In an interview with María Henríquez Betancor, Gloria Anzaldúa discusses identity as a continuously rearranging process, rather than a stagnant surface metaphor for a static consciousness. Anzaldúa proceeds to identify this dialectic process “as an arrangement or a series of clusters, a kind of stacking or layering of selves, horizontal and vertical layers, the geography of selves made up of the different communities you inhabit.” Her seminal text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza projects a possibility of reading about one such identity-in-process through the author’s almost prototypical “autohisteorías”. Anzaldúa’s work, which defies genre conscription on every single page -turning, generates the construction of a 'mestiza consciousness', a dynamic new paradigm capable of deconstructing the hegemony of many insfoar “acceptable” cultural paradigms. Her mestiza consciousness combats the unspoken acceptance and affirmation of culturally determined roles, imposed on people’s individuality by various mechanisms of compliance (governmental decisions, communal practices, tradition and gossip).
Since its initial publication in 1987, Borderlands/La Frontera has initiated numerous discussions regarding the author’s treatment of life in “the spaces in-between”, Anzaldúa’s (and our) borderlands. The voice of Anzaldúa’s “mestiza identity” comes across as an angry voice, overtly political, some would even say unnecessarily extreme. Anzaldúa’s newly redesigned mythos has been questioned by scholars, critics, students of culture as they have tried to come to terms with its paradigmatic reenactment of one’s identity by examining the ways in which we as people, as a society of dominant and minority cultures help enforce socially enslaving binaries (for example, WHITE IS GOOD, BLACK/DARK IS BAD; WOMEN ARE BIOLOGICALLY INFERRIOR; MEN ARE THE DOMINANT RACE; HOMOSEXULAITY IS A DENEGRATE PRACTISE, etc.).
No matter how angrily the voice comes across for some, I have found Anzaldúa’s “new mythos” an indispensable concept in the borderlands of our global existence. We seem to crave metaphors, archetypes, images, in other words indicators, that will help validate our choices, our struggles, our unsheltered existence in the wake of “the changing times”, similarly to the way our ancestors craved the myth of human origin in all of its colorfully various forms. By creating her mythos of “the many different mixes” consciousness, Anzaldúa asserts the power to restructure the audience’s collective unconsciousness through her own use of metaphors.
Metaphors play a defining role in our everydayness. They reshape our individual reality by forming our socially (un)acceptable existence. The Metaphors in Borderlines are not just figures of speech; they allow Anzaldúa to commence a process of finally transcending the culturally imposed “boundaries” that have labeled her an outcast. Many of her metaphors are cross-cultural and inter-/intra-referential, thus what we encounter in her text is a validation of experiences belonging to people from different racial, ethnical backgrounds, different class and sexual orientation. The metaphors of the serpents, otherwise indigenous to her home borderland of the Southwestern Texas/Mexico border, are both part of the Aztec and the Judeo-Christian mythology; they represent, on a number of levels, the source for her distress in her home of the American Southwest. They reflect the societies from which they have entered her borderland; they are a mirror projection of socially constructed gender roles. They are also a vehicle for Anzaldúa’s resistance. She resists being treated as an object of physical threat (as a woman, she does not allow for herself to be maltreated by a man – a gringo, an eagle, a coyote); she does not want a husband; she refuses to be a silent drone, overpowered by the dominance of men, culture, religion.
By appropriating these oppressive forces within her cultural heritage, she tries to lay claim to her final liberation. How successful is then her renewal? How content is her perpetually displaced self?
Taking into account the book’s success signaling “a new visibility for academic programs on the study of the U.S.-Mexico border area”, while crossing “rigid boundaries in academia as it traveled between Literature (English and Spanish), History, American Studies, Anthropology and Political Science departments,” and instigating “multiple theories of feminism in women’s studies and Chicana studies,” Anzaldúa’s act of self-cultural renewal is quite successful. The book is widely read and commented. It is visible. Personally I do not identify with her identity-in-process as constructed by the mestiza consciousness; however, I do not need to fully identify with it to be able to understand its correlation with my own Balkan borderland consciousness. My identity as a Balkan woman of multiple ethnic backgrounds, engaged in a never-ending battle with one another, is a day to day reassessment of what is a personal experience, what is a collective experience, what is the space-in-between. In that respect, when Anzaldúa says in her interview with María Henríquez Betancor that “identity is not just a singular activity or entity. It’s in relation to somebody else because you can’t have a stand alone; there must be something you’re bouncing off of…identity is not just what happens to me in my present lifetime but also involves my family history, my racial history, my collective history…,”
I listen, understand and dramatize.
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