Borderlands La Frontera

In the Preface to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa specifies that she is dealing with the border between the United States and Mexico in Texas. Still, she says, borderlands are not unique to this territory; they are there wherever two peoples occupy the same space. She describes herself as a “border woman” (19) and explains that she code-switches from English to Castilian Spanish to Tex-Mex Spanish in an effort to make visible the “bastard language” (20) of Chicano Spanish. This book is an invitation to try to understand this language and culture from its people, from “the new mestizas” (20).

Chapter 1 opens with an epigraph of lyrics from a song by a conjunto band (a small folk music band) describing the “other Mexico” (23). Anzaldúa then launches into her own prose-poem describing her standing at “the edge where earth touches ocean” (23), where Mexican children kick a soccer ball that lands in the United States. She describes this border as a “1,950-mile-long open wound” (24) that splits her in half. This “thin edge of barbwire” (25) is her home.

Anzaldúa then moves into prose, again describing the U.S.-Mexican border as una herida abierta (an open wound) that constitutes a “third country—a border culture” (25).