with the term “Anglo.” This shift is not just a synonymous use, but a conceptual modification from a racial to a national-­ cultural category to reflect on the ethnical pressures border artists encounter. As in the previous versions, Anzaldúa dwells on artistic ideas, autohistorias, communal artwork. She maintains the same ending as in the museum catalogue La Frontera/The Border, but adds further thoughts on collective, ancestral influences. Anzaldúa concludes the essay with a new paragraph on the construction of identities and spiritual connections to ancestors. In sum, the three versions of the essay give an overall impression of modified repetition and variation. The briefer NACLA Report compresses the ideas, while Light in the Dark, the longest rendering, paraphrases and enlarges them. The concepts of all three versions are partly restructured in new combinations, without completely changing. Light in the Dark refines the concepts, at times combining the two previous versions, at times being closer to either one, at times exceeding them. The essay’s last version takes up the museum catalogue’s contemplation on coloniality, a thought which is missing in the NACLA Report, and expands on its ongoing effects in museums in the fifth paragraph. It stresses border art’s contribution to decolonization of the occupied museum space. Where Light in the Dark ponders on structures of dependency and funding of border art—an aspect present in all three versions—, it repeats the formulations from the NACLA Report and makes them longer. Both versions address the effects of finances on the border artist and interpret this condition, while the museum catalogue’s version instead calls for further research on the understudied field of the impact of money on border art. Light in the Dark’s conceptual and narrative polish generally brings a higher degree of

5  THREE MUSEUMS: “BORDER ARTE’S” MULTIPLICATIONS 

71

complexity. The two earlier versions are easier accessible, especially the NACLA Report which forgoes additional digressions and literary decorations. And yet, all three versions condense the same core concepts and lead them in different directions. They cover similar issues, but structure them diversely. The essay’s diversified structure, narration, and conceptual layers tell the story of a performative essay. The dynamics created between the three versions of “Border Arte” are an open invitation to a flexible use of Anzaldúa’s thought. The Chicana writer once affirmed that she encouraged people to take her ideas and work with them in their own way. She wanted to inspire them to get in dialogue with themselves, to write their own books and theories (Anzaldúa and Reuman 2000, 5–6). Instead of delimiting meaning, Anzaldúa radically opened her texts for diverse interpretations. In “Border Arte’s” three versions, notions on identities, bodies, creation, politics, borders, spirituality, mythology, history, and cultures merge easily in new combinations. The multiplied essay demonstrates once more how Anzaldúa silently shuffled ideas, how she frequently added new layers to concepts, how she habitually divided and restructured textual pieces.

Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1993. Border Arte: Nepantla, el lugar de la frontera. In La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience, coordinated Katryn Kanjo, 107–114. San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza/The Museum of Contemporary Art. ———. 2000. Interviews. Entrevistas. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007 [1987]. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Ann E.  Reuman. 2000. Coming into Play: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa. MELUS 25 (2): 3–45. Keating, AnaLouise. 2009. Introduction. Reading Gloria Anzaldúa, Reading Ourselves… Complex Intimacies, Intricate Connections. In The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating, 1–15. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015a. Appendix 5. In Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, 190–199. Durham: Duke University Press.

72 

R. RADLWIMMER

———. 2015b. Editor’s Introduction. In Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, ix–xxxvii. Durham: Duke University Press. Nein, Karen M. 1993. AZTEC: The World of Moctezuma at the Denver Museum of Natural History. Curator: The Museum Journal 36 (4): 286–301. Vivancos Pérez, Ricardo F. 2013. Radical Chicana Poetics. New  York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 6

A Hemispheric Perspective on Anzaldúan Textualities

Intertexts of the Americas Gloria Anzaldúa’s linguistic awakening—the realization that speech acts are performative—was inspired by a conversation between actors from diverse zones of the Americas. Overhearing Caribbean women talking to each other, it dawned on the girl that language is continuously reinvented: “The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word ‘nosotras,’ I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we’re male or female” (Anzaldúa 2007, 76, original emphasis). To define linguistic processes as unstable and constructed, Anzaldúa pictured young Gloria who started to grasp complex cultural dynamics. From now on, she would regard language as a male discourse which could be altered. Gloria Anzaldúa’s life work is hemispheric per definition, as is the Chicanx and Latinx movement she identified with. The Reconquista de Aztlán traced the mythical paths of the Aztecs from a place imagined in today’s Southern US to Tenochtitlan, or Mexico City, and back in contemporary flows of hemispheric migration (Alurista 1969). The constant movement across the Mexico-US border, and the relocation of the border from the nineteenth century onward, has often been discussed (Bender 2012, 13–19; Radlwimmer 2020, 8). In Borderlands/La Frontera’s first

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Radlwimmer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity, Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5_6

73

74 

R. RADLWIMMER

chapter, home is Aztlán and “el otro México,” the other Mexico, where different parts of the Americas overlap and coexist. Anzaldúa, in line with other Chicanx literatures, highlights the long-grown, historic dynamics of colonization and war which formed her borderlands through constant circulations to and from Mexico and Central America. Anzaldúa’s hemispheric perspective is omnipresent in all her work; one cannot open any of her books or read any paragraph without stumbling over her attempts to recuperate, rewrite, rethink the connections between the Americas: whether in descriptions of Mexican folk life in the US, or in the reinvention of Aztec rites and deities, or in her personal Chicana anecdotes. However, Anzaldúa also expands wider into the hemisphere. Borderlands starts with Yemayá, the ocean’s patron in Cuban and Brazilian spiritual traditions. At a point where earth and ocean touch each other in constant movement, “a gentle coming together / at other times and places a violent crash,” the goddess blows down the wire fence which artificially separates the space (Anzaldúa 2007, 23). The essay “now let us shift …,” included as the last chapter in Anzaldúa’s last book, Light in the Dark, ends again with the hemispheric invocation of Yemayá: “Every day you visit the sea, walk along Yemayá’s glistening shores. You want her to know you, to sense your presence as you sense hers. […] At the lips del mar you […] voice your intention: to increase awareness of Spirit, recognize our interrelatedness, and work for transformation” (Anzaldúa 2015, 156). Yemayá, the Yoruba mother of the sea and of the world, transforms the writing self into a hemispheric being. In the allegoric form of the goddess, the connection with disperse people of the Americas becomes tangible. The poem which follows redefines geographic locations in shamanic traditions. Invoking the winds of the east, the fire of the south, the water of the west and the earth of the north, Anzaldúa’s lyrical ritual of words seek to permeate official cartographies of the Americas. Anzaldúa’s performative concepts, meandering from text to text, growing between paragraphs and sentences, are nurtured by a hemispheric network which, at the same time, recognizes the Chicana writer’s contributions. In Mexican classrooms and communities, for instance, Anzaldúa’s work is being read and exhibited as a complex cultural theory which transcends borders, inciting the question how to understand and reappropriate her notions in other contexts of the Americas (Gutiérrez Magallanes 2018, 136; Belausteguigoitia Rius 2020, 39). Anzaldúa maintained close intertextual relations with writers and intellectuals of the hemisphere, weaving their ideas into her writing. Stehn and Alessandri called this practice

6  A HEMISPHERIC PERSPECTIVE ON ANZALDÚAN TEXTUALITIES 

75

Anzaldúa’s “Inter-American Philosophy of Mexicanness.” Their careful research in the Anzaldúa papers at the Benson Latin American Collection identified eight Mexican philosophical sources Anzaldúa explicitly or implicitly used for Borderlands/La Frontera: José Vasconcelos, Miguel León-Portilla, Juana Armanda Alegría, Octavio Paz, Samuel Ramos, Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz, and Jorge Carrión (Stehn and Alessandri 2020). Anzaldúa’s intertextual hemispheric work, however, does not stop in a Mexican context or singular disciplines, and is still present in her later writing. In her essay “Border Arte,” Anzaldúa referred to Chilean and Mexican artists Juan Dávila and Rafael Barajas: There are other borders besides the actual Mexico-U.S. frontera and other border artists occupying other nepantlas. Wuthering Heights (1990), an oil painting by Juan Davila [sic] (a Chilean artist who has lived in Australia since 1974), depicts Juanito Leguna, a half-caste, mixed-breed transvestite. Juanito’s body is a simulacrum parading as the phallic mother with hairy chest and hanging tits. Another Latino artist, Rafael Barajas (who signs his work “El Fisgón”), has a mixed-media piece titled Pero eso sí … soy muy macho (1989). It shows a Mexican man wearing the proverbial sombrero taking a siesta against the traditional cactus, tequila bottle on the ground, gun belt hanging from unapenca de nopal. But the legs sticking out from beneath the sarape-like mantle is wearing a garter belt, panty hose, and high-heeled shoe. It suggests another kind of border crossing  – gender bending. (Anzaldúa 2015, 64, original emphasis)

In this paragraph, Anzaldúa theorized, in an almost classical Butlerian sense, gender performativity as “another kind of border crossing” situated at “other borders” besides the Mexico-US border. The ekphrasis of the two painted transvestites challenges “the distinction between appearance and reality” and, therefore, makes gender performativity visible (Butler 1988, 527). Yet, with Dávila and Barajas and their queer depictions of Juanito Leguna and the stereotypical Mexican macho, Anzaldúa goes beyond Butler and inserts transvestic performativity into decolonial ways of knowing. By naming an Australian-based Chilean and a Mexican artist, and calling them both “Latino,” Anzaldúa metaphorized the Mexico-US geographical division line as performative sexuality and displaced the border throughout the Americas, from Texas to Mexico City to Chile and even around the globe. Discursively, Anzaldúa connects to Nelly Richard, the Chilean-based feminist cultural critic, who also theorized the performativity of the Chilean transvestite through Juan Dávila’s work. Richard

76 

R. RADLWIMMER

talked about Latin American transvestites who stage a simulacrum through their neobaroque and murky art of discard, and whose impoverished aesthetics from the barrio distort US or European definitions of performativity. Like Anzaldúa, Richard explored how Dávila painted the transvestite as a trope for the continent, underlining the hemispheric quality of a Latin American (gender) performativity (Richard 2004, 41–52). Gloria Anzaldúa’s performative concepts further draw from Latin American fictional writing. When Anzaldúa experienced writing blocks, she read Rosario Castellanos’ poetry until she was able to write again. For her shaping of nepantla, Anzaldúa translated Castellanos to English: “But, oh, like Sor Juana, like the land-crossing Spanish, like so many Mexicans who have not recovered from the conquest, I lived nepantla—a spiritual isolation” (Anzaldúa 2015, 126). Anzaldúa owed the entire collection of Jorge Luis Borges works; she read Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Gabriela Mistral, whose delicate feminist prose and poetry she adored. Latin American magic realism, surrealism, and fantastic literature provided her with a model to write about supernatural phenomena from a realistic perspective, which she employed to further deconstruct Western oppositions of reality and fantasy, fiction, and history. When teaching about borderlands, Anzaldúa used a visual image she created of Borges’ imaginary of El Aleph, which, just like her understanding of borderlands, represented the entire universe in one single spot. Carlos Casteñeda’s books, like Las enseñanzas de Don Juan: una forma yaqui de conocimiento (1968) or Viaje to Ixtlan (1973), accompanied Anzaldúa’s thought production. In a 1983 interview, she already mentioned Don Juan’s ability to feel a presence in a room and to transform into something else, characteristics which reminded her of her father’ stories of a black dog racing alongside his truck, no matter how much he sped. In Light in the Dark, Don Juan and his author still appeared in instances when she defined the performative. Anzaldúa felt, with the protagonist Don Juan, that the steadily running course of the world stopped on 9/11; she reflected on shamanism through his flexible way of seeing the so-called non-ordinary reality; she took over Don Juan’s expression of a left side of awareness for naming her Mundo Zurdo; she listened, with Don Juan’s advice, consciously to her environment to overcome writing blocks; she stopped, as Don Juan’s acts of not-doing taught, the ongoing consensual reality to unlearn from a decolonial point of view; she called the shapeshifting naguala a dreaming body, as Don Juan did; or, in a new paragraph added in her third published version of the essay “Border Arte,” she defined nagual, the moving unconsciousness, with

6  A HEMISPHERIC PERSPECTIVE ON ANZALDÚAN TEXTUALITIES 

77

Don Juan’s shamanic hunting to access to the unknown (Anzaldúa 2000, 36, 50, 96, 272, 273, 2015, 16, 32, 44, 50, 54, 57, 103, 126). One of Anzaldúa’s intertextual references most frequently commented on, and criticized, is José Vasconcelos’ La raza cósmica, from which Anzaldúa derived her new mestiza consciousness. Research has investigated how these two visions of mestizaje differed or coincided, and by doing so, they implicitly proved the performativity of this concept, such as Anzaldúa’s incorporation of underlying shadows which may surface anytime, or the innovatively processual character of her mestizaje (DavisUndiano 2000; Saldaña-­Portillo 2001; Medina 2009; Pitts 2014; Palacios 2017). Furthermore, Anzaldúa mentioned sixteenth century native codices and Spanish American chronicles to comprehend the history of the Chicanx movement and to reinvent realities. According to Anzaldúa, but without indicating references, the snake entering a vagina as an image for rape was reported by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. The vagueness of Anzaldúa’s conquest narrations does not take away from the hemispheric engagement with the past her stories transport. The Chicana writer treated all genres she produced, including methodological, historiographic, or scientific reflections, like fiction or poetry, applying a storytelling format which theorized her own and other struggles for representation (Anzaldúa 2015, 4, 26). The narrations of the early Americas were not envisioned as exact historic accounts, but form part of her hemispheric performativity. Aimed to reinvent a world marked by the shadows of colonialism, they should be read as elements of the same instable, malleable literary-theoretic zone as her other concepts in motion.

Concluding Remarks Gloria Anzaldúa was acutely aware of her own hemispheric performativity. She explained that as the Chicana writer she chose to be, she was permanently crossing to other mundos, shifting into and out of perspectives, struggling with the role she played, and speaking from the geographies of many countries (Anzaldúa 2015, 2–3). Her “countries” were no national entities, even though they bore the spatial imprint of the hemispheric connections she maintained. They were the site of her performative speech acts and indebted, above all, to the culture of transformation. In 2014, Andrea Pitts asked to “locate Anzaldúa’s authorial positioning within philosophical traditions in Latin America” which she saw as a “hermeneutical

78 

R. RADLWIMMER

lacuna within contemporary Anzaldúa scholarship” (Pitts 2014, 85), and this book serves as a contribution to situate Anzaldúa’s work within a hemispheric context. The Chicana writer’s project does not stand alone but relates to a network of texts and ideas of the Americas, as this concluding chapter evidenced, weaving the book’s research results into a hemispheric panorama. The many intertexts Anzaldúa inserts into her writing, and the reception of her thought in the Americas, prove the transterritorial quality of Anzaldúa’s performativity. This book’s first chapter also explained Anzaldúa’s link to the performative turn of the Americas, which was especially motivated and constituted by feminist theories and artistic production like hers. Chapter 1 contended that Anzaldúa’s way of setting up performative concepts, dealing with performativity, directly relate to other, structurally similar feminist theories of the Americas, and to the conversations which accompanied their appearance. As shown in this book, Anzaldúa’s performative concepts operate in various ways. They expand and multiply through different texts, such as in the case of nepantla in its seemingly never-ending process of redefinition. They also appear in the multifold rewritings of the same text, even after its publication, like it happened in the essay “Border Arte.” Anzaldúa frequently wrote more than one version of the same text, and her drafts and published works communicate with each other. With the written word, Anzaldúa wished to capture ephemeral realities which then could be reenacted by her readers. Identifying the components which form Anzaldúa’s malleable notions, I reevaluated the interplay of the discursive and material aspects of her performativity throughout the book. On a discursive level, the Chicana writer used multiple literary devices, such as employing a stream-of-thought present tense, combining seemingly contradictory narrative elements, mobilizing the personal to place transformative life experiences at the center of enunciation, or entangling the changes endured in physical reality with philosophical considerations on movements. Materially, Gloria Anzaldúa arranged her handwritten or printed and cut-out sentences in pieces in front of her. She shuffled and organized them in various layers until they acquired the meaning she had intended, even though she would soon rearrange them in other layers. In Chap. 2, I analyzed these material dynamics of textual production together with Anzaldúa’s performative concepts on writing, which manifested in the 1981 essay “Speaking in Tongues,” included in This Bridge, in “Tlilli, Tlapalli / The Path of the Red and Black Ink,” the sixth chapter of her 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera, and in “Putting Coyolxauhqui

6  A HEMISPHERIC PERSPECTIVE ON ANZALDÚAN TEXTUALITIES 

79

Together,” the fifth chapter of her posthumous Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Together, the three accounts introduce a feminist, decolonial corporality which self-consciously affirms the continuous necessity to write. In Chap. 3, I assessed Anzaldúa’s notions of the body, mind, and soul, which she sees as fluid sites of transformation. Anzaldúa conceptualized her own bodily, mind and soul experiences—pain and disease, pleasure and desire—and channeled them into allegories like Coatlicue or Coyolxauqhui. The move from ailment toward spirituality became one of her dominant epistemological figures. To Anzaldúa, writing was a gesture of the body, and so were all life forms; therefore, in her texts, non-human actors and supposedly inanimate objects—the earth, the border wall’s steel curtain—suddenly take over bodily perceptions. In the same chapter, I associated the Chicana writer’s autohistoria-teorías on bodily transformations with her performative identity politics of a body which she cannot “de-race” or “e-race,” as she said. However, she envisioned the shift from a sexualized, racialized comprehension of bodies and identities to a solidary enactment of interconnectedness. Anzaldúa’s maneuvering through various movements and societal sectors made her understand that identities are constantly under construction and thus, require perpetual attention. Together with Moraga, Anzaldúa conceived a performative intersectionality nearly a decade before Spivak’s, Crenshaw’s, or Butler’s prominent interventions. Working through these notions, Anzaldúa conceived concepts like nos/otras, Spiritual Activists, or Nepantleras, aimed to interrupt the frenzy of a lifestyle dedicated to “a continual doing,” and to start doing work that matters instead. Chapter 4 dived deeply into Anzaldúa’s conceptual turns from borderlands to nepantla and back, claiming that neither one of the two is a “stable” notion. As Anzaldúa defined borderlands as a constant state of transition, I carefully reevaluated Borderlands/LaFrontera’s performative quality. I then disentangled her efforts in defining the notions of borderlands and nepantla, which at times coincided, even though Anzaldúa would finally replace borderlands by nepantla. In the process, the Chicana theorist reinvented borderlands and nepantla several times and formed both concepts in dialogue with the visual arts. In the paintings by Santa Barraza and Liliana Wilson, through which Anzaldúa advanced her concept, the performativity of the artistic-theoretic interventions of nepantla became visible. Chapter 5 was dedicated to the different versions of Anzaldúa’s essay “Border Arte,” which theorized the 1992 exhibition “Aztec: The World

80 

R. RADLWIMMER

of Montezuma” in Denver. A rigorous philological analysis showed the lines of transformation outlined in the three different editions of the essay. It also illustrated how Anzaldúa’s rewritings affected the variable semantics of “Border Arte.” The detected narrative and theoretical changes represent some of the basic principles of Anzaldúa’s performative concepts. At the same time, the Denver Museum of National History, which served as a background scenery to Anzaldúa’s text, arose each time anew, producing three different literary arrangements and giving an example of a performatively understood space. Ultimately, my research shows how Anzaldúa’s performative concepts are produced, and how they can be read as a hemispheric intervention which shaped innovative views on literature, art, bodies, or identities on a transterritorial level. In the 1970s, when Anzaldúa was a young writer, she set out to invent a new style; all her life she aimed to create less structured thoughts, less rigid categorizations, and thinner boundaries to picture similarities instead of divisions (Anzaldúa 2000, 37, 2015, 83). She succeeded. In Anzaldúa’s performative texts, material and discursive dimensions continuously interact. Her way of setting up theory reflects her ethics of transformation. Shamanic writing and embodied, spiritual identities prove her vision of performativity to be profoundly decolonial and feminist. A constant flow of images and ideas is the driving force of her thought, blurring borders between versions, texts, genres, territories. The performative mode enables her concepts to cross over, to move between and beyond, to connect apparently dispersed realities, phenomena, people.

Bibliography Alurista. 2000 [1969]. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. In Textos sobre el desarrollo del movimiento chicano. Texto bilingüe, ed. and trans. Raquel León Jiménez, 62–69. León: Universidad de León/Secretariado de Publicaciones. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2000. Interviews. Entrevistas. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007 [1987]. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press. Belausteguigoitia Rius, Marisa. 2020. Action as Deferment: Anzaldua’s conocimiento as Critical Thinking. In Transborder Matters: circulaciones literarias, transformaciones culturales mexicanas ychicanas, ed. Romana Radlwimmer, vol. 9, 36–49. iMex. México Interdisciplinario. Interdisciplinary Mexico.

6  A HEMISPHERIC PERSPECTIVE ON ANZALDÚAN TEXTUALITIES 

81

Bender, Steven W. 2012. Run for the Border. Vice and Virtue in U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings. New York and London: New York University Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531. Davis-Undiano, Robert Con. 2000. Mestizos Critique the New World: Vasconcelos, Anzaldúa, and Anaya. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 11: 117–142. Gutiérrez Magallanes, María del Socorro. 2018. Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies in Mexico. History and Evolution. Academy, Literature, Art, and Cultural Practices. In The Routledge History of Latin American Culture, ed. Carlos Manuel Salomon, 130–143. New York: Routledge. Medina, Rubén. 2009. El mestizaje a través de la frontera: Vasconcelos y Anzaldúa. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 25 (1): 101–123. Palacios, Agustín. 2017. Multicultural Vasconcelos: The Optimistic, and at Times Willful, Misreading of La Raza Cósmica. Latino Studies 15: 416–438. Pitts, Andrea. 2014. Toward an Aesthetics of Race: Bridging the Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and José Vasconcelos. Inter-American Journal of Philosophy 5 (1): 80–100. Radlwimmer, Romana. 2020. “Transborder Matters. A Conceptual Approach.” Transborder Matters: circulaciones literarias, transformaciones culturales mexicanas ychicanas, edited by Romana Radlwimmer. iMex. México Interdisciplinario. Interdisciplinary Mexico 9 (17): 8–17. Richard, Nelly. 2004 [1993]. Masculine/Feminine. Translated by Silvia R. Tandeciarz and Alice A. Nelson. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Saldaña-Portillo, Josefina. 2001. Who’s the Indian in Aztlán? Re-Writing Mestizaje, Indianism, and Chicanismo from the Lacandón. In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodríguez, 402–423. Durham: Duke University Press. Stehn, Alexander, and Mariana Alessandri. 2020. La Mexicana en la Chicana: The Mexican Sources of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Inter-American Philosophy. Inter-­ American Journal of Philosophy 1 (11): 44–62.

Bibliography

Alarcón, Norma. 1992. Ninfomanía: El discurso feminista en la obra poética de Rosario Castellanos. Madrid: Pliegos. ———. 2003 [1990]. The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism. In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole R.  McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim, 404–414. New York: Taylor & Francis Books. ———. 2012. Anzaldúan Textualities: A Hermeneutic of the Self and the Coyolxauhqui Imperative. In El Mundo Zurdo 3. Selected Works from the 2012 Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, ed. Larissa M. Mercado-­ López, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and Antonia Castañeda, 189–208. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Alire Sáenz, Benjamin. 1997. In the Borderlands of Chicano Identity. In Border Theory. The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelson and David E. Johnson, 68–96. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Alurista. 2000 [1969]. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. In Textos sobre el desarrollo del movimiento chicano. Texto bilingüe, ed. and trans. Raquel León Jiménez, 62–69. León: Universidad de León/Secretariado de Publicaciones. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1990. Haciendo caras, una entrada. An Introduction by Gloria Anzaldúa. In Making Face, Making Soul. Haciendo Caras. Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa, xv–xxviii. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 1993a. Border Arte: Nepantla, el lugar de la frontera. In La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience, coordinated

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Radlwimmer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity, Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5

83

84 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Katryn Kanjo, 107–114. San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza/The Museum of Contemporary Art. ———. 1993b. Chicana Artists: Exploring nepantla, el lugar de la frontera. NACLA Report on the Americas 27 (1): 37–45. ———. 1998 [1993]. Chicana Artists: Exploring Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera. In The Latino Studies Reader. Culture, Economy & Society, ed. Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres, 163–169. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2000. Interviews. Entrevistas. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. Preface. (Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe Spaces. In this bridge we call home. radical visions for transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, 1–5. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007 [1987]. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. ———. 2009 [2002]. Bearing Witness. Their Eyes Anticipate the Healing. In The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating, 277–279. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015a [2001]. Counsels from the Firing… Past, Present, Future. Foreword to the Third Edition. In This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 261–266. Albany: SUNY. ———. 2015b. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015c [1981]. Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers. In This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 165–174. Albany: SUNY. ———. 2016 [1993]. Border arte: Nepantla, el lugar de la frontera. In Entre Guadalupe y Malinche. Tejanas in Literature and Art, ed. Norma Cantú and Inés Hernández-Avila, 23–32. Austin: University of Texas Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Ann E.  Reuman. 2000. Coming into Play: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa. MELUS 25 (2): 3–45. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Back, Camille. 2019. ‘We Are the Queer Groups’: De ‘La Prieta’ à Borderlands/La Frontera, lire l’autohistoria-teoríacomme Performance et ‘Nouvelle’ Perspective Critique sur la Queer Theory. EOLLES Identités et Cultures 10: 1–14. Barraza, Santa C. 2001. An Autobiography. In Santa Barraza, Artist of the Borderlands, ed. María Herrera-Sobek, 3–49. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Belausteguigoitia Rius, Marisa. 2020. Action as Deferment: Anzaldua’s conocimiento as Critical Thinking. In Transborder Matters: circulaciones literarias,

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

85

transformaciones culturales mexicanas ychicanas, ed. Romana Radlwimmer, vol. 9, 36–49. iMex. México Interdisciplinario. Interdisciplinary Mexico. Bender, Steven W. 2012. Run for the Border. Vice and Virtue in U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings. New York and London: New York University Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531. ———. 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 1999 [1990]. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2016. Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance. In Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zaynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 11–27. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Calcott, Wilfred Hardy. 1968. The Western Hemisphere. Its Influence on United States Policies to the End of World War II. Austin: University of Texas Press. Capetillo-Ponce, Jorge. 2006. Exploring Gloria Anzaldúa’s Methodology in Borderlands/La Frontera—The New Mestiza. In Human Architecture. Re-Membering Anzaldúa, ed. Mohammad H.  Tamdgidi, 87–94. Belmont: Okcir Press. Carroll, Amy Sara. 2015. Lesbianism-Poetry//Poetry-Lesbianism. In The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, ed. Jodie Medd, 188–203. New York: Cambridge University Press. Castellanos, Rosario. 1984 [1973]. Mujer que sabe latín …. México D. F.: Fondo de la Cultura Económica. Castillo, Debra. 1999. Border Theory and the Canon. In Post-Colonial Literatures. Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah L. Madsen, 180–205. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2005. Redreaming America. Toward a Bilingual American Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Castillo, Verónica. 2013. In Translation: Clay Artist, 2013 National Heritage Fellow. Podcast, March 27, 2014. https://www.arts.gov/honors/heritage/ fellows/ver%C3%B3nica-­castillo. Accessed 14 April 2020. Contreras, Sheila Marie. 2008. Blood Lines. Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Culler, Jonathan. 2000 [1997]. Literary Theory. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dahms, Elizabeth Anne. 2012. The Life and Work of Gloria Anzaldúa. An Intellectual Biography. Theses and Dissertations Hispanic Studies 6. https:// uknowledge.uky.edu/hisp_etds/6. Accessed 20 February 2020.

86 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davis-Undiano, Robert Con. 2000. Mestizos Critique the New World: Vasconcelos, Anzaldúa, and Anaya. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 11: 117–142. Ferré, Rosario. 2001. A la sombra de tu nombre. México D. F: Alfaguara. Geertz, Clifford. 2000 [1983]. Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. 1991. Death on the Border: A Eulogy to Border Art. High Performance 53: 8–9. González, José. 2016. Performatividad de la ficción en la novela argentina contemporánea: relaciones de género en Griselda Gambaro, Sylvia Molloy, Perla Suez. PhD thesis. Université Toulouse le Mirail – Toulouse II. Gutiérrez Magallanes, María del Socorro. 2018. Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies in Mexico. History and Evolution. Academy, Literature, Art, and Cultural Practices. In The Routledge History of Latin American Culture, ed. Carlos Manuel Salomon, 130–143. New York: Routledge. Henderson-Espinoza, Robyn. 2012. El cuerpocomo (un) espacio de frontera: The Body as (a) Borderland Space. In New Frontiers in Latin American Borderlands, ed. Leslie G. Cecil, 41–48. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Herlinghaus, Hermann. 2000. ‘Performance’ as Critical Conceptual Figure: Nelly Richard’s Reading of DamielaEltit. Neohelicon 27 (1): 127–135. Johnson, David E., and Scott Michaelson. 1997. Border Secrets: An Introduction. In Border Theory. The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelson and David E. Johnson, 1–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Keating, AnaLouise. 1996. Women Reading Women Writing. Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 2000. Risking the Personal. An Introduction. In Interviews. Entrevistas, Gloria Anzaldúa, ed. AnaLouise Keating, 1–15. New York: Routledge. ———. 2009. Introduction. Reading Gloria Anzaldúa, Reading Ourselves… Complex Intimacies, Intricate Connections. In The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating, 1–15. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2013. Transformation Now! Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2015a. Appendix 5. In Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, 190–199. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015b. Editor’s Introduction. In Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, ix–xxxvii. Durham: Duke University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991 [1988]. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Colombia University Press.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

87

Lugones, María. 1992. On Borderlands/La Frontera: An Interpretive Essay. Hypatia 7 (4): 31–37. ———. 2006. On Complex Communication. Hypatia. A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21 (3): 75–85. Martín Alcoff, Linda. 2006. The Unassimilated Theorist. PLMA 121: 255–259. Medina, Rubén. 2009. El mestizaje a través de la frontera: Vasconcelos y Anzaldúa. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 25 (1): 101–123. Mignolo, Walter. 2001. Capitalismo y geopolítica del conocimiento: El eurocentrismo y la filosofía de la liberación en el debate intelectual contemporáneo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo. Mora, Pat. 1993. Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Moraga, Cherríe. 1993. Algo secretamente amado. In The Sexuality of Latinas, ed. Norma Alarcón, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga, 151–156. Berkeley: Third Woman. Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa. 2015 [1981]. Entering the Lives of Others. Theory in the Flesh. In This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 19. Albany: SUNY. National Geographic Resource Library: “Hemisphere.” https://education. nationalgeographic.org/resource/hemisphere Nein, Karen M. 1993. AZTEC: The World of Moctezuma at the Denver Museum of Natural History. Curator: The Museum Journal 36 (4): 286–301. Ohmer, Sarah S. 2010. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonizing Ritual de Conocimiento. Confluencia 26 (1): 141–153. Padrón, Ricardo. 2004. The Spacious Word. Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Palacios, Agustín. 2017. Multicultural Vasconcelos: The Optimistic, and at Times Willful, Misreading of La Raza Cósmica. Latino Studies 15: 416–438. Pinkvoss, Joan. 2007 [1987]. Editor’s Note. In Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa, n.p. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Pitts, Andrea. 2014. Toward an Aesthetics of Race: Bridging the Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and José Vasconcelos. Inter-American Journal of Philosophy 5 (1): 80–100. Pitts, Andrea J. 2021. Nos/Otras. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance. Albany: SUNY. PolgovskyEzcurra, Mara. 2019. Touched Bodies. The Performative Turn in Latin American Art. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Radlwimmer, Romana. 2015. Wissen in Bewegung. Latina-Kulturtheorie/ Literaturtheorie/Epistemologie. Würzburg: Königshausen&Neumann. ———. 2020. “Transborder Matters. A Conceptual Approach.” Transborder Matters: circulaciones literarias, transformaciones culturales mexicanas ychicanas, edited by Romana Radlwimmer. iMex. México Interdisciplinario. Interdisciplinary Mexico 9 (17): 8–17.

88 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

von Redecker, Eva. 2011. Zur Aktualität von Judith Butler. Einleitung in ihr Werk. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Richard, Nelly. 1994 [1990]. Presentación. In Escribir en los Bordes. Congreso Internacional de Literatura Femenina Latinoamericana 1987, ed. Carmen Berenguer, Eugenia Brito, Eugenia, Damiela Eltit, Raquel Olea, Eliana Ortega, and Nelly Richard, 9–10. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio. ———. 2004 [1993]. Masculine/Feminine. Translated by Silvia R. Tandeciarz and Alice A. Nelson. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Saldaña-Portillo, Josefina. 2001. Who’s the Indian in Aztlán? Re-Writing Mestizaje, Indianism, and Chicanismo from the Lacandón. In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodríguez, 402–423. Durham: Duke University Press. Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. 2000. Feminism on the Border. Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sandoval, Chela. 2002. Foreword: After Bridge. Technologies of Crossing. In this bridge we call home. radical visions for transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, 21–26. New York: Routledge. Searle, John R. 1989. How Performatives Work. Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (5): 535–558. Stanford Friedman, Susan. 1998. Mappings. Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stehn, Alexander, and Mariana Alessandri. 2020. La Mexicana en la Chicana: The Mexican Sources of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Inter-American Philosophy. Inter-­ American Journal of Philosophy 1 (11): 44–62. Tabuenca-Córdoba, María Socorro. 2009. Twenty Years of Borderlands: A Reading from the Border. In Güeras y Prietas. Celebrating 20 years of Borderlands/La Frontera, ed. Norma Cantú and Christina L. Gutiérrez, 11–16. Adelante Project. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Trigo, Benigno. 2006. Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women’s Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Valenzuela, Luisa. 2002. Peligrosas palabras. Reflexiones de una escritora. México D.F.: Editorial Océano de México. Vivancos Pérez, Ricardo F. 2013. Radical Chicana Poetics. New  York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, Liliana, and Antonia Castañeda. 2015. Ofrenda. In Ofrenda. Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams, ed. Norma E. Cantú, 13–30. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Zaytoun, Kelli D. 2022. Shapeshifting Subjects. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Naguala and Border Arte. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Index

A Ability, 37 Able-bodied-ness, 33 Abstract, 11, 27, 29, 30, 42, 52 pieces, 11 space, 45 Abstractions, 18, 48, 52, 59 Abstractly, 50 Academic, 54 Academic abstract, 17 Accentuated, 11 Access, 7 Accompany, 45 Accomplishment, 7 Accordions, 45 Accumulations, 3 Achieve, 8 Acknowledged, 8 Across, 45 the border, 44 differences, 9 Acrylic, 50 Action, 9 Active, 49

Activism, 34, 38 Activist, 38 Activity, 35 Act of writing, 21 Actors, 65, 73 Acts, 20, 22 of not-doing, 76 of trespassing, 6 Adding, 18 Additional, 19 Additions, 3 Advance, 8 Advisors, 17 Aesthetics, 7, 76 African American, 67 Afterlife, 29 Agency, 32 Age/ages, 33, 37 Ailing, 33 Ailment, 79 Alarcón, Norma, 1–4, 29, 46 Alegría, Juana Armanda, 75 Aleph, 47 Aleph, El, 76

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Radlwimmer, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity, Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5

89

90 

INDEX

Aliens, 44 Alive, 25 Allegoric, 52 Allegoric form, 74 Allegory/allegories, 23, 27, 32, 79 Altar, 22 Alter, 7, 23 Alteration of the principles of mapping, 5 Alterity, 9 Aluminum, 41 Alurista, 73 Ambiguity, 53 Ambiguous, 29 Ambiguous in-between- space, 62 Ambivalently, 11, 37 The Americas, 1–13, 42, 44, 73–80 Amosaic, 22 Amplifiers, 45 Analogue, 10, 18 Analysis, 2, 9 Ancestors, 64, 70 Ancestral, 70 Ancient, 48, 52 Ancient artifacts, 65 Androgynous, 50 Anecdotes, 74 Anger, 25 Angle, 10 Anglo-European projects, 13 Anglo/Anglos, 35, 70 Animal, 48 Animal’s ambiguous, 29 Anthology, 19, 37 Anthropological semantics, 7 Antiwar movement, 34 Anxiety, 22 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 9, 17–20 archives, 4 papers, 46, 75 textualities, 73–80 Appear, 20

Appearance, 75 Appendixes, 20 Appropriation/appropriations, 48, 69 Arab, 37 Árbol de la Vida, 54, 57 Archeological, 27 Archetypal, 29 Archetypal psychology, 70 Archival papers, 3 Archive, 17 Archive material, 10, 18 Argentinian, 6 Arguing, 9 Armadillo, 66 Arms, 29, 30, 56 Arnold, Robert, 61 Arrebato, 53 Art/arts, 1, 7, 36, 49, 54, 58, 69 Arteries, 28 Articulate nepantla, 12 Articulation, 36 Artifacts, 61, 66, 68 Artificial, 41 Artist/artists, 7, 45, 46, 48, 49, 58, 66, 68, 70 Artistic, 34, 49, 53, 54, 69 Artistic productions, 12 Artist-in-residency, 48 Art-making, 53 Art of discard, 76 Artworks, 50, 66 Asian Americans, 37 Assemblage, 1 Assembled, 20 Assessment, 24 Associated, 9 Association, 50 Attached, 52 Attachments, 58 Attributed, 10 Audience, 7, 22 Audio, 67

 INDEX 

Audio guide, 67 Austin, J. L., 7, 34 Author, 76 Autobiographic, 30, 54 Autobiographical, 23, 47, 68 Autobiographic narrator, 66 Autohistorias, 70 Autohistorias-teorías, 10, 28, 61, 79 Avocados, 67 Awareness, 11, 23, 37, 74 Aztec/Aztecs, 29, 31, 32, 44, 48, 58, 65–70, 73 aesthetics, 25 goddess, 23, 25 legacy, 68 material culture, 61 mythology, 45 rites, 74 temple, 67 Aztec: The World of Montezuma, 12, 61 Aztlán, 43 B Baca, Judy, 61 Bach, 24 Bajo sexton, 45 Balance, 51 Barajas, Rafael, 61, 68, 69, 75 Baroque, 46 Baroque fantasies, 5 Barraza, Santa, 49, 61, 68–70, 79 Barriers, 30, 66 Barrio, 76 Basis, 20 Bathroom, 21 Beans, 68 Bearing Witness, 50, 52 Bedroom, 45 Belles lettres, 5 Benson, Nettie Lee, 17 Benson Latin American Collection, 75

91

Bering Strait, 44 Biased, 35 Bilingual, 34 Binary/binaries, 36, 38, 41, 42, 45, 53 Birds, 55 Black, 30 Black dog, 76 Bleach, 31 Bleed/bleeding, 11, 28 Blending, 5, 21 Blessing, 67 Blocks, 25, 45, 54 Blocks of knowing, 54 Blood, 28, 31, 32, 44 Blue planet, 54 Blurring borders, 80 Bodily act, 27 Body/bodies, 2, 10, 11, 24, 27–30, 32, 36, 38, 39, 62, 66, 71 experiences, 4 and identities, 10 members, 32 sensations, 31–32 Bodymindsouls, 27–39 Bone/bones, 24, 27–39, 66 Book/books, 9, 18, 20, 22 Boot, 29 Border/borders, 3, 8, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 49, 51, 52, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73–75 art, 66, 68–70 artists, 48, 68, 70 crossings, 44, 75 fence, 43 space, 69 theory, 42 wall’s steel curtain, 79 “Border Arte,” 10, 18, 28, 32, 45, 47–49, 52, 58, 61, 62, 64, 66, 69, 75, 76, 78 Border Field Park, 32, 43

92 

INDEX

Borderlands, 9–12, 18, 19, 22, 23, 31, 32, 36, 41–59, 66, 68, 74, 76, 79 Borderlands’ cotton fields, 29 Borderlands/La Frontera, 8, 73, 75, 78 Borderlands’ performativity, 42 Borges, Jorge Luis, 47, 76 Boundaries, 1, 80 Boundless, 22 Branches, 55–57 Brazil, 74 Brazilian, 43 Breasts, 28 Breathing, 39 Bridge/bridges, 22, 34, 36, 38, 52, 53 Bridging, 36 Broadcasted, 33 Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, 30 Brown, 32, 34, 51, 56 Brown hair, 50 Bruja, Musa, 21 Brush, 49 Brushland, 43 Bus, 21 Butler, Judith, 7–9, 30, 36, 75, 79 Butterflies, 55, 56 C Cacti, 57 Cactus, 75 Cages, 67 Cajoled, 19 Calcott, Wilfred Hardy, 6 Calendar, 67 California, 21, 32, 46, 48 A call, 19 Candomblé, 43 Cantinas, 45 Cantú, Norma, 62 Canvas, 49 Capacity, 8 to imagine, 9

to move, 43 Cape, 56 Capetillo-Ponce, Jorge, 3 Cardiovascular, 27 Caribbean, 4 Caribbean women, 73 Carrión, Jorge, 75 Carroll, Amy Sara, 2, 3, 31 Cartographies, 74 Castañeda, Carlos, 3 Castellanos, Rosario, 46, 54, 75, 76 Casteñeda, Carlos, 76 Castillo, Debra, 6 Castillo, Verónica, 54, 55 Catalogue, 62 Categorizations, 68 Category, 47 Category of gender, 8 Causally related, 8 Cello suites, 24 Cemeteries, 41 Censoring, 67 Censorship, 31 Center stage, 7 Central, 27 Central America, 74 Central epistemological principles, 5 Centro Cultural de la Raza, 62 Ceramicist, 54 Ceramics, 49 Ceremony, 67 Chain of cause and effect, 5 Change/changes, 18, 49, 54, 63, 64, 68, 78, 80 Changing physical realities, 10 Chant, 67 Chaos, 59 Chapter/chapters, 12, 17, 44 portrays, 10 six, 45 Chávez, César, 34 Chávez, Patricio, 62

 INDEX 

Chiapas, 49 Chicana/Chicanas, 2, 35, 46, 54, 69 arts, 70 theorist, 7, 8 writer, 9–11, 74 Chicana/o, Chicanas/os, 65, 68, 69 artists, 68 discourse, 43 Spanish, 45 tongues, 45 Chicano/Chicanos, 34–36, 44, 67 literary magazine Tejidos, 35 movement, 34 Chicanx/Latinxcontext, 2, 13, 50, 62, 73 Chicanx movement, 77 Chicken farm, 43 Child/children, 35, 48 Childhood, 30 Childhood memories, 22, 62 Chile, 75 Chilean, 75 Chilean-born, 49 Chilean transvestite, 75 Chronology, 46 Cigarettes, 30 Cincinnati, 47 Circle/circles, 34, 56 Circular, 55, 57 Circular branches, 58 Circulate, 6 Circulation, 44, 74 Circumstance/circumstances, 8, 9 Cixous, Hélène, 30 Clarity, 53 Clash/clashes, 52, 53 Class/classes, 1, 8, 33, 35, 37, 49, 54, 58 Class differences, 11 Clay, 49, 54, 66 Cloth, 56 Clouds, 41

93

Coalitions, 9 Coatlicue, 29, 32, 45, 54, 79 Coatlicue State, 22, 45, 53, 58 Co-created, 7 Code-switches, 66 Codices, 66–68, 77 Coexistence, 8 Coffeehouse, 19 Coherent logics, 19 Coincide, 7 Collaborative procedure, 10 Collaborative readings, 19 Collective, 28, 32, 58 Collective process, 10 College, 35, 42 Colonial, 28, 54 Colonial and nationalist historiography, 5 Colonialism, 77 Coloniality, 4, 68, 70 Colonization, 42, 44, 53, 68, 74 Colonized space, 69 Color/colors/colored, 36, 41–59 Coloradas, 43 Colorful, 52 Colorful depiction of space, 11 Colorfully, 41 Comadre/comadres, 24, 25 Combine poetry, 18 Come to grips with race, 9 Common, 8 Commonplace, 6 Communal thinking process, 8 Communicate, 33 Communication, 31 Community/communities, 8, 74 Community-based, 34, 50 Complete, 19 Complete draft, 18 Complex, 5, 8, 9, 42 level, 17 material process of production, 18

94 

INDEX

Composed, 12 Comprehend strategic ways, 9 Computer/computers, 18, 22, 67, 68 Computer files, 20 Concept/concepts, 1, 7, 9, 11, 12, 19, 24, 47, 53 Concept-metaphors, 29 Concepts in motion, 77 Conceptual advancing toward nepantla, 11 Conceptual bits and pieces, 18 Conceptual figure, 6 Conceptual framework, 9 Conceptualization/conceptualizations, 2, 9, 10 Conceptualization of the performative, 5 Conceptualized, 4 Conceptualize performativity, 11 Conceptualizing, 8 Conceptually, 12 Conceptual outline, 12 Conceptual production, 18 Conceptual work, 6 Concerned, 9 Conclusion, 9 Concrete, 42, 52, 57 Conference, 18 Configuration, 8 Configuration of her concepts, 5 Confusing, 53 Confusion, 53 Conjuntos musics’ guitars, 45 Connected, 30, 58 Connection/connecting, 38, 53, 55, 63, 68, 74 Connective tissue, 18 Conocimiento, 53, 54, 58 Cono Sur, 4, 6 Conquest, 76 Conquest narration, 77 Consciencia de la mestiza, 45

Conscious, 51, 53, 58 Consciousness, 32, 33, 37, 42, 45, 53 Consensual reality, 76 Considerations, 8, 9 Constant changes, 3 Constructed, 11, 43 Constructing concepts, 17 Construction/constructions, 33, 34, 38, 63, 79 Constructivism, 29 Consultant, 34 Consuming, 67 Contexts, 3 Contextual, 58 Continent, 76 Continental mass, 5 Continual doing, 11, 38, 79 Continued, 24 Continuously, 9 Continuum, 3 Contradiction, 32 Contradictions women of color live, 36 Contradictory, 29, 42 Contradictory narrative, 78 Contribution, 8 Control, 53 Convergences, 8 Conversation, 73 Convert chaos into order, 3 Cookbook, 43 Cooperation, 43 Copy, 47 Core of attention, 6 Corn, 68 Cornucopia, 1 Corporeal, 27, 31, 38 Corporeal realities, 27 Corpse, 32 Corrido and ranchera music, 41 Corridos, 45

 INDEX 

Cortázar, Julio, 76 Co-texts, 3 Cotton, 41 Countries, 77 Coyolxauhqui, 9, 11, 12, 23, 24, 28, 29, 32, 33, 46, 53, 62, 63, 65–69 imperative, 33 philosophical, 68 Coyolxauqhui, 23, 79 Coyotes, 22, 41 Cracks, 52 Created, 11 Create rhythm, 18 Creating, 22 Creation, 23, 25, 53, 71 Creation of ambiguous, 5 Creative act, 21 Creative life force, 43 Creative process, 19, 46 Creativity, 48 Crenshaw, Kimberlee, 36, 79 Criteria, 21 Critical, 43 intervention, 4 juncture, 2 Criticized, 42 Critics, 11 Crops, 56 Cross/crosses, 45, 47, 54, 66, 67, 80 borders, 1 over, 43, 45 Crossing/crossings, 11, 41, 43, 44, 49, 63 Crossover, 29 Crossroads, 8, 32 Crushed, 33 Cruz, Santa, 21 Cuba, 74 Cuban Santería, 43 Culler, Jonathan, 5

Cultural/culturally, 8, 28, 42, 44, 50, 53 connections, 8 dynamics, 73 fragmentation, 68 goods, 7 phenomena, 4 sense, 7 spaces, 4 theory, 74 translation, 8, 9, 43 Cultural-political force, 7 Culturas, 66 Culture/cultures, 2, 22, 34, 36, 44, 48, 52, 77 Cultures merge, 71 Cut and pasted, 17 Cut-and-glued-together texts, 17 Cut-out, 78 Cut-out passages, 18 Cutting, 19, 23 Cut-up, 17 Cycle/cycles, 19, 25 D Dahms, Elizabeth Anne, 18 Daily acts, 7 Dairy farm, 43 Dance, 25 Dancing, 53 Dangers, 48, 49 Dark, 29, 31, 45, 50 caves, 25, 48 colors, 50 Daughter, 34 Dávila, Juan (Latino artists), 61, 68, 69, 75 Day, 21 Deals, 44 Death, 45 Decade rethinking, 7

95

96 

INDEX

Decades, 5 Decolonial, 4, 10, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 38, 76, 80 allegory, 11 corporality, 79 cultural memory, 68 discourse, 3 point of view, 7 self, 11 theory, 42 ways of knowing, 75 Decolonization, 70 Deconstructing, 33, 36 Deconstruction, 33, 34, 41 Deconstruct Western oppositions, 76 Decorated, 57 Deities, 56, 74 Deleted, 12, 18 Deleuze, 57 Delineates, 10 Dentist, 45 Denver Museum of National History, 80 Denver Museum of Natural History, 12, 61 Dependency, 70 Depths, 57 Desconocimiento, 53 Desert sand, 22 Design, 64 Designations, 7, 11 Desire, 31, 48, 79 Desperate, 25 Destruction, 33 Detached, 29, 52 Detachments, 58 Detailed, 11, 18 Devices, 18 Diabetes, 28 Dialogue, 58 Dichotomy, 38 Dictatorships, 6

Didactical, 47 Died, 28 Difference/differences, 9, 42 Difficulties, 20 Digital methods, 18 Digital world, 10 Digressions, 71 Directions, 13, 45 Dirt, 35 Disabilities, 35 Disappear, 5 Discarding, 20 Disciplines, 75 Discrete, 8 Discrimination, 36 Discursive, 4, 30, 43, 64, 78, 80 Discursive demands, 8 Discursively, 30 Disease, 79 Disinheritance, 32 Disks, 18 Dismembered, 32 Dismembered Mexican, 69 Dismemberment, 63 Disorientation/disorientations, 48, 49 Dispersed, 2 Dispossessing, 9 Diss-chapters, 18 Disseminating semantics, 12 Dissertation, 17, 20, 46 Distanced, 67 Diverse, 8 Diversification, 7 Divided, 10, 11 Divine, 56 Divisions, 80 Doctor, 35 Documentaries, 5 Documents, 3, 18 Dogs, 22 Dominant, 22, 53 Dominant culture, 48

 INDEX 

Double, 42 consciousness, 51 negativity, 36 Doubts, 24, 25 Dove, 56 Draft/drafts, 19–25, 32, 44, 46, 64, 78 Drafting, 24 Dramatically, 18 Draw, 48 Drawings, 59 Dream, 29 Dreaming, 24, 65 Dreaming body, 76 Dresses, 55, 56 Dropped, 35 Droughts, 43 Drums, 45, 67 Duality, 41 Ducks, 67 Dumb, 45 Dust, 41 Dynamic/dynamics, 12, 41, 71 corporality, 25 flows, 10 montage, 20 textual worlds, 6 E Eagle, 44 The early 2000s, 18 Earth, 32, 47, 56, 74 Eat, 21 Economic, 38 Economic depressions, 48 Edge, 8, 9 Edinburg, 35 Editing, 19 Editor/editors, 19, 25 Editorial Aunt Lute, 18 Editorial process, 19

Education, 33, 44 Ego, 24 Ekphrasis/ekphrases, 12, 75 Elaborated, 10, 18, 19 El color de la esperanza, 51, 52 Elcruzar, 44 El destierro/The Lost Land, 44 Electricity, 24 Electronic drafts, 10 Electronic technologies, 18 Elements, 43, 44 Elizarraras, Cristina Luna, 49 Embodied, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 80 Embodiment/embodiments, 11, 38 Embroider/embroidered, 56, 57 Emotionally, 27 Empirical observations, 5 Empirical process, 11 Employed, 21 Empowerment, 33, 36 Enact/enacted, 11, 20, 22, 33, 34, 44, 49, 51, 58 Enacting intersectionality, 34, 36 Enactment/enactments, 29, 34, 46 Enchiladas, 43 Encouraged, 19 Endnotes, 20 Energy, 28, 30 Engage, 8 English, 12, 35, 63, 64, 66 EnNepantla, 46 Entering, 44 Entities, 44 Entre Americas: El Taller Nepantla, 48 Enunciation, 78 Environments, 33 Envisioned, 10 Ephemeral, 20 Ephemeral realities, 78 Epistemic balancing, 13

97

98 

INDEX

Epistemological, 12, 22, 23, 31, 32, 44, 53, 54, 58, 79 certainties into question, 8 operations, 13 studies, 5 turn, 4 Eroticism, 11, 31 Erotic phantasies, 31 Escape, 42 Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, 50 Espinosa, Juárez, 49 Essay/essays, 10, 12, 18, 24, 47, 50, 51, 61, 66, 67, 69, 80 Essentialism, 43 Essentialist, 36 Established, 8 Eternally repeatable writing process, 10 Ethical, 61 Ethics, 24, 80 Ethics of transformation, 3 Ethnic, 36, 37 Ethnical, 38, 70 Ethnical debates, 9 Ethnicity, 1, 33–35, 61 Ethnographies, 5 Euphoric inspiration, 24 Ever-changing, 27 Everyday, 24 Everyday life, 21, 56 Evidenced, 10 Examines, 10 Excluded, 33 Exclusion/exclusions, 36, 37, 42 Exemplify, 12 Exercise, 21 Exhibit/exhibits, 61, 67, 70 Exhibition, 48, 63, 68 Exile, 32 Existence, 42 Existing, 9 Expand/expanded, 9, 13, 18

Expectations, 25 Expensive, 35 Experience/experienced, 4, 7, 8, 22, 23, 27, 30–32, 42, 54, 79 Experiencing, 21 Explicitly, 8 Exploding, 11 Exploiting, 43 Explosion, 31 Express, 11, 19 Eye/eyes, 32, 50, 51 Eyebrow, 51 Eyesight, 28 F Face, 31 Fact, 21 Failure, 24 Family, 35 Family relations, 63 Fantastic literature, 76 Fantasy, 76 Farmworker, 34 Farmworker’s movement, 34 Fashionable metaphor, 42 Father, 76 Father’s legends, 22 Fear, 25, 29 Fearful, 44 Feather/feathers, 31, 66 Feedback, 20, 21 Feel, 76 Feelings, 30 Feet, 28, 67, 68 Female, 29, 56 Female orgasm, 3 Feminism/feminisms, 2, 27, 29, 35 Feminist, 3, 4, 7, 11, 25, 29, 34–38, 46, 47, 79, 80 cultural critic, 75 icon Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 46 imaginary, 30

 INDEX 

performativity, 2 practice, 10 prose, 76 theories, 3, 7, 78 theory of the Americas, 4 writer, 25 Feminist Writers Guild, 35 Feminization, 53 Fence/fences, 32, 45, 51, 52 Ferré, Rosario, 6 Fertility goddesses, 66 Fever, 30 Fiction, 21, 76, 77 Fictional writing, 5, 21, 76 Fields, 35, 44, 45 Figures, 12, 67, 68 File, 18 Filters, 6 Finances, 70 Fingers, 28, 31, 32 Fire, 74 Flames, 56 Fleeting, 20 Flesh, 32 Flexibility, 9, 43 Flexible, 37, 43, 71, 76 Flexibly, 53 Floating, 44 Floating limbo, 22 Floor, 19 Flourish, 28 Flow, 24, 28, 73, 80 Flowers, 41, 55, 56, 66 Flows of thought, 1 Fluctuations, 3, 28 Fluid, 79 Fluid change, 66 Fluidity, 38 Focus, 18 Folder “08 diss, biblio,” 18 Folk, 33, 55, 68 life, 74 religion, 69

Foot, 55 Forces, 8, 52 Forging alliances, 9 Forgotten, 56 Form/forms, 49, 59 Formalities, 12, 63 Formal revision, 18 Formulations, 8 Foucault, 3 Fragmentation, 53, 69 Fragmented, 29, 32, 54 Fragmented discourse, 20 Fragments, 19, 69 Frame, 10 Framework, 7 Frantically, 20 Freedom, 44 Freewriting, 24 French, 30 French feminists, 29 French-Lacanian, 29 Freud, Sigmud, 3 Friendship, 55 From top to bottom, 6 Fruits, 55 Frustration, 38 Fuse, 18 Fusing imaginal abstractions, 10 G Gambaro, Griselda, 6 Gatekeeper, 67 Gaze, 56 Geertz, Clifford, 5 Gender/genders, 1, 11, 32, 33, 36, 37, 49, 53, 75, 76 Gender bending, 75 Genette, Gerard, 23 Genre/genres, 18, 24, 42, 77, 80 Geographic, 74 Geographical, 34, 53 Geographies, 33, 77

99

100 

INDEX

Gesture, 79 Giant, 52 Gifted children, 35 Girl, 29, 52 Glass, 29, 67 Globe, 75 Glowing, 51 Glucose meter, 28 Glue, 17–25 God, 67 Goddess, 29, 32, 56, 63, 68, 74 dismembered, 29 philosophical, 68 Gómez, Gwendolyn, 62 Gómez, Marsha, 61 González, José, 6 Gorman, R.C., 61 Government, 33 Grab, 30 Grammatical, 64 Grandmother, 22, 56 Graphic, 59 Graspable, 5 Grass, 30, 56 Green, 56 Green aloe veras, 41 Group, 34 Grynsztejn, Madeleine, 62 Guadalajara, 44 Guadalupe, 69 Guattari, Félix, 57 Guides, 67 Guiding mechanism, 5 Gun belt, 75 H Habermas, Jürgen, 3 Hair, 30 Hand, 17–20 Hands and knees, 19 Handwriting, 18

Handwritten, 78 Hard-copied pre-draft, 24 Hard drive, 18, 20 Hard-to-grasp quality, 3 Hargill, 35 Harvest, 43 Head, 29, 32 Headache, 32 Heal, 30, 32, 38 Healing, 31, 56 Healing of the wound, 33 Health, 28 Heart, 32, 55 Heat, 41 Hegemonic models, 13 Hemisphere, 6, 74 Hemispheric, 73–80 connections, 77 context, 9 and global networks, 7 intellectual panorama, 6 network, 74 performativity, 6, 77 picture, 12 point of view, 2 tendencies, 2, 4, 7 unfolding, 8 Hemispheric Performativity: Pieces, Shuffles, Layers, 9 Henderson-Espinoza, Robyn, 30 Herbs, 56 Herlinghaus, Hermann, 6 Hermeneutical, 77 Hermetic vessel, 30 Hernández-Avila, Inés, 62 Heteronormative, 28, 44 Heteropatriarchal, 33 Heterosexist, 8 Hieroglyphs, 66 High-heeled shoe, 75 Highlight, 6 High school, 35

 INDEX 

Hispanic, 67 Historic, 48 Historical, 53 Historiographic, 77 History, 11, 27, 34, 45, 52, 71, 76 History of drafts, 18 Hole, 45 Home, 28, 44, 54 Homecoming, 32 “The Homeland, Aztlán. El otro México,” 43 Honor life, 7 Horizontal axis, 8 Hormonal, 27 Hormone/hormones, 27–33 Horses, 48 Hospital, 32 Hotel, 67, 68 “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” 19 Human, 9, 30 operating, 9 sacrifices, 65 Humanity, 38 Humanness, 37 Hummingbirds, 56 Hunts, 44 Hybrid, 5, 20 Hybridity, 68 Hybrid texts, 5 Hysterectomy, 28, 32 I Idea/ideas, 7, 59, 78, 80 Identity/identities, 2, 8, 9, 11, 33, 34, 36–38, 58, 70, 71, 79 constructions, 11, 22 politics, 37 Ignorance, 38 Ignore sexuality, 11 Ill, 28 Illegal, 44

101

Illegal Anglo migration, 44 Illness, 10, 28 Illustrations, 50 Image/images, 22, 24, 33, 43, 44, 48, 51, 57, 59, 80 Imagination, 38 Imagine coalitions, 9 Immigrants, 68 Immune system, 28 Imperative, 33 Imperialist, 33 Inanimate objects, 79 In-between, 46, 47 In-between space, 46, 47 Incessantly, 10 Included, 8 Inclusion, 10 Inclusive, 37 Inclusive movement, 9 Incomplete, 69 Incorporeal abstraction, 27 Indiana, 34 Indian identity, 64 Indigenous, 52, 57, 69 groups, 9 objects, 64 Individual, 9, 10 Inert, 27 Infant, 28 Inflexible, 57 Influential, 8 Information, 18, 63 Inhabiting, 50 Inherent/inherently, 7, 9 Innards, 27, 31 Inner changes, 48 Inner processes, 25 Inner shift, 53 Inner stream of images, 24 Innocent, 5 Innovation of theories, 5 Innovative, 25

102 

INDEX

Input, 18 Inside, 27 Insight, 11 Instable, 77 Instance, 52 Insufficient, 8 Insulin, 28 Integrated, 69 Integrating, 38 Integration, 41 Intellectual/intellectually, 27, 34, 74 Interact, 24 Interaction, 12, 20, 68 Interchangeable, 54 Interconnected, 34 Interconnectedness, 10, 30, 79 Interconnectivity, 34, 38 Interdependence, 48 Interiority, 51, 52 Internal clock, 21 International, 37 International Date Line, 5 Interpretations, 11 Interpreting, 22 Interrelatedness, 74 Interrupt, 10 Intersectional, 8, 33, 36–38, 58 Intersectional enactment, 11 Intersectionality, 33, 34, 37, 49, 70 Interstices, 38, 45, 47 Interstitial, 46 Intertext/intertexts, 12, 73–80 Intertextual, 74, 77 Intertextual hemispheric, 75 Intertwined, 30, 36 Intertwined phases, 3 Interview, 29, 76 Interweaving, 6 In the middle, 47 Introduction/introductions, 9, 19 Investigate, 10 Invisible, 5, 30

Invocation, 23 Invoked, 22 Inward-turn, 53 Irrigation, 43 Isabel, 49 J Jade, 66 Jaguar, 66–68 Job, 21 Journal, 21 Journey, 32, 57 Juan, Don, 76 Juana, Sor, 76 Judgmental, 32 Juncture, 8 Jung, C.G., 29 Jungian, 29 Justice, 38, 42 K Kaleidoscopic, 46 Kanjo, Katryn, 62 Keating, AnaLouise, 2, 3, 10, 20, 30, 34, 36, 63 Key concepts, 47 Kitchen, 24 Knees, 17–20 Knitting, 18 Knowing, 54 Knowledge, 70 Kristeva, Julia, 29, 38 L Labels, 11, 37 Labor force, 43 Lacan, Jacques, 29 “La conciencia de la mestiza,” 19 La Facultad, 45, 52

 INDEX 

La frontera, 48 LaFrontera’s performative, 79 La Llorona, 69 La migra, 41 “La Mujer Chicana,” 19 Land, 35, 43, 44 Land in the middle, 46 Landscape, 25, 41 Landscape’s reality, 52 Language/languages, 8, 30, 66, 73 Laptops, 19 Lara, Irene, 19 La razacósmica, 77 Latin America, 76, 77 Latin American, 6, 46 magic realism, 30, 76 women, 36 Latin American Collection, 17 Latino, 75 artist, 75 studies, 6 Latinx, 2, 73 Layers/layered, 12, 17, 24, 34, 46, 53, 63, 69, 71, 78 Leans, 9 Learning, 9 Leaves, 56 Legacy, 37 Legend, 25, 44 Legendary feminist essay, 21 Legs, 29 Leguna, Juanito, 75 León-Portilla, Miguel, 75 Lesbian/lesbians, 29, 34–36 Lesbianism, 31 Lesbian sex, 70 Leslie, G., 19 Letter, 17 Level/levels, 5, 11 Lexis, 64 Libraries, 41 Life, 44, 47, 55, 79

103

horizon, 2 practice, 7 situation, 52 stages, 9 Lifelong dynamic, 24 Lifelong engagement, 10 Lifelong work on transformations, 2 Lifetime, 35 Light, 48, 49 Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro, 2–4, 10, 18, 20, 22, 28, 31, 32, 46, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 63–65, 67–70, 74, 76, 79 Liliana Wilson: El color de la esperanza, 51 Limber in-between-ness, 11 Liminal, 38, 42, 58 phases, 6 space, 48, 69 Liminality, 38, 43, 45, 58 Limitations, 37, 43 Limiting, 33 Limits/limited, 5, 9, 34 Lineage, 65 Linear, 17, 54 Linguistic/linguistics, 4, 53, 73 circle, 66 philosophers, 7 Link, 10 Listener, 22 Literary, 34, 36 concepts, 10 criticism, 5 decorations, 71 devices, 23, 78 drafting, 4 production, 4 theory, 4 Literature, 1, 10, 46 Live body, 7 Lives, 2 Living room floor, 20

104 

INDEX

Locus of hope, 42 Logical structure, 17 Logical ties, 12 Logics, 63 Longing, 31 López, Yolanda, 61, 68, 69 Losintersticios, 43 Loss, 32 Love, 45, 56 Lover, 21 Lugones, María, 22, 42 M Macho, 75 Magma-like state, 6 Main concepts, 12 Main theoretic intervention, 5 Making Face, 1, 20 Making Face, Making Soul, 46 Making Face to Interviews, 3 Making Soul, 1, 20 Male discourse, 73 Malinche, 69 Malleable, 3, 77, 78 Maneuver, 47 Manuscript/manuscripts, 17, 19, 31, 46 Map-making, 6 Marginalization, 49 Marginalizes/marginalized, 37, 69 Margins, 9 Market, 67 Márquez, Gabriel García, 76 Married, 21 Marrow, 39 Marsh, 25 Marx, Karl, 3 Master’s degree, 35 Material/materials/materially, 12, 18, 19, 30, 32, 58, 66, 67, 78, 80 aspects, 4

body, 27 dynamics, 18 process, 19 Materiality, 11, 20, 23, 29, 62 Material Writing Dynamics, 17–25 Maternal, 29 Matriarchal, 44 MAYO, 34 Meals, 21 Meandering, 68 Meanders, 67 Meaning, 7, 24, 48 Mechanic, 35 Media, 18 Mediating, 38 Melody, 33 Membrane, 52 Memory, 30, 32, 44 Men, 37 Menudo, 41 Merging, 18 Mesoamerican spiritual concept, 4 Message, 31 Messy entanglements, 6 Mestiza/mestizas, 32, 38, 42, 45 Mestizaje, 64, 70, 77 Mestizo border artists, 49 Metamorphoses/ metamorphosed, 21, 24 Metanarrative, 23 Metaphoric, 30, 42 Metaphorization, 42 Metaphors, 27, 54, 68 Metaphysical, 11 Methodological, 6, 9, 64, 77 Methodology, 46 Methods, 18, 21 Mexican, 28, 33, 35, 41, 44, 46, 49, 52, 54, 55, 58, 69, 75 classroom, 74 migrants, 47 philosophical source, 75

 INDEX 

Mexican-American Youth Organization, 34 Mexican-US borderlands, 4 Mexica wise men, 22 Mexico City, 11, 41, 46, 49, 52, 54, 61, 66, 67, 73–75 Mexico-US border, 13, 45, 50, 73, 75 Middle, 47 Mignolo, Walter, 42 Migrant/migrants, 44, 47 Migration/migrations, 6, 44, 73 Migratory, 44 Millennia, 53 Millennium, 6, 36 Mind, 10, 29, 45, 79 Mirrors, 29 Mirror state, 29 Miscellaneous genre, 5 Mistral, Gabriela, 76 Misuses, 69 Mixed-media, 75 Mobility, 42 Modifications, 19 Modified, 18, 63 Modified identities, 11 Mojado, 44 Molloy, Sylvia, 6 Money, 70 Monterrey bay, 23 Montoya, Malaquías, 61 Moon, 32, 45, 63, 68, 69 Moon goddess, 24, 69 Mora, Pat, 47 Moraga, Cherríe, 8, 19, 31 Moral, 33 Mosquito, 22 Most recent drafts, 18 Mother, 28, 29, 43, 56 Mother Earth, 56 Motion, 43 Mountain, 22 Moveable, 45

105

Moveable concept, 46 Movement/movements, 6, 29, 36, 43, 44, 47–49, 58, 73, 74, 79 Movie, 29 Movimientos de Rebeldía y culturas que traicionan, 44 Moving, 34, 45, 53, 64 Moving quality, 4 Multicolored, 56 Multicultural understanding, 9 Multifaceted concepts, 10 Multilayered, 42 Multilingual, 8 Multiple, 8, 17, 42 discriminations, 11 spaces, 47 Multiplicity, 3 Multiplied, 58 border zones, 45 essay, 71 Multiplies, 62 Mundane, 7 Mundo, 77 Muscles, 39 Museum/museums, 12, 49, 61, 62, 64–70 Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, 62 Museum shop, 67 Music, 24 Musical recitations, 67 Mythological, 29 Mythology, 58, 71 N NACLA Report, 49, 62–66, 68, 70 Nagual, 76 Naguala, 4, 9, 24 Nahuatl, 46, 48, 67

106 

INDEX

Nahuatl music, 68 Naked, 31 Narrated time, 23 Narration/narrations, 30, 71, 77 Narrative/narratives, 21, 29, 43, 44, 68, 70 Narrative techniques, 64 Narrator, 23, 33 National, 37, 41, 70 National Endowment of the Arts, 54 National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, 61 Native, 29, 47, 56, 61, 67 codices, 48 heritage, 68 past, 69 spirituality, 69 Natural, 55 Nature, 25 Necessary, 8 Neck, 29 Negotiation, 11 Neobaroque, 76 Neo/colonization, 69 Neologisms, 37 Nepantla, 9–12, 24, 38, 41–59, 61, 62, 64, 69, 76, 78, 79 disorientation, 68 liminality, 49 workshop, 12 Nepantla: Theory and Manifesto, 49 Nepantleras, 11, 37, 38, 53, 79 Network, 78 Neuromuscular, 27 New, 36 dynamics, 4 mestiza consciousness, 77 millennium, 19 order, 12 settings, 17 tribalism, 37

Newspapers, 19 New York City, 30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3 Night, 21, 22, 24 9/11, 31, 33, 76 Non-dichotomized liminality, 11 Non-human actors, 79 Non-linear, 54 Non-Native, 69 Non-ordinary reality, 76 Non-Western performances, 10 Nopales, 67 Nopalitos, 68 Normal, 48 Norteño, 45 North, 44 Nosotras, Nos/otras, 11, 37, 38, 79 Not-dichotomized, 43 Notion of performativity, 8 Notions, 1, 3, 9, 12, 13, 42, 61 Novel, 34 Now let us shift, 53, 54, 58, 74 Nurse, 35 Nurtured, 7 O Oakland, 19 Object/objects, 7, 33 Obsidian, 29 Obstacles, 48, 49 Occupation, 44 Occupied, 49, 54, 70 Occupied space, 69 Occupy/occupies, 53, 57 Ocean, 21, 23–25, 43, 74 Ohmer, Sarah S., 2, 3 Olmos, Edward James (Chicano), 65, 67 Olmos’ voice, 67 One-directional, 11 Ongoing process, 11

 INDEX 

Ongoing racial, 11 Ongoing reformulations, 3 On hands and knees, 10, 17 Ontologically, 47 Ontological-spatial-temporal, 48 Openness, 8–9 Open wound, 33 Opposites, 41 Oppositional, 54 Oppositions, 42 Oppression/oppressions, 8, 42, 44 Oppressive, 33, 44 Oppressive military mold, 6 Orange/oranges, 27–33, 44, 62 Order, 64 Organ, 28 Organism, 23 Organization, 12 Orientation, 34 Ornaments, 52 Oscillating texts, 2 Otherness, 36, 42 Other/s, 9, 38, 42 Outline, 17 Outminds, 2 Output, 19 Ovaries, 32 Overcome the tradition of silence, 45 Overlapped, 7, 12 P Pace, 38, 48 Padrón, Ricardo, 6 Pain, 28, 30, 31, 79 Painful, 42 blocks, 25 surfaces, 11 writing blocks, 21 Painfully, 24 Painted, 50 Painting/paintings, 12, 52, 59, 69

undefined space, 50 Paints, 43 Palpable, 48 Pan-American University, 35 Paper, 49 Parables, 5 Paradigms, 7 Paradox, 38 Paragraph/paragraphs, 9, 18 Parallelism, 18 Parrots, 56 Participate, 19 Participatory politics, 7 Particular idea, 17 Passage/passages, 12, 58 Passageway, 54 Passing, 10 Passive, 49 Passivity, 32 Pass over, 11, 43 Past, 68 Pasting, 19, 23 Path/paths, 9, 45 Patriarchal, 28, 44 Pattern, 22 Paz, Octavio, 3, 75 Peace, 35 Pedazos, 32 Pencil, 49 People, 33, 36, 74 Pepper, 41 Perceptions, 79 Pérez, Irene, 61 Perfected, 10 Perfectionism, 64 Perfectionist, 22 Perfectly, 24 Perform, 7, 21, 38 Performance/performances, 7, 20, 22, 30 artists, 11 studies, 6

107

108 

INDEX

Performative, 3, 4, 7, 9–11, 34, 36–38, 42–44, 46, 47, 53, 64, 66, 73, 76, 80 accomplishment, 7 acts, 1, 44 aspects, 36 character, 10 concepts, 1–13, 74, 76, 78, 80 conceptualizations, 11 elements, 11 epistemologies and ontologies, 22 epistemology, 9, 45 essay, 71 feminisms, 13 feminisms of the hemisphere, 4 identity politics, 33, 36 intersectionality, 79 language, 3 mode, 6 model, 54 place, 12 process, 21, 45, 54 production process, 20 reader, 2 reading experience, 23 sexuality, 75 space, 43 speech acts, 77 stylistic device, 63 texts, 23, 43, 80 turn, 6, 78 use of language, 45 writing, 22, 45 writing dynamics, 10 Performativity, 2–7, 9, 23, 30, 36, 48, 75, 76, 78, 80 Performativity of concepts, 5 Performed, 36 Performing, 34 Performs, 22, 31 Permeable, 37 Perpetual, 24

enactment, 3 precarity, 11 Personal, 24, 31, 34, 43, 78 Personification, 11 Person/persons, 44, 64 Perspective/perspectives, 7, 74 Petates, 67, 68 Petrified, 43 Phallic mother, 75 Phases, 22 PhD, 36 Phenomena, 5 Phenomenon manifesting, 6 Philosopher, 43 Philosophical, 65, 69, 77, 78 Philosophical inquiries, 5 Phrase, 8 Physical/physically, 27, 28, 35, 57, 78 Physical space, 52 Picking crops, 35 Pickup, 41 Pictograms, 48 Pictographic material, 12 Pictures, 59 Piece/pieces, 20, 24, 25, 32, 33, 53, 63, 64, 68, 69, 78 Piecing-process, 17 Piecing, shuffling, and layering, 3 Piles of paper, 20 Pink, 41–48, 56 Pinkvoss, Joan, 18, 19 Pitts, Andrea J., 2, 77 Pivotal research questions, 4 Places, 43, 68 Plane, 44 Planet, 48 Planting, 56 Pleasure/pleasures, 24, 79 Plot, 64 Plugged, 19 Plural, 53 A plural form of performativity, 9

 INDEX 

Poem/poems, 18, 32, 34, 43, 44, 74 Poetic/poetically, 2, 47 Poet/poets, 43, 45 Poetry, 18, 21, 76, 77 Poetry section, 18 Point, 8 PolgovskyEzcurra, Mara, 6, 7 Political, 38, 43, 53, 68, 69 decolonization, 3 engagement, 2, 4 inequality, 11 tracts, 5 Politics, 4, 49, 71 Polyphone, 58 Ponders, 10 Popular concept of performativity, 8 Popularity, 7 Portray, 52 Position, 53 Possibility, 6 Postcolonial theory, 41 Posthumous, 22 Posthumously published work, 4 Postmodernist, 42 Powerlessness, 38 Power relations, 13 Practice/practices, 7, 9 Practice translated, 10 Precarious, 28, 43 Precarious conditions, 21 Precisely, 7 Pre-Colombian, 55 Pre-Columbian, 56 Pre-draft/pre-drafts, 20, 24 Preface, 7 Pregnant, 29 Pre-Hispanic sun-god, 55 Prejudice, 32 Preschool, 35 Presence, 76 Present, 23, 44, 48, 68 Priestess, 32

109

Priestess of crossroads, 45 Primary school, 35 Prime meridian, 5 Print, 19 Printed, 43, 78 Printed book, 19 Printouts, 18 Privileges, 49 Problematic, 6 Process/processes, 20–22, 32, 33, 43, 53, 69, 78 Processual, 42 Proclaimed, 6 Produced, 8 Projected, 11 Projects, 21 Proof-read, 35 Proportion, 24 Proposal, 9 Prose, 45 Prose section, 19 Protagonist, 76 Protect, 30 Provisional syntheses, 3 Psyche-spirit, 29 Psychoanalysis, 29 Psychoanalytical, 29, 38, 47, 51, 58, 69 Psychological, 32 Public, 7 Publication, 18 Public schools, 34 Publish, 18 Published, 20 texts, 46 versions, 12 Puebla, 54 Puro performativity, 3 Pushed, 19 “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together,” 23, 25, 64, 78 Puzzle, 17

110 

INDEX

Q Queer, 3, 8, 32, 34, 35, 75 Queer Chicana, 64 Queer mestizo, 30 Queerness, 31, 37 Quest, 3 Question, 44 Quintessential, 2 R Raced, 33 Race/races, 1, 37, 61, 66, 79 Racial/racially, 8, 35, 37, 49, 70 Racialized, 34, 35 Racial whiteness, 70 Racism, 35 Racist, 38 Radical, 8 Radlwimmer, Romana, 6 Rain, 25 Ramos, Samuel, 75 Ranches, 35, 48 Rape, 29 Rattlesnake, 29, 41 Raza/razas, 34, 66 Read, 22 Reader/readers, 20, 23, 78 Reading/readings, 22, 24, 35, 47 Read silently, 20 Realistic perspective, 76 Reality/realities, 23, 33, 38, 42, 50, 54, 57, 75, 76, 80 ‘Real’ world, 65 Reappear, 5 Rearrange, 18 Rearranged, 17 Reassembling, 69 Rebel, 32 Rebellion, 44 Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 46 Recapitulates, 10 Receptive process, 2

Recipe/recipes, 43 Recognition, 69 Re-composition, 18 Reconfiguration/ reconfigurations, 31, 54 Reconfiguring relationships, 7 Reconnected, 17 Reconquista de Aztlán, 73 Reconstructed, 18 Reconstruction, 33, 41 Re-contextualized, 12 Recovery, 32 Rectangles, 43 Recuperations, 32 Red, 51, 56 heart, 56 pepper, 45 Redecker, Eva von, 9 Redefinition/redefinitions, 46, 78 Red pepper fields, 41–48 ‘Referring to Anzaldúa,’ 9 Reflections, 11 Reformulated, 12 Reformulations, 3, 46 Refugees, 44 Regional, 37 Register, 64 Regrouping, 10 Reintegration, 33, 69 Reinterpreted, 2 Reinvention, 74 Relational, 12, 52, 58 Relational approach, 10 Relationship, 21 Relevant, 19 Re-member, 24 Re-membered, 32 Re-member-ing Coyolxauhqui, 24 Renewed, 2 Reorienting thinking, 5 Repeatedly cut, 18 Repetition/repetitions, 18, 21, 35, 53, 63

 INDEX 

Repositioned, 2 Representation, 77 Represented, 19 Repressed, 28 Reread, 18 Research, 47 Research findings, 12 Resistance, 6, 24, 25, 42, 44, 69 Resisting, 9 Resources, 18 Respect, 56 Respective cultural-political contexts, 6 Respiratory, 27 Restricted, 21 Restructured, 12 Restructuring, 24 Retablos, 69, 70 Rethink the Americas, 6 Returns, 44 Reuse, 53 Reversed, 12 Revising, 24 Revision/revisions, 19–21 Reworked, 12, 17 Reworking, 24 Rewrite/rewrites, 24, 32, 74 Rewriting processes, 46 Rewritings, 6, 80 Rewritten, 37 Rewrote, 33 Rhizomatically, 45 Rhizome, 57 Rhythm, 24, 45 Richard, Nelly, 6, 75 The right order for words and concepts, 17 Río Grande, 44 Rio Grande Valley, 41, 45 Risk, 8 Risky, 9 Rites of passage, 44 Ritual/rituals, 7, 22, 31, 74 River, 45

Role, 38, 77 Room of one’s own, 21 Roosters, 44 Root, 57 Rootedness, 69 Rulfo, Juan, 3 Rupture/ruptures, 53, 69 S Sacred ritual, 70 Sacred tribal, 22 Sacred world, 67, 68 Sacrifice/sacrifices, 31, 67 Sad, 52 Safe spaces, 43 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 77 Said, 3 San Antonio, 50, 54 San Diego, 32, 43 San Diego museum, 47 Sandoval, Chela, 2, 3, 20, 34 San Francisco, 18, 35 Santa Barraza, 49 Santa Cruz, 50 Sara Castro-Klarén, 36 Sarape, 75 Saved, 18 Scars, 38 Scattered, 32 Scenes, 56 Scholarship, 2, 78 School, 21, 28 Scientific, 77 discussions, 5 referencing, 4 Scissors, 17–25 Scramble magazines, 19 Sculptors, 12, 54 Sculpture/sculptures, 54, 55, 59 Sea, 24, 74 Search for method, 3 Searle, John R., 7

111

112 

INDEX

Seashore, 23, 25 Sections, 18 Seeker, 70 Seers, 29 Self, 9 Self-consciously, 6 Self-destructiveness, 38 Semantic/semantics, 10, 12, 58, 64, 80 Semiotic, 11, 29, 31 Send, 19 Sensation of the body, 31 Sense, 52 Sensorial, 68 Sentence/sentences, 12, 18 construction, 18 length, 18 Separated, 42 Sequential, 8 Seriously ill, 19 Serpant/serpents, 29, 32, 44, 45 Serpent goddess, 45 Serpentine, 65, 66 Servicio Chicano Center, 67 Sex, 37 Sexed, 33, 34 Sexual, 11, 36, 37, 45, 49, 53 Sexual and gender identity, 2 Sexuality, 4, 29, 31–33, 48, 70 Sexualized, 79 Shadow/shadows, 31, 48, 77 Shamanic, 74, 77 performativity, 23 state, 22 writing, 80 Shamanism, 76 Shame, 28 Shaped, 9, 19 Shape/shapes, 18, 41–59 Shapeshifter, 9 Shapeshifting, 4 Shapeshifting naguala, 76 Shaping her concepts, 5

Sharecropper, 35 Shared, 7 A shared act of creation, 19 Sharing, 56 Shattered, 33 Shifted, 11, 46, 63 Shifting, 18, 33, 46, 64 Shifting concepts, 42 Shift/shifts, 5, 36, 49, 66 Shifts in perception, 45 Shocking truths, 11 Shuffle, 63, 78 Shuffled, 49, 64, 71 Shuffling, 19 Siesta, 75 Significance, 13 Signified, 31 Signifier, 11, 31 Silenced, 30 Silver waves, 43 Similarities, 80 Simplistic, 42 Simulacrum, 75, 76 Simulation/simulations, 67, 68 Singular event, 6 Sister, 22 Situate, 6 Skeleton, 66 Sketching, 48 Skin, 27–39 Sky, 33, 35, 43, 56, 57 Sleeping, 21, 52 Slide presentations, 67 Slides, 67 Slippery idea, 7 Smoking, 30 Snake/snakes, 29, 44, 45, 77 Social/socially, 23, 38, 53 Social and political positionalities, 3 Social field, 8 Society, 9, 42, 58 Solidary connections, 9 Solidary enactment, 79

 INDEX 

Sombra, 33 Sombrero, 75 Songs, 44 Sor Juana, 46, 54 Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz, 75 Soul, 10, 29, 30, 39, 79 Sources, 8 South, 13, 44 Southern Cone, 4 South Texan, 54 South Texan Chicana, 47 South Texas, 28, 35, 41, 43, 44, 46 Southwest, 43, 44 Space-in-between, 24, 38, 43, 46 Space/spaces, 7, 11, 47, 50, 58, 80 Spanish, 12, 38, 62–66 Spanish American chronicles, 77 Spanish colonization, 44 Spatial/spatially, 47, 68, 77 Spatial structuring, 67 Speak, 25, 64 Speaking gigs, 38 “Speaking in Tongues,” 10, 17, 21–23, 78 Specificity, 10 Speech acts, 36, 73 Spirit, 24, 29, 30, 45, 74 Spiritual, 12, 22, 23, 30, 31, 33–35, 38, 42, 47, 51, 52, 54, 58, 69, 70, 76 awareness, 30 connection, 69 identities, 80 retablos, 69 rituals, 24 traditions, 74 wisdom, 7 Spiritual Activism, 11 Spiritual Activists, 37, 38, 79 Spirituality, 2, 4, 29, 30, 37–39, 44, 58, 70, 71, 79 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti, 8, 25, 36, 79

113

Split, 32 Splitting and pasting of material, 10 Spoken, 20 Squares, 43 Stability, 38 Stabilize performative concepts, 21 Stabilize the unstable, 5 Stable, 11, 33, 54, 79 Staged, 8 Stages, 53 Stages of consciousness, 54 Staggered, 17 Stand a chance, 9 Stanford Friedman, Susan, 36 State, 47, 54 State of transition, 11, 43 Static, 41, 43, 45, 57 Staticontological condition, 11 Statues, 68 Steady transformations, 9 Steel, 33 Stigmatized, 28 Stomach, 28 Stone, 33, 66 Stories-concepts, 22 Story/stories, 20–25, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 57, 71, 76, 77 Storyteller, 22 Storytelling, 22 Storytelling format, 77 Straight, 36 Strange, 38 Strategy, 24 Straw, 66 Stream-of-thought present tense, 78 Structural/structurally, 12, 18 Structure/structures, 24, 28, 44, 63, 64, 70, 71 Struggle/struggles, 38, 42, 44, 77 Style, 24, 64, 80 Stylistic devices, 5 Subaltern, 25 Subaltern women, 36

114 

INDEX

Subchapter consults, 10 Subchapter/subchapters, 8, 10–12 Subconscious, 38, 58 Subfolder, 18 Subheadings, 18 Subject, 7, 8 Substance, 33 Substitution, 18 Sub-subfolder, 18 Subtracting, 18 Subversive, 25, 33 Success, 24 Suez, Perla, 6 Suffering, 30 Suffocating, 31 Summarily ranked, 8 Summarize, 6 Summertime, 35 Sun, 31, 51, 52 Sun’s eyes, 52 Superintendent, 35 Supernatural, 76 Surface, 52 Surrealism, 30, 76 Survival, 28 Sweating, 32 Swimming, 44 Symbolic, 52 Symbolic process, 52 Symbolizes, 11, 32 Symbol/symbols, 27, 29, 68 Syntactical, 64 Syntax, 64 T Table, 18 Tackle, 18 Tactile dealing, 17 Talks back, 31 Tangible, 42 Tape, 18, 67 Taxi, 67, 68

Tax manipulation, 35 Taylor, Diane, 6 Teacher, 35 Teaching, 35, 57 Tears, 52 Techniques, 30, 38 Temple, 65, 66 Templo Mayor, 61 Temporality/temporalities, 33, 48 Temporally, 47 Tendons, 39 Tenochtitlan, 67, 69, 73 Tense, 64 Tension/tensions, 51, 52 Tequila, 75 Terminological/terminologically, 11, 12 Terms, 9, 12 Terrain, 47 Territory, 7, 11, 45, 47 Texas, 21, 44, 75 Texas Women’s University, 35 Textbook, 21 Text in motion, 42 Text/texts, 1, 10, 17, 21, 24, 25, 27, 66, 78, 80 Textual, 11 evolution, 18 hybridity, 2, 5 pieces, 12, 71 worlds, 2 Texture, 18 Thematic, 10 Thematic sections, 19 Themes, 5 Theoretical treatises, 5 Theoretic role, 13 Theorists, 7, 13 Theorize, 77 Theorizing, 10, 21 Theory in the Flesh, 31 Theory/theories, 6, 9, 20–22, 36 in motion, 1–5 path, 11

 INDEX 

Third eye, 51, 56 This Bridge, 3, 78 This Bridge Called My Back, 19, 20, 34–36, 46 This bridge we call home, 20, 34, 37, 53 Thought, 12, 27 Threats, 31 Thresholds, 6, 38 Through visual arts, 49 Tijuana, 32, 43 Time, 11 Timeline, 24 Time of narration, 23 Time-space continuum, 47 Tissue, 31 Tlaltelolco, 67, 68 Tlamatinime, 22 Tlilli, Tlapalli, 22, 23 “Tlilli, Tlapalli/The Path of the Red and Black Ink,” 45, 78 Tonantzín, 56, 57 Tonatiuh, 52 Tongue, 32 Tools, 33 Topic, 9 Torn, 53 Tortillas, 41, 70 Toucans, 56 Touch, 23 Toward, 44 Towers, 33 Toyed, 18 Trance, 22 Transcendental, 11 Transcending, 9 Transferred, 10 Transform, 22, 76 Transformational, 33, 53 Transformational comprehension, 11 Transformation/transformations, 4, 6, 9, 13, 24, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37–39, 42, 49, 53, 74, 77, 79, 80

Transformative, 33, 34, 37 aspects, 3 life experiences, 78 notions, 4 substance, 10 Transformed, 30, 69 Transforms, 22, 32 Transition, 47, 54, 58, 79 Transitional, 47, 53, 69 Translated, 46, 48 Translate/translates, 54, 76 Translation/translations, 9, 62 Translator, 62 Transparencies, 48 Transports, 11 Transterritorial, 78, 80 Transterritorial scale, 13 Transvestite, 75 Traumatic, 32 Traumatic experiences, 69 Travel, 27 Traveling, 38 Travelogues, 5 Travesías, 44 Tree of Life, 54, 57 Tree/trees, 35, 54–57 Trespass, 43 Tribe, 29 Trigo, Benigno, 29 Tripling of her body, 30 Trope, 76 Truck, 41, 76 True confessions, 5 Trunk, 55–57 Truths, 37 Turner, Victor, 7 Turn of the millennium, 2–3 Turtle, 44 Two-dimensional, 36 Two-sided concept, 11 Two sides, 41 Typed pieces, 18 Typescript/typescripts, 17–19

115

116 

INDEX

Typewriter, 17, 31 Typewriting, 18 U Ubications, 6 Ultimately, 8 Unconscious, 48, 51, 53, 70 Unconscious disintegrates, 69 Unconsciousness, 76 Undergo, 8 Underpin, 9 Understand, 23 Underworld, 54, 57 Undetected networks of thought, 6 Undisciplined, 7 Undoing Gender, 8 Unequal global knowledge, 13 Unfinished, 20, 25 Unitary, 8 United States (US), 6, 11, 33, 41, 47, 49, 69 Universe, 76 University of Austin, 35–36 Unknown, 77 Unmapped, 38 Unsafe, 54 Unstable, 30, 73 Untamable, 32 Untold, 30 Upside down, 48 Us/other, 38 The US side of the border, 52 UT Austin, 17, 19, 54 Uterus, 32 V Vague, 47 Vagueness, 11, 43, 77 Valenzuela, Luisa, 6 Valley, 44, 45 Varicolored, 48 Varieties, 8

Various, 10 Vasconcelos, José, 3, 75, 77 Veins, 32 Vernacular, 64 Versions, 12, 20 Vertical model, 8 Victims, 31 Videos, 67 Vietnam, 34 Viewpoint, 12 View/views, 7, 8 Violence, 32, 38 Violent, 32, 46 Violent crash, 74 Vírgen de Guadalupe, 52 Virtual reality, 20 Virtuosity, 24 Virtuous aesthetics, 22 Visitors, 67, 68 Visual artist, 48 Visual arts, 12, 61 Visual border art, 61 Visual image, 11, 76 Visuality, 46, 48 Visual repertoire, 46 Vivancos Pérez, Ricardo F., 2, 3, 18, 19 Vocabulary, 29, 37 Vocality, 58 Voice, 64, 67 Void, 69 Volcanic, 29 Volume, 20 Vulnerability, 7, 9 W Wading, 44 Waitress, 19 Wakening, 29 Waking, 21 Walking, 44 Walkman, 65, 67, 68 Walks, 21, 25, 68

 INDEX 

War, 74 Warned, 29 Water, 74 Waves, 24 Waves of the ocean, 10 Way, 58 of being, 47 of knowing, 9 Weaving, 22, 56 Web of existence, 7, 30 Weight, 28 Welfare line, 21 Wellbeing, 10 Well documented, 17 Western, 57 Western hemisphere, 5 Western individualist, 22 Whiteness, 37 White/whites, 30, 35–38, 41, 43, 56, 67, 69, 70 culture, 43 male, 31 man, 31 middle-class, 67 students, 35 upper-class women writers, 35 Wild Tongue, 45 Wilson, Liliana, 19, 49–51, 61, 69, 79 Wilson’s allegorical, 52 Wind, 43, 74 Windowless, 45 Wire, 32 Wire fence, 74 Witness, 33 Wittig, Monique, 29 Woman, 50 Woman of color writer, 31 Woman Space, 35 Women, 9, 36, 37, 49, 56, 58 artists, 49 of color, 17, 19, 21, 30, 37, 38 of color writers, 31 voices, 45

117

Woolf, Virginia, 21 Word/words, 21, 23, 24, 29, 36, 38, 48, 54, 59, 74 order, 18 processor, 18 Work, 17, 24, 79 Working, 54 Workshop, 50 World’s velocity, 48 World/worlds, 11, 28, 32, 42, 43, 53, 57, 63, 69, 74, 77 Wound, 32 Woundedness, 30 Write, 24, 79 Write from the body, 29 Writer, 19, 21, 46, 49, 77 Writes through the body, 29 Writing, 4, 10, 19, 21–25, 27–29, 33–35, 53, 75, 78 blocks, 22, 76 the body, 30 comadres, 10, 19 notes, 20 phases, 23 practice, 3, 4 routines, 10 the soul, 30 theory, 22 Writing/editing process, 10 Written word, 78 Y Yellow, 41 Yellow land, 51 Yemayá, 43, 74 Yoruba, 74 Yo Soy Joaquin, 34 Z Zaytoun, Kelli D., 2, 4, 9 Zurdo, Mundo, 76