[For Cinco de Mayo, a series on a handful of impressive and inspiring Mexican American voices. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an inspiring young scholar and voice!]
On what a
stunning autoethnographer reveals about the US and us.
I’ve written
about Mexican American writer, scholar, and activist Gloria
Anzaldúa
and her amazing book Borderlands/La
Frontera in multiple prior
posts, and wanted to dedicate this first paragraph to highlighting them in
case you’re able to check them out (the first hyperlink above is the most in-depth
of those posts, just FYI).
Welcome back! One
of the best reasons to better remember and read Anzaldúa is just how fully both her
book and her perspective challenge not just exclusionary definitions of
American identity, but really any narrative that seeks to define America as
something homogeneous. While it might seem that the “borderlands” of her title
refers to the particular region in which she grew up (the Rio Grande Valley of South
Texas, located as fully in between the United States and Mexico as any place
can be), or even the Mexican-American border overall, my argument (which I
advanced in both a chapter in my second book, Redefining American Identity, and part of the Mexican American
chapter in my fifth book We the People) is that Anzaldúa
helps us see the entire United States as a borderlands. She does so through one
of the most multi-layered texts I’ve ever read, a book that utilizes
literatures and languages, history and culture, religion and myth,
autobiography and communal stories, and more to create this profound new vision
of the nation, one all Americans should at least consider.
Anzaldúa’s
subtitle is The New Mestiza, and I
would say something parallel about this figure/identity—that while she might
seem to be referring to particular individuals or a specific form of heritage,
her argument instead is that in the late 20th century all of us are
in a number of important ways “mixed.” Given just how much our collective
conversations seemed unable to grapple with Barack
Obama’s multi-racial heritage and identity—and I’m thinking here not just
of the
Birtherism and racism on the right, but the much more general and often
celebratory tendency to define him as “the first black president”—I would argue
that we very much still need strategies for engaging with the concept of
“mixed” identities. And again, while of course particular individuals (with our
44th president and, yes, my two sons as examples) seem to literally
embody that complex combinatory heritage, Anzaldúa makes a persuasive case for
this mestiza form of identity as not just widely shared, but indeed the
defining experience of late 20th century humans. Here in the early
21st century, we could all benefit from better remembering and
reading that challenging and crucial perspective.
Next Cinco de
Mayo post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Mexican American figures, voices, histories and stories you’d highlight?
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