La Consencia de la Mestiza

Decades ago Gloria Anzalda comprehended what many of us spend

our lives attempting to graspthat colonization may have destroyed
our indigenous civilizations but colonization could not eliminate the
evolution of an indigenous psyche. That world still persists inside our
communitys psychic, material lives. We wear it on our bodies, our
flesh, our mestizaje. The mixed racial bodies and minds that weve
inherited usher that past into the present and, more important, into the
future. She devised her theoryla conciencia de la mestizaas a
method, a tool that offered us hope to move from a bleak present into
a promising future. La conciencia de la mestiza, mestiza
consciousness is that transformative tool (81). She said:

The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subjectobject dual-ity that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and
through the images of her work how duality is transcended. The
answer to the problem between the white race and the colored,
between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in
the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our
thoughts . . collective consciousness is the beginning of a long
struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of
rape, of violence, of war. (80)

For Gloria, mestiza consciousness must be attained by all races, by

all people. It is the consciousness that we need to take us through the
21st century, from el cinco sol (the fifth sun) to el sexto sol (the sixth
sun).
To quote Gloria, mestiza consciousness will guide us toward the creation of yet another culture and to a new value system with images
and symbols that connect us to each other and the planet (81). The
clash of cultures will become embedded in our very flesh. The

consciousness of our crossbreeding will create a culture of harmony,

where love and hope become key. Moreover, the crossbreeding of
cultures occurs, for Gloria, in the borderlands.

The actual physical borderland that Im dealing with in this book is

the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological
borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands, are
not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are
physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other,
where people of different races occupy the same territory, where
under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space
between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. (1987, preface)

In that opening paragraph, she illustrated complexities that scholars

con-tinue to debate, reiterate, draw from and upon, extrapolate,
deconstruct and reconstruct. In essence, Gloria Anzalda forged a
new territory, a new intellectual locale, a new spiritual space, a new
psychic and psychological terrain. She created fresh symbols,
metaphors, and taxonomies to describe a material world where
poverty, racism, homophobia are real problems and where a psychic,
sacred inner world is as real as the material, tangible world. For her
there were no boundaries. She leapt across borders between the real
and imaginary because she knew that one could inhabit both at once.
In addition, she theorized what it was like to be a queer of color who
not only inhabited sexual borderlands, but also survived sexual
border-lands that often terrorized queers. Herself a queer of color,
una jota, una marimacha de la frontera, she spoke about the pain and
the creativity of living between worlds, of melding the real and
metaphoric borderlands.

. As a queer Chicana from south Texas, Anzalda inhabited multiple

identities at once, just as we all do, and she reminded us that our
movement between and among these borderlands was necessary for
our cultural and political survival. To say that Gloria was not queer
enough in her writings is to negate her theorizing of the sexual
borderlands. She argued that queers of color in the borderlands
navigate a politically charged and racialized terrain in which harsh
violence is always a danger.

The coatlicue state is a psychic sensibility, one that we ignore or

dismiss in our post-Enlightenment Western European training. I have
to admit I never permitted myself to quite grasp what she meant by
the coatlicue state. I was, after all, trained in the 1970s and 1980s
when a feminist and Marxist materialist critique superseded all
others. Not until now as I read and reread Borderlands/La Frontera
did I realize, of course, the battle within. She had always been
referring to that inner struggle in which cultural identity is
inextricably enmeshed with ambiguity. But an ambiguity that allows
for degrees of differences, for shifting and moving around inside
another perspectivea third perspectivenot a static onebut a
mobile cultural identity that is always already transforming. For me,
the coatlicue state allows me to tap into an intuitiveness that helps me
survive daily. Like la facultad, which is the interpretive tool, the
coatlicue state is that space in which we dwell when we plunge into
the abyss of self-pity, of borracheras without alcohol or drugs. The
coatli-cue state is the alternate consciousness that we delve into,
feeling sorry for ourselves until coatlicue kicks our butt and says, Ya
Parale.

..this one too disregarded women, whether Euroamerican, Irish,

Spanish, Spanish-Mexican, or Native American. Not until the late
twentieth cen-tury, with the publication of Borderlands/La Frontera,
did that omission become remedied in a way that traditional
scholars/historians would never have imagined. Glorias book, after

all, is conscious myth-making, conscious interpretive narrative that

re-centers la India y la mestiza.

Her book became the progres-sion toward postmodern, postnational

identities for Chicanas/mestizas. She reinscribed Borderlands/La
Frontera, and those terms became the keywords, the metaphoric
lynchpins for many late twentieth and early twenty-first century
writings. As a Chicana feminist theoretician, she intervened with a
treatise that presented history as only another literary genre. Debates
circulated about the books historical errors, but many more
traditional historians simply missed the metaphor and read too
literallyas we often can.

She moved beyond the Chicano nationalist project and issued a

postnationalist feminist project in which la nueva mestiza, the mixedrace woman, is the privileged sub-ject of that in between space, that
interstitial space that was formerly a nation and must be without
borders, without boundaries. She challenged Chicano nationalist
discourse and critiqued the discursive nation as a space that negates
feminists, queers (jotas y jotos), and anyone who is not of pure
Chicano blood or lineage. Meztizaje, for Anzalda, is rede-fined and
remixed into an open consciousness where racial, ideological,
cultural and biological cross-pollinization co-exist.

). Women like Gloria meshed their political lives with their scholarly
and community lives. The voices, especially the queer of color voices
in the anthology, spoke to me in ways that no other writings had
before. Moreover, the essays in the anthology spoke from a queer/lesbian-of-color position that melded race, sex, and class.

when Anzalda published Borderlands/La Frontera, she referred to

herself as jota, or queer. As she theorized what it meant to be la
nueva mestiza, she argued that as a Chicana jota from the border and
from another generation, she had never felt comfortable with the selfidentifying term, lesbian, but instead had grown up with queer and
all its negative connotations yet still embraced it because it was and is
what made sense to her. Anzalda had been theorizing queerness
from a decolonial perspective in which issues of race and coloniality
were always already enmeshed in her writing.