Borderlands La Frontera

Anzaldúa’s final prose chapter synthesizes the ideas laid out in prior chapters into a manifesto for a new mestiza consciousness. Here, Anzaldúa specifically situates the mestiza struggle as a feminist one, linking the interstitial experience of the borderland with the experience of being a woman and a queer person. Anzaldúa effectively rejects binary understandings of gender, race, culture, and subject-object duality, imagining a new future outside of these dualities. This is why Contradiction as Mestiza Consciousness, though painful, is necessary: The experience of alienation and division becomes the experience of the liminality and fluidity that Anzaldúa positions as necessary to societal healing.

The paradoxical nature of this undertaking is evident in a key image from this chapter: the queer Chicana woman as an act of kneading. Through this symbolism, Anzaldúa links domestic labor with Chicana women, reclaiming domesticity—traditionally associated with women’s oppression—as an empowered act that questions the status quo. As such, this kneading also becomes an ontological act that consistently interrogates existence. Part of this interrogation is linked to Indigenous spirituality, especially as Anzaldúa describes shaping new myths as an animal shape-shifter. Here, Anzaldúa again links Indigenous culture with rupture, embracing the contradiction of returning to one’s roots to envision the future.

Anzaldúa’s call to The Chicano people to reach out to white people is, in part, linked to the spirit of coalition-building that was emerging in the 1980s sociocultural landscape. However, it also reflects her expansive understanding of what it means to be Chicana or mestiza, as evidenced by her allusion to José Vasconcelos’s promotion of a “cosmic race.” For Vasconcelos, this project was literal: He advocated for the amalgamation of all human ethnicities into a single, uniform race (leading to accusations of eugenics, as this would necessarily erase the many ethnic and racial groups that currently exist). Anzaldúa’s meaning has more to do with transforming the collective consciousness, though like Vasconcelos, she suggests that the Chicano people are the origin point of this transformation. Her declaration that reality will not change without first changing one’s psyche also seems to be an argument for the power of art and literature to change the world.

Returning to the scene of her homeland at the end of the section, Anzaldúa ends where she began: at the borderland, deep in her personal history, reiterating the idea that as the land changes hands, the Chicano people continue to tend to it, resilient as ever. This image of hope for a Chicano future embodies just the mestiza consciousness that Anzaldúa puts forth.