Gloria Anzaldas Borderless Theory in Spain

Author(s): Maria Antnia Oliver-Rotger

Source: Signs, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Autumn 2011), pp. 5-10
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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S I G N S

Autumn 2011

por otra: Testimonios de Latin@s in the U.S. through Cyberspace (11 de septiembre
de 200111 de marzo de 2002), ed. Claire Joysmith and Clara Lomas, 92103.
Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

Gloria Anzalduas Borderless Theory in Spain

Maria Anto`nia Oliver-Rotger

ince the mid-1990s, Gloria Anzaldu

as work, and in particular Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), has become very significant to Spanish
scholarship concerned with the critique of Western modernity and its
aftermaths. The first scholars to be influenced by the decolonial, deconstructivist impulses in her thinking were those who, from their respective filologia
anglesa (English philology) departments, conducted research on American
studies, gender studies, and cultural studies, as well as postcolonial, African
American, and Chicano/a studies. However, Anzaldua has also had a particular bearing on the fields of Spanish language and literature (filologia hispanica), translation, philosophy, art, and immigration studies, which confirms
the disciplinary permeability of a theory that knows no borders.
One of the first widely circulated Spanish texts to acknowledge Anzalduas contribution to feminist theory was the volume edited by Marta
` ngels Carab, Feminismo y crtica literaria (2000). Anzaldua
Segarra and A
is aligned here with thinkers like Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, who have questioned the Eurocentrism of feminist
thought prevalent until the early 1980s. Anzalduas contribution to feminism is seen as replacing the Western feminist subject with one who
understands herself relationally, although not uncritically so, with respect
to the family, the community, and the figure of the mother. In a more
extensive analysis of Anzalduas writing, my essay Sangre Fertil/Fertile
Blood: War, Migratory Crossings and Healing in Borderlands/La Frontera (Oliver-Rotger 2001) views Anzalduas Borderlands/La Frontera as
a hybrid text whose multiple discourses (critical mythopoesis, poetry, historical revision, feminist and postnationalist critiques of identity and culture) converge to recount and heal the wounds inflicted on both the female
writing subject and the multiple collectivities she speaks for and against.
With regard to Anzalduas contribution to theories of sexuality, the
philosopher and art critic Beatriz Preciado has written about Anzalduas

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2011, vol. 37, no. 1]
2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2011/3701-0002$10.00

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Symposium: Gloria E. Anzaldua, an International Perspective

ideas for a Spanish readership in academic venues, as well as in the Spanish

press (Preciado 2004, 2007). As a Spanish speaker and a specialist in queer
theory heavily influenced by Judith Butler, Preciado has found in Anzaldua
and Cherre Moraga her privileged interlocutors. In her essay Multitudes
queer: Notas para una poltica de los anormales (Queer multitudes: Notes
toward a politics of abnormality) she speaks of Anzaldua as belonging to
post-feminist queer multitudes in the sense that, without wanting to
do away with feminism, these multitudes engage in a reflective confrontation of feminism (Preciado 2004) and challenge it for erasing differences in order to develop a hegemonic, heterocentric political subject
(Preciado 2004). Along these lines, in Teora encarnada y pensamiento
fronterizo (2008) I examined Anzaldua and Moragas nonessentialist
lesbianism as a condition of marginality that develops into a critical hermeneutic tool for challenging what Emma Perez calls the colonial imaginary (1999, 6) of Mexican/Chicano culture and what Walter Mignolo
terms colonial subalternity (2001, 30) in the wider context of the Americas (Oliver-Rotger 2008).
Also grounded in decolonial thought, Indias y fronteras: El discurso en
torno a la mujer etnica by Silvia Martnez-Falquina (2004) engages in an
interesting comparative study of the liberatory possibilities of post-indianista thought in the works of such writers as Anzaldua, Paula Gunn
Allen, Louise Erdrich, and Diane Glancy (Martnez-Falquina 2004, 7).
Martnez-Falquina contends that it is not always the case that these writers
successfully overcome the notion of precolonial Native Americans as pure
and somehow precultural, which characterizes colonial indianista discourse. Another Spanish scholar, Nieves Pascual Soler (2000), offers an
insightful analysis of this assumption of a stage prior to fusion or mestizaje
in her contribution to New Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness (Santaolalla 2000). For Pascual Soler, Anzalduas
new exoticism takes advantage of the commodification of otherness to
construct new identities, recover a tradition, and do away with stereotypes.
Spanish scholars in the field of translation and linguistics have analyzed
the ways in which Anzalduas linguistic hybridization is essential for the
construction and expression of a deterritorialized identity. In Espais de
frontera Pilar Godayol (2000), a translator of Chicana literature into Catalan, considers Anzalduas disarticulation of the assumed place of the
masculine imperial speaking subject to be a necessary position for the task
of translation, which she understands not so much as the carrying over
of meaning from one language to another but as mediation and constant
negotiation between several systems of reference. In Asymetries in/of
frica Vidal ClaTranslation (2004) Rosario Martn Ruano and Carmen A
ramonte, specialists in translation theory, look at Anzalduas Borderlands

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S I G N S

Autumn 2011

as a plurilingual text that travels between cultures and makes the familiar
strange for the dominant culture without forsaking the authors marginality vis-a`-vis dominant cultures. Similarly, Antonio Torres (2009) sees
Anzalduas open, unrestricted use of varieties of Chicano Spanglish as a
challenge to the linguistic colonization effected by the Spanish languages
ethnocentric territorialization.
Anzalduas critique of the Western feminist, nationalist, heteronormative
subject was one of the theoretical strategies informing the art exhibit Fugas
subversivas (Subversive escapes), curated by Guillermo Cano, Ran Lozano,
and Johanna Moreno in 2005 at the University of Valencia.1 They brought
together more than fifteen Spanish artists and groups that denounce the
imposition of sexual, gender, and linguistic identities in contemporary society.
As in the United States, in Spain Borderlands/La Frontera has been
acknowledged as a foundational text in literary and cultural studies for
theorizing notions of the border or frontera to be crossed as opposed to
the American frontier to be conquered. The volume edited by Jesus Benito
and Ana Mara Manzanas, Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands (2002), contests grand narratives and proposes alternative ones
that defy national histories while extricating the paradigm of the borderlands from its application solely to the cultural predicament of Mexican
Americans. As an example, migration between Spain and Africa, and the
seasonal shrinking or widening of the borderlands between them, serves
as a useful counterpart to the U.S.-Mexico border, given that both borders
function as demarcating lines between the third and first worlds, the colonizer and the colonized.
While the field of geography in Spain has yet to take Anzalduas work
into account in terms of her understanding of space, for Spanish scholars
in the field of literary and cultural studies Anzalduas narration of the
impact of social and material space on the constitution of the gendered
subject has been inspirational. In my own Battlegrounds and Crossroads:
Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas (Oliver-Rotger 2003)
nand in Manuel Albadalejo Martnezs Hacia una cartografa de Los A
geles a traves de la literatura chicana (2007), Anzalduas concept of
borderlands is a paradigm enabling inquiry into the relationship between
intimate and public spaces in Chicana/o literature. The cross-pollination
between the methodologies of literary criticism and cultural geography is
also outstanding in Manzanas Calvos Contested Passages: Migrants
Crossing the Ro Grande and the Mediterranean Sea (2006) as well as
in most of the essays of her edited volume Border Transits (2007). Though
1

See the exhibit Web site at http://www.uv.es/cultura/c/docs/expfuguessubversivescast.htm.

See also Piqueras-Sanchez (2005).

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Symposium: Gloria E. Anzaldua, an International Perspective

not always acknowledged, Anzalduas notion of the borderlands has undoubtedly inspired Manzanass work, as well as the essays by Manuel MartnRodrguez (2007), Javier Duran (2007), and Jose Pablo Villalobos (2007)
in Border Transits, which engage in transnational comparative studies of
writers who, like Anzaldua herself, inhabit transitory literary and geographical spaces.
To end this brief review, I should say that perhaps the most neglected
aspect of Anzalduas theory in Spain is her contribution to global or transnational feminism, especially insofar as it may apply to issues of immigration
and gender. In 2004, the anthology Otras inapropiables, an initiative from
the grassroots feminist collective Eskalera Karakola (Spiral staircase) based
in the multiethnic neighborhood of Lavapies, Madrid, published a Spanish
translation of outstanding texts by authors Anzaldua, Aurora Levins Morales, bell hooks, Avtar Brah, and Chela Sandoval (Eskalera Karakola
2004). Registered with Creative Commons, the volume breaches the constraints that copyright laws place on the accessibility of academic texts and
makes available feminist texts that insist on the intersection of gender,
migration, and the global political economy. The introduction to this
volume contextualizes the essays within a necessary but not yet accomplished refashioning of Spanish feminist discourses and practices: While
Spanish feminism was prompted by class struggle and the critique of Francisco Francos national-Catholic idea of Spain, todays white Spanish
feminism reacts with ambivalence to issues such as the changing racial and
cultural demographics generated by migrations from Africa and Latin
America, the fortification of Spanish borders, the often cynical approaches
that the mass media and the political class bring to the feminization of
poverty and the vulnerability of migrant women, and the role of the mass
media in perpetuating stereotypes and menacing views of the other. In
order to do away with cultural relativism, localism, and stereotypes, Otras
inapropiables calls for the transnational coalitions that Anzalduas borderless
theory encourages feminist collectives to establish.
Department of Humanities
Universitat Pompeu Fabra

References

ngeles a traves
Albadalejo Martnez, Manuel. 2007. Hacia una cartografa de Los A
de la literatura chicana [Toward a cartography of Los Angeles through Chicano
literature]. PhD dissertation, Alicante University.
Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco:
Spinsters/Aunt Lute.

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S I G N S

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Benito, Jesus, and Ana Maria Manzanas, eds. 2002. Literature and Ethnicity in
the Cultural Borderlands. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Duran, Javier. 2007. Border Voices: Life Writings and Self-Representation of the
U.S.-Mexico Frontera. In Manzanas 2007, 6178.
Eskalera Karakola, ed. 2004. Otras inapropiables: Feminismos desde las fronteras
[Inappropriable others: Feminisms from the borderlands]. Trans. Maria Serrano
lvaro
Gimenez, Rocio Macho Ronco, Hugo Romero Fernandez Sancho, and A
Salcedo Rufo. Madrid: Traficantes de Suen
os. http://www.nodo50.org/ts/
editorial/otrasinapropiables.pdf.
Godayol, Pilar. 2000. Espais de frontera: Ge`nere i traduccio [Border spaces: Gender
and translation]. Barcelona: Eumo.
Manzanas, Ana Maria, ed. 2007. Border Transits: Literature and Culture across
the Line. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Manzanas Calvo, Ana Maria. 2006. Contested Passages: Migrants Crossing the
Ro Grande and the Mediterranean Sea. South Atlantic Quarterly 105(4):
75975.
Martn-Rodrguez, Manuel. 2007. Mapping the Trans/Hispanic Atlantic: Nuyol,
Miami, Tenerife, Tangier. In Manzanas 2007, 20522.
frica Vidal Claramonte. 2004. Asymmetries
Martn Ruano, Rosario, and Carmen A
in/of Translation: Translating Translated Hispanicism(s). TTR: Traduction,
terminologie, redaction 17(1):81105.
Martnez-Falquina, Silvia. 2004. Indias y fronteras: El discurso en torno a la mujer
etnica [Indian women and the border: The ethnic womans discourse]. Oviedo:
KRK.
Mignolo, Walter. 2001. Coloniality at Large: The Western Hemisphere in the
Colonial Horizon of Modernity. Trans. Michael Ennis. CR: The New Centennial Review 1(2):1954.
Oliver-Rotger, Maria Anto`nia. 2001. Sangre Fertil/Fertile Blood: Migratory
Crossings, War and Healing in Gloria Anzalduas Borderlands /La Frontera.
In Dressing Up for War: Transformations of Gender and Genre in the Discourse
and Literature of War, ed. Aranzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam,
189211. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
. 2003. Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
. 2008. Teora encarnada y pensamiento fronterizo en las autobiografas
de Gloria Anzaldua y Cherre Moraga [Embodied theory and border thinking
in the autobiographies of Gloria Anzaldua and Cherre Moraga]. In Que sus
faldas son ciclones: Representacion literaria contemporania del lesbianismo en
lengua inglesa [Her skirts are cyclones: Contemporary literary representation
of lesbianism in English], ed. Rosa Garca Rayego and Mara Soledad Sanchez
Gomez, 16784. Madrid: Egales.
Pascual Soler, Nieves. 2000. Autobiographies in La Frontera: Gloria Anzaldua.
In Santaolalla 2000, 24150
Perez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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10

Symposium: Gloria E. Anzaldua, an International Perspective

Piqueras-Sanchez, Norberto, ed. 2005. Fugas subversivas: Reflexiones hbridas sobre

la(s) identidad(es) [Subversive escapes: Hybrid reflections on identities]. Exhibition catalog. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, Servei de Publicacions.
Preciado, Beatriz. 2004. Multitudes queer: Notas para una poltica de los anormales [Queer multitudes: Notes toward a politics of abnormality]. Multitudes 12 (suppl.), http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Multitudes-queer,1465.
. 2007. Despues del feminismo: Mujeres en los margenes [After feminism:
Women in the margins]. El Pas, January 13, 23.
Santaolalla, Isabel, ed. 2000. New Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
` ngels Carab, eds. 2000. Feminismo y crtica literaria [FemSegarra, Marta, and A
inism and literary criticism]. Barcelona: Icaria.
Torres, Antonio. 2009. Expresion lingustica e identidad en los latinos de los
Estados Unidos [Latino language and identity in the United States]. Confluenze 1(2):81100.
Villalobos, Jose Pablo. 2007. Up against the Border: A Literary Response. In
Manzanas 2007, 3552.

Medi-terranean Borderization
Paola Zaccaria

as a result of the diasporas produced by new

wars and new forms of colonialism, boats, rubber dinghies, and wornout ships started sailing in the direction opposite to that of colonial
times: people emigrating from North Africa steered toward the closest
Mediterranean shores, especially to the Italian island of Lampedusa, the
t the end of the 1990s,

In breaking the word Mediterraneanwhich means sea in the middle of the earth,
from the Latin medius (middle) terra (land, earth)with a hyphen, as Medi-terranean,
I want to point out that many European and Eastern names for this sea stress the fact that it
is a sea between lands/earths/continents (Europe, Africa, and Asia). The Medi-terrannean is
the water that licks/laps the lands of three continents; it is a water route that has created and
still creates cultural intercourseeven through wars and colonialismbetween different populations, economies, ideas, and discourses. Because the Mediterranean flows in the middle of
so many lands and belongs to many countries, I consider European policies of refoulement
of people coming from the other two continents to be a methodology of oppression, a virtual
building of walls, which has devastating effects on the lives of socially disadvantaged Mediterranean people.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2011, vol. 37, no. 1]
2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2011/3701-0003$10.00

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