Special Feature Contribution

IV. Knowledge from the

borderlands: Revisiting
the paradigmatic mestiza
of Gloria Anzaldua

F eminism
&
Psychology
Feminism & Psychology
22(2) 261270
! The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0959353511415969
fap.sagepub.com

Liliana Vargas-Monroy
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota-Colombia

Keywords
Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua, Latin America, Postcolonial theory, Women-of-color
feminism

The publication in 1987 of Borderlands/La Frontera strengthened the theoretical

work of a group of women, feminists and Latin Americans who had been born or
were living in the United States and who expressed in their work This Bridge Called
My Back (Anzaldua and Moraga, 1981), Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (Gomez et al.,
1983) and Loving the War Years (Moraga, 1983), among others the experience of
inhabiting a territory between two worlds. The paradigmatic work of Gloria
Anzaldua marked a point of inection for their discussions, consolidating perhaps
the eld of what has been referred to as a women-of-color feminism, a feminism in the
diaspora, clearly postcolonial and on the border. This article considers two issues in
relation to the work of Anzaldua. The rst refers to the peculiarities and dierences
that distinguish her work in relation to certain proposals of white feminism (in
particular, I will draw upon the work of Donna Haraway). The second is related
to the epistemological consequences of this dierentiation.

Two mestiza sisters

I will begin my discussion considering some elements of Donna Haraways work,
particularly regarding the rst chapter of her (1997) book Modest Witness@Second
Millenium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. In this
chapter, Haraway uses the work of Anzaldua to construct the image of the
Mestiza Cosmica. In her discussion, she describes a Lynn Randolph painting
Corresponding author:
Liliana Vargas-Monroy, Facultad de Psicologa-Universidad Javeriana. Carrera 5a no 39-00. Bogota-Colombia,
S.A., Bogota, Colombia
Email: vargasmliliana@yahoo.com

262

Feminism & Psychology 22(2)

which clearly resembles the physical features of Anzaldua. I will begin with a
fragment of the text which condenses the dierences I would like to draw attention
to, italicizing below what will serve as the central point of my reection:
A mestiza stands with one foot in Texas and one foot in Mexico. She is taming a
diamond-back rattlesnake with one hand and manipulating the Hubble telescope with
another . . .. La Mestiza Cosmica is the kind of modest witness coming into existence
at the end of the Second Christian Millennium, when what can count as freedom,
justice, knowledge, and skill are again very much at stake in the mutated experimental
way of life . . .. La Mestiza Cosmica is historically specic, located in a particular time,
place, and body; she is, therefore, a gure representing the kind of global consciousness a modest witness should cultivate. The rattlesnake and the four hands suggest a
mode of consciousness called the Coatlicue state, associated with an Aztec goddess, as
theorized by Gloria Anzaldua. Not unlike Anzaldua, who maintains a necessarily eclectic altar on her computer, Randolphs mestiza joins the snake and the Hubble telescope to
demonstrate the kind of vision needed in the New World Order. (Haraway, 1997: 20)

Using the dierence proposed between the Mestiza Cosmica and Anzalduas
mestiza, I suggest that this contrast evokes two dierent narratives: one, the narrative that Haraway builds from her idea of a cyborg conscience, and the other the
narrative that Anzaldua has constructed in Borderlands/La Frontera.
The work of Donna Haraway implies a strong critique of certain forms of scientic knowledge. In this text, Haraway (1997) critiques the experimental point of
departure that develops a particular form of testimony, dening modesty as one of
its central virtues.1 The virtue of modesty that characterizes the Modest Witness
the scientist implies the concealment of its positions, emotions and opinions, with
a certain inexpressiveness which renders invisible the subject who is speaking.
Haraway proposes, with some humor, that this allows him (sic) to speak as a
legitimate ventriloquist of the objective world:
Modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity. This is the virtue
that guarantees that the modest witness is the legitimate and authorized ventriloquist
for the object world, adding nothing from his mere opinions, from his biasing embodiment. And so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts. He
bears witness: he is objective; he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects. His
subjectivity is his objectivity. His narratives have a magical power they lose all
trace of their history as stories, as products of partisan projects, as contestable representations, or as constructed documents in their potent capacity to dene the facts.
The narratives become clear mirrors, fully magical mirrors, without once appealing to
the transcendental or the magical. (1997: 24)

For Haraway (1997), the Modest Witness is the basis for the model of western
science, both European and masculine, which has followed us to the present day
and which has facilitated the notion of objectivity, establishing a strong

Vargas-Monroy

263

dierentiation between the object and subject of knowledge. This form of disembodied knowledge, through dierent discursive mechanisms, brings about the concealment of its positions and interests. Against the Modest Witness, Haraway
introduces a new subject of knowledge which she calls the Mutated Modest
Witness who is capable of an embodied form of knowledge.
In this way, Haraway (1997) does not completely abandon the Modest Witness;
rather, because of her faith in science (I sign into this religion she says to us in her
text Crittercam: Haraway, 2007: 185), she suggests the Mutated Modest Witness
with a viewpoint that is situated and has not only the capacity to reect, but also to
diract knowledge. Her proposal is a critique of illustrated science, which paradoxically is located within the same tradition, indicating a mutation in its path.
This is why Haraway can arm her faith in science; it is also why her mestiza is
accompanied by the Hubble telescope.
The fragment quoted initially seems to indicate that she nds material for this
new Mutated Modest Witness in the new Mestiza proposed by Anzaldua (2007) in
Borderlands/La Frontera. Nevertheless, the fragment also clearly indicates that the
line separating Randolphs mestiza and Anzalduas mestiza is not a tenuous one:
The Mestiza Cosmica connects the snake and the telescope of Hubble, while
Anzalduas mestiza identies with the snake and with the state of conscience
called Coatlicue, proposed in the mystical tradition, within the knowledge of the
indigenous Mexican cultures (Haraway, 1997: 37). This is why Anzalduas mestiza
necessarily supports an eclectic altar, perhaps distinguishing her destiny from that
of the Mestiza Cosmica. The two mestizas are, however, sisters and it could be
concluded that Haraway nds in the one (Anzalduas mestiza) the inspiration for
the other.

Two forms of knowledge

This dierentiation makes it possible to suggest that the two mestizas, although
sisters, respond to dierent traditions and trajectories of knowledge. Haraways
mestiza continues in the scientic tradition (and it is possible to clearly locate her in
the Critical Studies of Science), whilst Anzalduas mestiza, in spite of giving inspiration to some elements of the Mestiza Cosmica, cannot be located within this
tradition2 and is better placed in what the post-colonial Latin American theorists
have called border thinking (Mignolo, 2003).
In the introduction of the Spanish edition of his book Local Histories, Global
Designs, Mignolo (2003) proposes the denomination of gnosis to capture a wider
range of forms of knowledge which philosophy and epistemology contributed to
casting away (in this he is following the ideas of the African theorist Valentin Y.
Mundimbe [1988]). The origin of the word gnosis refers to knowledge in general,
without specifying the dierence between doxa (common opinion) and episteme
(formalized knowledge). Mignolo proposes a border gnosis or border thinking as
a kind of knowledge from a subaltern perspective. This implies a knowledge otherwise, a knowledge conceived from the borders of the modern /colonial

264

Feminism & Psychology 22(2)

world system. Hence border thinking could be a powerful and emergent form of
comprehension or episteme that absorbs hegemonic forms of knowledge from the
perspective of the subaltern (Mignolo, 2003).
As subaltern, queer and someone of the third world in the United States,
Anzaldua (2007) recognizes herself as being multiply situated, complex, contradictory and many in one. This is why she chooses to narrate her experience from
categories that are not part of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, where she is contradictorily immersed. Thus, she constructs new histories and a new and powerful
narrative that proposes not only another history, but also another subjectivity, one
unimaginable from the advantageous position of the Cyclops-type self-satised eye
of the dominant subject. (Haraway, 1997: 9).
Anzalduas (2007) theory arises then from her own history and connects with the
emergence of new spaces, of new narratives of refuges, which she constructs by
weaving her histories with the subaltern knowledge of the indigenous Mexican
people. In considering fragments of the texts of Anzaldua, I will present particular points where border feminism involves epistemological ruptures and challenges
for scientic knowledge (including their mutated versions) as well as for psychology, a clear inheritor of this form of thought. In doing this, I would like to bring
out some of the possible queries that could be posed in this sense from the work of
Anzaldua.

Knowledge in the borderlands

But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the
embodiment of the hieros gamos, the coming together of opposite qualities within.
(Anzaldua, 2007: 41)

Anzaldua inhabits multiple identities. Her territory: Borderland (La Frontera) is a

physical, geographical place of uncertainty.3 This place opens the possibility of a
new psychological, sexual and spiritual politics (Perez, 2005) that provides the
space for new forms of knowledge. Like a mestiza in multiple senses,4 Anzaldua
lives in this border ground, a place of mixture that is not only racial:
A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of
an unnatural boundary. It is a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint eye, the perverse, the
queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in
short those who cross over, pass over, or go through the connes of the normal.
(Anzaldua, 2007: 25)

Borderlands are a place of instability. In contrast to the canons of western

thought, which look for the certainties of dierentiations and which construct
their own imagery from identities based on these dierentiations, the borderland

Vargas-Monroy

265

appears as undetermined, a place which is constantly in transition and which produces a feeling of unease. In this way, if illustrated science generates strong and
established binary logics, subversion arises with the promise of the territories of
transition and borders. Lugones (1994) sees the gure of the mestiza as one of
resistance, capable of inhabiting these borderlands, since she herself is
unclassiable.
In dierent texts, Anzaldua (2002, 2007, 2009) suggests a form of knowledge
which challenges the rational dichotomy of the modern/colonial world system and
makes the way to the borderland possible. Her elaborations, therefore, have a
dierent point of demarcation working from an undetermined area between feminist critique, theory and the narrative. Her writing also departs from many of the
traditional forms of writing in the disciplines of the West. For Anzaldua, writing
must be alive and must produce transformations. When she writes, she goes to
narratives which rearticulate and recreate indigenous traditions, recovering the
voice of another type of knowledge; in her writing the word jumps, hurts and
heals; it is, in fact, a spellbinding word.
This knowledge has a dierent voice, an intonation and a melody that speaks,
and is impossible to nd in the voice of the Modest Witness; Anzalduas voice is
alive and her writing has a force, implying a trip and a transition.5 In this way it is
impossible to separate words such as knowledge, charm and transformation in
her work:
I look at my ngers, see plumes growing there. From the ngers my feathers, black
and red ink drips across the page. Escribo con la tinta de mi sangre. I write in red. Ink.
Intimately knowing the smooth touch of article, its speechlessness, before I spill myself
on the insides of trees. (Anzaldua, 2007: 93)

In the following fragment written in Spanish,6 Anzaldua considers writing as a

muse. It is a muse that tortures and awakens self-consciousness:
Musa bruja, venga. Cubrese con una sabana y espante mis demonios que a rempujones y a cachetadas me roban la pluma, me rompen el sueno. Musa, misericordia!
O game, musa bruja Por que huye uste en mi cara? Su grito me desarrolla de mi
caracola, me sacude el alma. Vieja qu tese de aqu con sus manos de navaja. Ya no me
despedaze mi cara. Vaya con sus pinches unas que me desgarran de los ojos hasta los
talones. Vayese a la tiznada. Que no me coman, le digo. Que no me coman sus nueve
dedos can bales.
Hija negra de la noche, carnala Por que me sacas las tripas, por que cardas mis
entranas?
Este hilvanando palabras con tripas me esta matando. Jija de la noche vete a la
chingada! (Anzaldua, 2007: 72)

266

Feminism & Psychology 22(2)

After considering border identities, border knowledge and forms of writing

which come from those borders, it is possible to indicate some of the challenges
to traditional forms of scientic knowledge that arise from the work of Anzaldua.
Firstly, it should be recognized that her work operates from a dierent place from
that which characterizes scientic reason. This new point of departure makes possible a way of thinking about forms of knowledge that cannot be separated from
the experience of transition and transformation. This is why it is a matter of thinking through categories such as mestiza which do not t the logics of dichotomy.
The journey through reading/writing is another key element in the work of
Anzaldua. The experience of her writing and our reading therefore becomes transformative, presenting the possibility of re-writing ones own history.

Autohistory-theory: A path from our own subjectivity

to the social world
The struggle is inner: Chicano, Indio, American Indian, mojado, Mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian our psyches
resemble the border towns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has
always been inner and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must
come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing
happens in the real world unless it rst happens in the images in our heads. (Anzaldua,
2007: 109)

The category of autohistory-theory brings together some of the elements of what

might be thought of as the methodological proposal of Anzaldua (Keating, 2005), a
proposal that comes through an exercise with our own subjectivity. Subjectivity
then emerges as a central element, articulating the possibilities of social transformation. It is a matter of invoking ones own history (the struggle is inner) and
recreating larger histories (played out in outer terrains), since only in this way is
there a possibility of social transformation (nothing happens in the world unless it
rst happens in the images in our heads). In this way our own psychology and
desires are the source of transformation.
It is perhaps from this point that the multiple interpellations that Anzalduas
work make to psychology become clearer. Her ideas and images speak about a
subjective world clearly intersecting with the social. However, as border knowledge, we would only nd elements close to her proposals in discussions that are also
on the borders of the discipline and that constitute a critique of modern thought
(e.g. Enriquez, 1992; Owusu-Bempah and Howitt, 2000).
It is therefore possible to say that in at least three ways the work of Anzaldua
(2007) demonstrates dierences as regards modern thought (as well as scientic
psychology). The rst one is related to the rebellious opposition to binaries that is
made clear by the idea of borderlands; the second one aims to eliminate the distinction between the knower and the known, positing instead a vision of our own

Vargas-Monroy

267

subjectivity as the center of knowledge; and nally the third one rejects (scientic) control, and rather appeals to the experiences of uncertainty, transition and
crisis.

Interpellating Latin American feminism

Within Latin American feminism, Anzalduas proposals have stimulated a Mestiza
feminism (Saldivar-Hull, 2000), which allows a movement from identity to postidentity politics, thus challenging essentialist visions of women. In this way, it
opens a space for the recognition of minority subjectivities.
The question of autonomy and identity considered by many to be a feature of
Latin-American feminism (Alvarez et al., 2002, Curiel, 2009), is challenged by
Gloria Anzalduas category La Frontera (Borderland) which opens a space for
a non-essentialist epistemology. This is an epistemology of frontier capable of
thinking identity conicts and contradictions in many creative ways:
The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically
present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of dierent
races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes
touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. (Anzaldua,
2007: 27)

The displacement from an essentialist way of thinking to a non-essentialist perspective has been signaled as a movement to decolonize feminism (Suarez Navas
and Hernandez, 2008). This movement contributes to a more complex feminism
and to the constitution of an always mobile feminine subject.

Stories as a way of healing

Finally, I would like to use some examples of how, in Anzalduas work, narrative
interweaves with theory and experience. In the third part of Borderlands/La
Frontera, Anzaldua (2007) recovers the gure of Coyolxauhqui, the ancient
Aztec goddess, who was cut into pieces due to the rivalries with her brother. The
big stone that represents Coyolxauhqui was found accidentally in an excavation
near the Templo Mayor in 1978. In dierent writings, Anzaldua (2007, 2009)
invokes the memory of this mutilated body, which she considers a metaphor for
everything that has been broken in the mestiza, an inner state that must be overcome to create self-awareness (Kattau, 2007). Anzaldua proposes that the reconstruction of the dismembered goddess is synonymous with change and the return of
exiled emotions, creating the possibility of healing. In this sense, for Anzaldua, the
fact that the stone was found symbolizes a kind of return of all the personal and
social fragmentations we experience, and indicates a means of transition for our
own healing (Anzaldua, 2009).

268

Feminism & Psychology 22(2)

Anazaldua invokes Coyolxauhqui as a way of explaining her feelings. In the

following excerpt Anzaldua calls to the fragmented goddess during the terrorist
attack on New York (and the US Pentagon) on September 11, 2001:
The day the towers fell, me sent como [I felt like] Coyolxauhqui, la luna [the moon].
Algo me agarro y me sacudio [Something grabbed me and shook me], frightening la
sombra [soul] out of my body. I fell in pieces into that pitch-black brooding place.
Each violent image of the towers collapsing, transmitted live all over the world then
repeated a thousand times on TV, sucked the breath out of me, each image etched on
my minds eye. Wounded, I fell into shock, cold and clammy. The moment fragmented me, dissociating me from myself. Arresting every vital organ in me, it
would not release me. (Anzaldua, 2009: 218)

In a similar vein, Anzaldua appeals to the gure of Coyolxauhqui to speak about

the fragmentations that must be healed, and Coatlicue, the mother of Coyolxauhqui,
illustrates this healing. Her proposal again appears as a narrative: Coatlicue, the
serpent goddess of the darkness and the light, contains all contradictions. She
reigned before the Aztecs came to be a military and warlike bureaucracy, at which
point she was forgotten (Anzaldua, 2007). Because of her misfortunes, Coatlicue can
still help us to nd the way, to re-compose what we have lost:
Coatlicue depicts the contradictory. In her gure, all the symbols important to the
religion and philosophy of the Aztecs are integrated. Like Medusa, the Gorgon, she is
a symbol of the fusion of opposites: the eagle and the serpent, heaven and the underworld, life and death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror . . . when we are not
living up to our potentialities and thereby impeding the evolution of the soul or worse.
Coatlicue the Earth opens and plunges us into her maw, devours us. By keeping the
conscious mind occupied or immobile, the germination work takes place in the deep,
dark earth of the unconscious. (Anzaldua, 2007: 69)

In following Anzaldua in the exercise of constructing new narratives, it is possible to wonder if in these times humankind is inhabiting the black ground in which
Coatlicue, goddess of multiplicity, keeps her detainees immobile until they successfully integrate, thus bringing opposites closer. As the western mind is busy and
immobilized, perhaps something is germinating in the dark, deep ground of the
unconscious (Aigner-Varoz, 2000). Anzaldua speaks to us about a knowledge that
refuses to disappear. This knowledge is in a battle to the death with other forms of
knowledge that have lost the way to the borderlands.

Notes
1. This concurred with the arguments of Shapin and Schaffer (1985) in their studies on
Robert Boyle, a scientist of the 17th century who was considered one of the founding
fathers of experimental science (identified in the work as a modest witness).

Vargas-Monroy

269

2. Discussing this issue, Paula Moya (1997) makes a critique of postmodern feminism. To
Moya, postmodern feminism has generated a way of considering the differences that
paradoxically eliminate such differences. I am following this critique when I insist on
the distinction between the Mestiza Cosmica and Anzalduas mestiza.
3. Recovering a Nahuatl word, Anzaldua calls the borderlands: Nepantla, the spaces in
between worlds. Her proposal is that transformation occurs in these places which are
unstable and unpredictable, producing fear and anxiety.
4. Mestiza is a word that designates a person of mixed race, in Latin America the offspring
of a Spanish American and an American Indian. In Anzalduas work the word could be
used as a metaphor of different kinds of mixtures.
5. Keating (2005) proposes that Anzaldua shapes her theory as transformative writing or
Shaman aesthetics; her stories (prose and poetry) have the ability to transform the
storyteller and the listener into someone or something else.
6. Boderlands/La Frontera is written in three languages: Nahualt, Spanish and English. This
is a gesture that contests the dominance of English as the main academic language.

References
Aigner-Varoz E (2000) Metaphors of a mestiza consciousness: Anzalduas Borderlands/La
Frontera. MELUS 25(2, Latino/a Identities): 4762.
Alvarez SE, Friedman Jay E, Beckman E, Blackwell M, Chinchilla N, Lebon N, Navarro M
and Tobar Rios M (2002) Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(2): 537580.
Anzaldua G (2002) (Un) natural bridges, (un) safe spaces. In: Anzaldua G and Keating AL
(eds) This Bridge we Call Home, Radical Visions for Transformation. New York:
Routledge, 16.
Anzaldua G (2007) Borderlands/La Frontera, 3rd edn. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute.
Anzaldua G (2009) Let us be the healing of the wound: The Coyolxauhqui imperativeLa
sombra y el sueno. In: Keating AL (ed.) The Gloria Anzaldua Reader. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 303318.
Anzaldua G and Moraga C (eds) (1981) This Bridge Called My Back. Boston, MA:
Persephone Press.
Curiel O (2009) Panel: Los encuentros feministas latinoamericanos, analisis y perspectivas.
Unpublished article. Escuela de Estudios de Genero. Bogota: Universidad Nacional de
Colombia.
Enriquez VG (1992) From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: The Philippine Experience.
Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.
Gomez A, Moraga C and Romo-Carmona M (eds) (1983) Cuentos: Stories by Latinas.
New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press.
Haraway D (1997) Modest Witness@Second Millenium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse:
Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Haraway D (2007) Crittercam: Compounding eyes in NatureCulture. In: Selinger E (ed.)
Expanding Phenomenology: Companion to Ihde. New York: SUNY Press.
Kattau C (2007) Review of Entre mundos / among worlds: New perspectives on Gloria
Anzaldua edited by Ana Louise Keating. Wagadu 4: 201203.
Keating A (2005) Entre Mundos / Among Worlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldua. New
York: Palgrave.
Lugones M (1994) Purity, impurity, and separation. Signs 19(2): 458479.

270

Feminism & Psychology 22(2)

Mignolo W (2003) Historias Locales/ Disenos Globales. Colonialidad, Conocimientos

Subalternos y Pensamiento Fronterizo. Madrid: Akal.
Moraga C (1983) Loving in the War Years/Lo que nunca paso por sus labios. Boston: South
End Press.
Moya P (1997) Postmodernism, realism and the politics of identity: Cherrie Moraga and
Chicana feminism. In: Alexander J and Tapalde Mohanty Ch (eds) Feminist Genealogies,
Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, 125150.
Mudimbe VY (1988) The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Owusu-Bempah K and Howitt D (2000) Psychology beyond Western Perspectives. London:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Perez E (2005) Gloria Anzaldua: La Gran Nueva Mestiza Theorist, Writer, Activist-Scholar.
NWSA Journal 17(2): 110.
Saldivar-Hull S (2000) Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Shapin S and Schaffer S (1985) Leviathan and the Air Pump. Hobbes, Boyle and the
Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Suarez Navas L and Hernandez A (2008) Decolonizando el Feminismo. Madrid: Ediciones
Catedra.

Liliana Vargas-Monroy is associate professor in Psychology and Cultural Studies at

the Ponticia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota-Colombia.