Product Description

Rooted in Gloria Anzalda's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remapped our understanding of what a "border" is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This twentieth-anniversary edition features new commentaries from prominent activists, artists, and teachers on the legacy of Gloria Anzalda's visionary work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44207 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Anzaldua is a self-proclaimed borderland beinga Chicana who lives close to the border between Mexico and Texas, who shares several cultures and uses a mixture of languages. With exceptional insight, she creates a mosaic of the marginal person: a person, like herself, who exists in a state of transition, of ambivalence, of conflict; someone who is infused with many cultures yet cannot claim a single one wholly for herself. Her journal is written in earth tones, like an Aztec design, tones that are both engaging and striking. Weaving prose with poetry, Mexican-Indian history with psychology, mythology with philosophy, the author pulls together the frazzled edges of Chicano culture and of her sense of self. Anzaldua is a rebellious and willful talent who recognizes that life on the border"life in the shadows"is vital territory for both literature and civilization.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Anzaldua, a Chicana native of Texas, explores in prose and poetry the murky, precarious existence of those living on the frontier between cultures and languages. Writing in a lyrical mixture of Spanish and English that is her unique heritage, she meditates on the condition of Chicanos in Anglo culture, women in Hispanic culture, and lesbians in the straight world. Her essays and poems range over broad territory, moving from the plight of undocumented migrant workers to memories of her grandmother, from Aztec religion to the agony of writing. Venting her anger on all oppressors of people who are culturally or sexually different, the author has produced a powerful document that belongs in all collections with emphasis on Hispanic American or feminist issues. Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes
Text: English, Spanish

Customer Reviews

One of the best books about chicano identity
I'm very satisfied with my order because in my opinion Borderlands/La Frontera is one of the best books about chicano identity.

Classic
Not much can be said to some of the postings I see here--to those that suggest the third tier prose, those that call this work "racist," those that implore statements like "I hated it." These are the same people that vote for their own oppression, these are the very people that fancy their success on some sense of entitlement. Relax, you do not have to agree, but hear me out.



Classic. Classic.



With the colorful enagement of gender, consciousness, and subconscious indeterminacy, the creation of a new utopia (racial, linguistic, gender, cultural, etc) is suggested by the prose of self actualization. This book is about all of us--it is about the exchanges we have with domination, be it familial or societal. It's loose diction is its very strength, it does not confide to the subordination of patriachal, hegemonic forces of tradition. The reflexive allegorical stories and unpacking of our human complexity give it a breathing body and a compelling face.



Anzaldua suffered greatly for not writing like "the male pimps," those that claim a fanatical space in some high art and legitimacy canon. It was her filter of difference, it was her cries for something else, that connects with everyone at a spiritual level. I do not know how this can be connected to some mundane powerpoint presentation at a university; this piece involves the full of enagement of mind, body, and soul. To contextualize it--one needs to read consistently. In order to feel out her domain, one must be willing go beyond what "our mom said" or "what our 6th grade teacher" told us about this and that. This about the struggle for agency; this about search for Thoreau's Walden amidst sociohistorical forces that still "do not see."



Welcome it. This classic work of literature, philosophy, education...remains one of the most unrecognized treatises on being and becoming.

Overrated Drivel
I find it interesting that such a supposedly important and relevant contemporary work has only been reviewed by 11 people at the time of this writing. That alone tells you all you need to know since this is a book that is classed under both Latino and Women's Studies, and is part of many university literary programs.

The book is pretentious claptrap of the worst kind. If this book were judged on its merits rather than by popular, politically correct notions, it wouldn't come close to making the cut.

Alas, academia has embraced the book as a great work, and so it is required reading for an English M.A. program at a major university that I was accepted into. An English M.A.! Once I saw that this book was part of the program, I didn't even bother registering.

I don't mind rants against social, cultural and economic injustices. I've read many. But Ms. Anzaldua is no James Baldwin, that's for sure.