A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greek recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.
–Heidegger (in Bhabha 1994: 1)
Far from fading into historical irrelevance as predicted by F. Fukuyama (1992), borders have re-emerged as volatile symbols of crisis, control and contestation – no longer merely lines of demarcation, but fault lines in what S. Huntington reframed as a civilizational struggle, where immigration is cast not as a social phenomenon, but as a threat of quasi-military proportions (in Nevins, 2001: 138). From the militarized enforcement of immigration policies and the proliferation of surveillance technologies (cf. De Genova, 2002), to the production of illegality (Koser, 2000), and the ongoing humanitarian catastrophes – at sea (Mazloum, 2019), in detention centers (Hesawi, 2019) and in camps (Fleifel, 2012) -, the border is routinely framed in public discourse through narratives of threat (cf. Stolcke, 1995), legality (cf. Anderson, 2014), and national identity (cf. Malkki, 1992). Yet representations in the public domain rarely account for the so-called border spectacle where the state performs its sovereignty through highly visi-ble enforcement actions, while concealing how immigration law itself produces “illegality” as a racialized condition; one that creates and sustains a vulnerable and thus “cheap” reserve of labour (De Genova, 2002: 436, 440; Block, 2014). Neither does it account for the emotional, linguistic, and embodied dimensions of border life, which reflect a ‘homological relationship between colonisation and immigration’ (Saada, 2000: 32) where both processes interlock within broader systems of domination and cultural imposition, shaping the everyday realities of those who live in-between, carrying the border in their tongues, skin, memories, and identi-ties.
To approach these lived realities arguably requires a situated perspective; one that resists nu-merical abstractions to focus instead on the stories and intimate geographies of those who in-habit the interstices between nation and self, legality and illegality, visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion, mobility and containment (cf. Jackson, 2002 and 2013). In this vein, I will turn my focus to the border and the people who inhabit the borderlands.
“… the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing”, this paper will conceptualise the border not as an end, but as a liminal space1; a threshold where new subjectivities, languages and forms of resistance come into being. It is within this space of ambiguity and emergence, that the notion of borderlands begins to resonate not merely as a geopolitical demarcation, but as a lived condition and a mode of being and becoming. The borderland is not simply drawn on maps; it is carved into bodies, spoken through hybrid languages, and experienced in profound psychological registers (Mignolo, 2005).
To be clear, this is not only a theoretical premise, but a poetic and lived one. Approaching the border as a threshold – as a space of emergence, contradiction, and affect – I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987); a literary manifestation that offers a vocabulary of code-switching to convey the lived experiences of a migrant and a “border woman” (8) who inhabit the in-between. I engage this text not only for its canonical status within Chicana/o2 and feminist thought (Lugones, 1992), but for its critique of methodological nationalism3 together with its capacity to render visible the often concealed emotional, linguistic, and embodied dimensions of border life. Informed and inspired by the reflections above, I will engage with theory of subjectification through a decolonial feminist framework to explore the research question:
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How does Gloria Anzaldúa’s use of hybrid literary forms – combining poetry, autobiography, and theory – construct a new mestiza consciousness in the borderlands that resists both the empirical framing of migration and the erasure of embodied, linguistic, and affective border subjectivities?
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Borderlands/La Frontera not as a historical document – though it does contain history -, but as a situated social praxis that both explores and reveals intimate orientations of body and mind in a fractured tempo-spatial dimension characteristic of the borderland, I intend to trace how Anzaldúa’s aesthetic experimentation performs a mode of resistant subjectification. This involves drawing connections across our course literature and beyond, examining how language, genre, and embodiment work as means of self-making in contexts of migration, marginality, and epistemic violence.
Literature in Social Sciences
By presenting a preliminary reflection on the use of poetry and creative writing within scholarly research into the field of migration, I hope to accommodate an interdisciplinary approach that recognizes literature as a critical lens to explore the borderland experience(s) beyond so-called factual or testimonial accounts, emphasizing its political and ethical role in reshaping narratives of visibility and invisibility.
In line with this proposal, P. White suggests that: “creative or imaginative literature has a power to reflect complex and ambiguous realities that make it a far more plausible representation of human feelings and understanding than many of the artefacts used by academic re-searchers”. (in Pourjafari and Vahidpour, 2014: 688). From this perspective, literature does not simply reflect the world. Rather than striving to present a more “authentic” depiction of social reality, literature opens a fictional and affective space where the politics of representation, memory, and belonging can be reimagined, offering a page from which to delve into the complexities of migration that often lie beyond the scope of “factual” narratives (Burges, 2020).
Turning to L. Malkki (2015), the rethinking of literature within social sciences requires us to reflect critically on the imagination and recognise fiction as a valid form of knowledge production, rather than disciplining it into empirical frameworks. This entanglement of imagination and reality is captured by G. Deleuze, who writes: “a real voyage, by itself, lacks the force necessary to be reflected in the imagination; the imaginary voyage, by itself, does not have the force, as Proust says, to be verified in the real… the imaginary and the real must be, rather, like two juxtaposable or superimposable parts of a single trajectory, two faces that ceaselessly interchange with one another, a mobile mirror” (in Malkki, 2015: 16). Succinctly, this mobile mirror foregrounds the inseparability of imagined and lived experiences, offering a compelling framework for understanding literary narratives of e.g. diaspora or exile, not as derivative accounts of migration, but as complex epistemological venues where the real and the imaginary continually inform one another.
Theorising the politics of aesthetics, J. Rancière (2006) critically extends the argument by asserting that the aesthetic is not confined to matters of style or beauty; rather, it is fundamentally political in its capacity to redistribute the sensible4, reshaping what is perceived, felt, and thought to be sayable or knowable in each social order. Fiction thus becomes a space where the unseen and unsaid can emerge, allowing for the articulation of precarious or marginalized experiences that may otherwise elude empirical capture.
Building on these insights, I argue that C. Gallien is right saying that migrant literature: “cannot be studied out of its material context, while at the same time… cannot be reduced to it” (Burge, 2020: 11). By attending to metaphor, voice, and narrative structure, scholars can trace how literature stages encounters with alterity, ambiguity, and resistance – elements often flattened in positivist or purely testimonial accounts – and thereby reveal the political and aesthetic work such texts perform.
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Analysis
To contextualise the analysis, I begin with an introduction to the book: Borderlands/La Fron-tera. Hereafter, the analysis will unfold across three interrelated headings: 1) Border(land) as Metaphor and Materiality, 2) Mestizaje as In-Betweenness and Resistance, and 3) Writing Selves Across Borders, all supported by quotes and insights from the book.
Borderlands/La Frontera
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), explores the Chicana/o and Latina/o experience in the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican borderland. The book disrupts the linearity of conventional discourse by unfolding a polyphonic, multiform voice that weaves together text, image, memory, myth, poetry, and theory. Its structure resists a uniform narrative or a centralized authorial I, creatively shifting perspectives and pronouns to perform the com-plex interlocking oppressions and solidarities of intersectional identities (cf. Poem: that dark shining thing 187-189). This creates a constellation of voices – intimate, collective, ancestral – that move across and blurs the lines between literary genres, fusing autobiography with fiction, poetry with essay, academic reflection with spiritual invocation.
Divided in two interconnected parts: first, a series of seven thematic essays that explore identity, culture, language, and resistance; and second, a collection of poems that not only echoes, but expands and complicates the ideas laid out in the prose. This translates into a dialogue between analytical reflection and poetic expression; a mosaic of texts that “spill over the boundaries” (78), dissolving rigid interpretations and inviting the readers into a space where meaning is constantly negotiated and transformed. What follows is an analysis of the border not merely as a geographical delimiter but as a site of epistemic struggle, embodied resistance, and cultural re-signification; a space where metaphor and materiality coalesce to challenge dominant narratives of nationhood, belonging, and normativity.
Border(land) as Metaphor and Materiality
The first essay, Homeland, establishes the Indigenous peoples historical and spiritual claim to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: “This land was Mexican once, was Indian always, and is. And will be again” (13). By positioning the land as sacred and stolen, Anzaldúa reframes the border as: “una herida abierta5 where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (13). This framing resonates with W. Mignolo’s (2005: 34) theorization of the colonial wound, which he defines as a historical and ongoing consequence of colonialism, manifested through a racializing hegemonic discourse. In this light, Anzaldúa’s herida abierta is not just a personal or cultural metaphor. It is a geopolitical inscription of coloniality on the body and land of those who live in-between and beyond borders.
The border is a place of both convergence and rupture, conflict and creativity: “The borderland”, she writes, “is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary… in a constant state of transition” (1987: 3). In a poetic voice, Anzaldúa captures the phenomenological experience of inhabiting the borderland:
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A soul between two worlds, three, four,
my head buzzes with contradiction.
I am northerned6 by all the voices
speaking to me at once. (88) [my
translation]
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It is this shifting, unstable terrain that grounds the work of Anzaldúa: a space where subjectivities are fractured and reassembled, where languages coexist in tension, and where identity becomes a practice of navigating contradiction and ambivalence.
“the prohibited and forbitten… in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (14). In accordance with Z. Bauman (1995: 12), Anzaldúa defines the border dwellers in contrasts to the normative authority, serving as its necessary mirror and Other. The “normal” is not a neutral category, but rather a socially constructed positionality aligned with whiteness, heteronormativity and bodily ableness. This positionality is upheld through systems of power that depend on exclusion and control of the Other (cf. Poem: That Dark Shinning Thing, 187-189).
“White, Mexican, Indian” (32). She challenges the heteropatriarchal order that governs each culture, exposing how they all silence, punish, and exile those who refuse to conform: “Nothing in my culture approved of me. Había agarrado malos pasos. Something was ‘wrong’ with me. Estaba más allá de la tradición” (26)7. This critique is further contextualised and developed in her later reflections (89, 94) and in the poem Yo no fui, fue Teté (151).
This social disciplining operates through what R. Segato terms the pedagogies of cruelty (2018: 11): systems of violence that teach through fear, humiliation and internalised oppression how to enforce gender norms and uphold male dominance. In extension, Nevins (2001: 143) argues that: the discourse of border control functions by pitting the disadvantaged against those in even worse conditions, deflecting attention from the powerful agents and institutions responsible. As a coloured, lesbian, migrant woman, Anzaldúa offers a multifaceted critique of the borderlands, not only as a space of asymmetrical power relations but as a lived experience where intersecting identities – gender, sexuality and race – shape unique forms of oppression and resistance (cf. Valentine, 2007).
Within this schema, “normality” functions as a racial- and sexualised regulatory ideal that dis-ciplines bodies and delimits both the horizons of intelligibility and the possibilities of move-ment (cf. Graw and Samuli, 2012: 14-15). This produces a paradox that, as S. Turner observes in the context of the camp, renders certain bodies “simultaneously depoliticised and hyper-politicised” (2015: 145). Much like the principle of superposition in quantum computing – where a qubit exists in multiple states simultaneously until observed – marginalized bodies in the borderlands are often invisible in terms of rights, representation and institutional recognition, and yet hypervisible as targets of surveillance, regulation and control. Anzaldúa capture this in her writing: “I am visible – see this Indian face – yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot” (97).
To elaborate the argument, S. Ahmed argues that whiteness operates not simply as a racial identity but: “[as] an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space, and what they ‘can do’” (2007, 149). Whiteness, as an extension of the colonial legacy, becomes an invisible infrastructure that governs who be-longs, who moves freely, and who is rendered excessive or out of place (cf. M. Douglas, 1966). That said, Anzaldúa does not narrate these crossings from the perspective of the centre looking outward; rather, she writes from the border, from within and beyond the margin. In this sense, the margin is not per se a space of lack or exile. It is a generative and constitutive site where histories of pre-Colombian warfare and pilgrimage (40-43) intersects with colonisation and ill use by five countries (101), new migrations (20-22; 128-130), the appropriation of by dispossession (16-17; 142-143), and ongoing struggles for self-determination (98).
Returning to the metaphor – border as wound –, Anzaldúa enacts what A. Mountz advocates: “to locate the struggle of power and productions of difference at the scale of the body in order to address a broader debate about the power of the nation-state” (2004: 323). By foreground-ing the embodied experiences of the border dwellers, Anzaldúa offers an affective lens through which to understand differential experiences that are often obscured at other scales (Ibid: 341). Herewith, literary analysis may be employed to reveal what is otherwise hidden in discourse, as literature fundamentally engages with subjective experiences and expressions (Burge, 2020). In this context, the metaphor functions not as a mere abstraction but a technology of survival: “In the reconstructing the traumas behind the images, I make ‘sense’ of them, and once they have ‘meaning’ they are changed, transformed. It is then that writing heals me” (81). Body and word co-constitute one another: the metaphor emerges from lived experiences and returns to the body to make sense of it.
This perspective engages critically with F. Fanon’s framing of the colonial wound as a site of imposed objectification: “For the native”, he writes, “objectivity is always against him” (in Malkki, 1996: 384). The colonial subject is denied the legitimacy of voice or narrative; only physical suffering is granted the status of “truth”. This reflects the dehumanizing logic of colonialism, where “objectivity” is instrumentalised to render the native knowable only through tangible suffering; suffering that is extractable and commodifiable under necropolitical regimes (cf. Mbembe, 2003; Ahmad, 2008).
The repetition of the wound becomes uncanny (cf. Bandak, 2018), reflecting a temporal suspension in which the past persists and future precarity looms. In line with Derrida’s hauntology (in Bandak, 2018: 202), Anzaldúa’s narrative inhabits a space of spectral return, where memory and identity are haunted by histories of colonization, migration, and cultural genocide, and where the future is shadowed by the repetition of structural violences.
Borderlands/La Frontera reframes the wound not as static trauma but as a transformative site. The wound be-comes a generative locus through which identity is fractured, renegotiated, and reassembled in new, nonbinary forms resonating with A. Young’s insight that “recurrent trauma produces transformation rather than summation” (in Bandak, 2018: 199).
Against this backdrop, Anzaldúa reclaims authority over the wound, refusing to let grief serve as a static symbol of victimhood; passive and decontextualized. Instead, she reconceives it as a site of epistemological agency and introspection. The wound in her work becomes recursive and affectively charged; not simply endured as in Feldman’s (2015) analysis of humanitarian suffering, but actively worked through (cf. Poem: Sus Plumas el Viento, 121-124). Herewith, she rejects the Anglo-American epistemologies that seek to fix the subject in pain and silence, advancing instead a methodology of healing that is simultaneously intellectual, spiritual, and political.
To elaborate, Anzaldúa evokes pre-Columbian symbols and cosmology to challenge the Cartesian split between mind and body, invoking the “animal soul” (35): a state of being rooted in intuition, body, and ancestral memory. This deeper consciousness underpins la facultad: “An instant ‘sensing’” (48) that bypasses conscious thought and allows one to identify truth in the unseen or the unspeakable. This may be interpreted as “a survival tactic that people caught between the worlds, unknowingly cultivate” (48), but it also signals “a shift in perception” that opens the “soul (Self)” (49) to new ways of knowing.
Coatlicue, the Aztec earth goddess who embodies both creation and destruction, this state of being represents a liminal space that disrupts binary thinking and creates the conditions for a new consciousness to emerge: the mestiza consciousness. As a shift in perception, it resonates with Rancière’s concept of dissensus (2010), understood as a rupture in the distribution of the sensible that unsettles dominant configurations of the (in)visible and the (un)say-able. Often triggered by trauma, shame and cultural alienation, entering the Coatlicue State forces people to confront suppressed parts of themselves, including internalised oppression (48). Writing and speaking metaphors, Anzaldúa uses la facultad to enter the Coatlicue State, where knowing is felt before it is named (48). By situating the border in the wounded body through metaphor, the text offers an epistemology of the border that collapses distinctions between dis-course and materiality. Herewith, Anzaldúa does not transcend the historical wound but inhab-its it, pragmatically engaging the epistemic violence Fanon diagnoses, yet insisting that within the wound, new meaning, new bodies, and new texts can be written into being.
To expand the argument, this collapse also challenges nationalist frameworks that seek to impose fixed boundaries on human experience. An anti-nationalist stance exemplified in the poem: La Curandera (193-197), which confronts the violent imposition of state borders through the refusal to recognize these as a meaningful divider in death:
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The Border Patrol came
found el Sobrino dead.
We’ll take the body back to the other side,
they said.
No, said Dávila, I’ll bury him here. Under
the ground it doesn’t matter
which side of the border you’re in (193)
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Succinctly, the poem enacts a spiritual becoming inseparable from an ancestral claim to land that predates nationalist territorial divisions. By burying the dead here, Dávila asserts a pro-found connection to the land that rejects the legitimacy of Anglo-American authority. This gesture epitomises a decolonial perspective rooted in place, memory, and enduring Indigenous presences, disrupting the imperial logic of possession and exclusion. In this, the poem echoes Anzaldúa’s vision and aligns well with Mignolo’s concept of border epistemology (2005: 41): a perspective from which to analyse the colonial difference and challenge the universalising claims of Western knowledge systems. Specifically, border epistemology confronts what Mignolo identifies as theo-politics and ego-politics of knowledge, which respectively privilege the Christian and Cartesian modes of thinking. Against these paradigms, Anzaldúa affirms a deeper ancestral and ecological unity:
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Suspended in fluid sky
I, eagle fetus, live serpent
feathers growing out of my skin
the buffeting wind
the rock walls rearing up
the earth (149)
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Mestizaje as In-Betweenness and resistance
To appreciate the progressiveness in Anzaldúa’ new mestizaje, I will begin this section contextualizing the concepts: mestiza/o, mestizaje and chicana/o. Occupying a complex and contested space in the intersection between race, culture and identity, the term mestizo traditionally refers to individuals of mixed Indigenous and European descent. Dating back to the 16th century, the term mestizo was part of a broader system of racial classification designed to reinforce social hierarchies and maintain colonial control (Katzew, 2004).
The verb mestizaje – literally meaning “mixing” – has been central to Latin American national imaginaries, particularly in Mexico, where it was institutionalized as a unifying ideology post-Revolution in early 20th century. Advocates like J. Vasconcelos, author of La Raza Cósmica (1925), envisioned the creation of a fifth race through the mixing of all ethnic groups, arguing that racial homogenization would dismantle existing hierarchies and reduce conflict and dis-crimination by truly unifying the Mexican populace. This biologically deterministic framing has since been challenged and re-interpreted as a cultural and political identity (Doremus, 2001); nevertheless, critics such as P. Wade (2005) argue that state sanctioned programs negate Indigenous, African and other minority identities in the name of a hegemonic national identity. Turning to Anzaldúa, Chicana/o identity emerges as both a response to and a reworking of mestizaje. Chicana/o thought reclaims the mestiza/o condition not as a diluted identity, but as a space of resistance, ambiguity, and potential transformation: “The new mestiza copes by de-veloping a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures” (90).
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The new mestiza becomes a subject who negotiates multiple cultural, linguistic, and epistemic worlds, embodying what Anzaldúa calls a mestiza consciousness. This new consciousness neither seeks assimilation under a Social Darwinist paradigm of white supremacy nor accepts the homogenising narratives propagated by nationalist ideologies to resolve contradictions. In-stead, the new consciousness lives within the contradictions transforming fragmentation into a source of power and defiance: “Being Mexican is a state of soul – not one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects border” (73).
Defining mestizaje as both a lived experience and a decolonial strategy, grounded in the tensions and generative possibilities of liminal existence, Anzaldúa embraces the open-ended process of identity formation. This vision epitomises Mignolo’s idea of complementary dualism (2005: 23), which rejects Hegelian dialectical oppositions in favour of relational, co-constitutive ways of knowing and being. By recognising protean identities, this framework contests the enduring colonial matrix of power; a structure that, as Mignolo observes, no longer depends on traditional conquest but instead operates through biopolitical governance, debt economies and global surveillance regimes (2005: 33).
In this context, Anzaldúa’s mestizo and borderland thinking aligns closely with the diasporic frameworks conceptualised by J. Clifford (1994) and S. Hall (2003), who respectively speak of diasporas as identification rather than identity, and as a narrative strategy that employs storytelling practices to articulate selfhood along routes of movement and histories of rupture. Yet, as R. Jenkins reminds us, such subjective constructions of identity must also contend with the social dimension: self-identification alone is never sufficient to constitute a viable identity; rather, identities are always formed through a dialectic between self-perception and external recognition (in Peteet, 2005: 150).
Building on this insight, J. Peteet (2005) explores this dynamic in her analysis of Palestinian national identity, where systemic violence arguably functions as a rite of passage into belonging, revealing how recognition is often forged through struggle and exclusion. Though the geopolitical contexts differ, a similar dynamic seems to operate at the U.S.–Mexico border, where the chicana/o identity is shaped not only through cultural narratives, but also through the violent regime that polices the borderland: (cf. Poems: In the fields, la migra, 13; To live in the Borderlands means you, 213-214).
In this context, the notion of mestizaje can be understood through the Foucauldian theory of subjectification, where identity is not only self-fashioned but also produced through power re-lations that operate via disciplinary and biopolitical regimes (in Ong, 1996: 737). Through a dual process of being made and becoming a subject, Anzaldúa’s new mestiza reveals how borderland identities escape fixed categorisation, which will be discussed further below.
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Writing Selves Across Borders
Across the pages, Anzaldúa explores language and writing as discursive instruments for the shaping and expressing of the new mestiza consciousness. Renouncing colonial “linguistic terrorism” (69), the texts affirm the political and personal significance of linguistic hybridity and code-switching. Language in the Borderlands is not only a means of expression but a space of belonging: “language is a homeland closer than the Southwest” (66). Insisting on the deep entanglement of voice and selfhood, Anzaldúa continues: “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language” (70).
If language roots the self in place, writing sets it in motion. Through genre-crossing and code-switching, the act of writing is an exercise in the imagination, an embodied performance, in which the personal becomes political, and the political, world-making: “it feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart – a Nahuatl concept. My soul makes itself through the creative act. It is constantly remaking and giving birth to itself through my body… it is always a path/state to something else” (85).
Elsewhere, Anzaldúa invokes writing as a shamanistic act, a ritual of metamorphosis that alters “the storyteller and the listener into something or someone else” (78). This enactment of selves through a reciprocal process of creative writing and reading resonates with Rancière’s concept of the emancipated spectator (2009)8, but to appreciate the significance of this imaginative process, P. Riceur’s (1994) reflections on the phenomenology of action seem particularly useful. Riceur suggests that the imagination serves as “a mediating space of a common ‘fantasy’” where one rehearses symbolic forms of agency and tests the contours of the “I can” (ibid: 126-127). Since symbolic forms are socially and culturally constituted, imagination inherently pos-sesses an intersubjective dimension of agency; herewith, the I can is not a fixed capacity but a shared horizon of potentiality. Succinctly, Riceur’s reflections anticipate the intersubjective dynamics in Anzaldúa’s work, suggesting that subjectification through writing is not a solitary act but an imaginative negotiation performed within relational, social worlds9. This is well captured in the poem by León-Portilla, cited in Anzaldúa:
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Those who are looking (reading),
Those who tell (or refer to what they read).
Those who noisily turn the pages of the
codices.
Those who hold in their power
the black and red ink (wisdom)
and the painted (images),
they lead us, they guide us,
They show us the way. (83) [my translation]
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This imaginative terrain becomes the very site where Anzaldúa – as a queer Chicana writer – contests imposed silences and speaks from the wound, while also inspiring others (cf. Lugones, 1992). It is not merely that writing gives voice to identity; it gives form and body to the struggle of becoming: “I write in red. Ink… Daily, I battle the silence and the red. Daily, I take my throat in my hands and squeeze until the cries pour out, my larynx and soul sore from the constant struggle” (83).
This process is visceral, rooted in the body and in the Earth. As Anzaldúa writes: “This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for the images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body – flesh and bone – and from the Earth’s body – stone, sky, liquid, soil” (86–87). In this vision, writing becomes a potential path to healing and revelation, a sacred labour of becoming that bridges the inner and outer worlds.
Conclusion
As a final comment, G. Spivak’s (1985) question – Can the Subaltern Speak? – reminds us that the power to narrate one’s own reality is inherently political. Anzaldúa takes up this challenge not by speaking for the subaltern, but by enacting a new mestiza consciousness through hybrid literary form. Through her integration of poetry, autobiography, and theory, she refuses to be ventriloquized by dominant, empiricist epistemologies that reduce migrant lives to data and borders to lines on a map. Instead, she cultivates a polyvocal, fragmented narrative that opens space for insurgent enunciation, where language, body, and land co-produce new, nonbinary modes of being and belonging in the borderland
Rather than claiming representative authority or imposing a totalizing mestiza identity, Anzaldúa embraces metonymy (cf. Souza, 2019: 102), allowing her writing to stand with rather than in place of others. By foregrounding the affective, linguistic, and embodied dimensions of border subjectivity, I argue that Anzaldúa enacts a contingent mestizaje that amplifies the voices of border dwellers: the prohibited and the forbidden. This aligns with Souza’s (2019: 102) reading of Spivak, which posits that a subaltern choir must operate as a heterogeneous collective to genuinely represent the Other, one that resists essentialist identities and instead actively forms through ongoing, performative engagement.
As the analysis shows, Anzaldúa collapses binary categories of oppressor/oppressed and subject/object. Through her creative shifts in pronounce, she is simultaneously the beast and the one hunted by it: “I remember hating him/me/they who pushed me” (188).
Borderlands/La Frontera is thus more than text; it is epistemological praxis: a situated, subaltern epistemology that enacts the cognitive and affective complexity of migration, queerness, and border subjectivity. Her metaphors – like the wound – are not symbolic despite materiality, but rather because of it: they emerge from, and return to, embodied and spatial conditions.
This is why phenomenological experiences are necessary to challenge the hegemonic discourse of realist reductionism, in which border subjectivity becomes knowable only by cutting through the stories to extract the facts. Such reductionism enacts an active process of dehistoricization; one that silences lived experiences and serves as a project of depoliticization. Against this, Anzaldúa insists that imagination, affect, and storytelling are not deviations from truth but integral to how subjects live and know in the borderlands. Through her work, she challenges us to recognize that the imaginary and the real are not opposites but, as Deleuze wrote: two faces that ceaselessly interchange with one another, a mobile mirror through which new forms of political and poetic knowledge emerge..
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Endnotes
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1 L. Richter (2016) critiques the concept of liminality and proposes limbo as an alternative term to highlight the fixity and dead-endedness experienced by migrants in prolonged states of suspension. While liminality traditionally refers to a temporal, ritualistic rite of passage, I use liminal space to emphasize a physical and/or metaphorical zone characterized by ongoing spatial and existential in-betweenness. Unlike limbo, which stresses stasis and impasse, liminal space as I use it foregrounds spatiality, coexistence, and continuous instability as conditions of transformation.
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2 Chicana/o, identifier for people of Mexican descent born in the United States. The term came into popular use by Mexican Americans as a symbol of pride during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2025). Anzaldúa links its emergence to political and literary milestones, noting: “Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965 when Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers united and ‘I am Joaquín’ was published” (74), highlighting literature’s formative role in collective identity.
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3 Refers to the tendency in social science research to treat the nation-state as the natural unit of analysis, thereby overlooking transnational processes and global interconnections (Castles, 2010; Levitt et al. 2004).
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4 The theory of Jacques Rancière is based on a concept :“le partage du sensible” [the distribution or partition of the sensible], which he de-fines in The Politics of Aesthetics (2006: 12) “I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it”. This concept refers to the implicit rules that determine what is visible, sayable, and thinkable in a given social order, thus shaping both aesthetic experience and political possibility.
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5 An open wound
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6 Northerned is a literal translation from the Spanish norteada, which carries a double meaning: it can denote being geographically directed toward the North, but also disoriented or confused (RAE). In Anzaldúa’s context, it signifies both the pull of the U.S. as a hegemonic center and the psychic dislocation experienced by border dwellers caught between conflicting cultural, linguistic, and ideological forces.
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7 I had taken the wrong path & I was outside of tradition
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8 The Emancipated Spectator explores how spectatorship can shift from passive reception to active engagement, enabling intellectual and political emancipation through critical interpretation. In this way, spectatorship becomes a transformative process for both the observer and the observed.
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9 M. Jackson’s (2013) presents a similar account of speech and action among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, where identity is forged intersubjectively, not in solitude but through encounter.
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Ørne Trygve Voetmann/span> nació en Dinamarca en 1991. Con dos títulos universitarios de Grado –uno en Relaciones Internacionales y Geografía Humana, de la Universidad de Roskilde (2019); y otro en Lengua y Cultura del Mundo Hispanohablante, de la Universidad de Copenhague (2024)– Voetmann actualmente acaba de defender su tesis de Máster, la cual tiene como base un estudio de campo sobre los migrantes venezolanos en Colombia.
