When groundbreaking lesbian political writer Gloria Anzaldúa grew up as a seventh-generation Tejana and Chicana in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley during the early 1940s, her grandparents had lost much of the land they had owned through “carelessness … white peoples’ greed, and my grandmother not knowing English,” she said.
Anzaldúa — who had Spanish, German, Black, and indigenous Native American ancestry — felt the tension of her intersectional identity growing up. Her family didn’t consider themselves Mexican; they openly valued lighter-skinned people over dark-skinned ones, and she worried, later on, that her writings about her indigenous ethnicity could unwittingly encourage others to misappropriate Native American culture and spiritual symbols, just as white colonialists had also stolen many tribal lands and customs.
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Despite the pervasive poverty, racism, and sexism of her youth, she graduated as valedictorian of Edinburg High School and rose from her work as a preschool and special education teacher to earn her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Austin, Texas, before eventually moving to California in 1977 at the age of 35. There, she earned money through writing and teaching about feminism, Chicano studies, and creative writing.
Having grown up through the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, the Chicano Movement (which centered on workers’ rights and cultural education) during the ’60s and ’70s, as well as the sexual liberation movement of the early ’70s, Anzaldúa work viewed existence through an intersectional lens that examined how racism, classism, heteronormativity, colonialism, and male dominance express themselves in society — and in one’s own body — while continuing to perpetuate among marginalized groups.
“What am I? A third-world lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic leanings. They would chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a label. You say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva,” she wrote in her influential 1981 essay “La Prieta,” “a many-armed and -legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man’s world, the women’s, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web. Who, me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.”
Growing up near the Mexico-Texas border, in a world where she was constantly asked to declare her loyalties to specific identities and communities, she instead encouraged herself and other marginalized writers to go deeper into their multiple and conflicting selves, to transcend social conventions through writing and self-expression, and, in the process, to actively recreate one’s self and society.
This may sound charming, but it can also be alarming. She claimed that it was “easy” to change one’s “sexual preference,” and she admitted to having sexual fantasies about “father-daughter, sister-brother, woman-dog … woman-panther” and even discussed feeling an “intense sexuality” towards trees. Though she’s remembered as a lesbian, she had relationships with both men and women, and lived more as a pansexual queer.
Some of these admissions may have been deliberately provocative: the countercultural proclamations of a revolutionary fiction writer and memoirist, or a way to process the incestual rape and border life she experienced in her youth. After all, she was part of a Chicana literary movement looking to elevate marginalized women’s voices while cutting off the shameful tethers of centuries-old colonialist exploitation and oppression.
Yet she was also truthfully admitting just how messy real lives, personal identities, and sexual desires can be: they can shift, attach onto unlikely objects, and don’t always care about social propriety. Even if she never explored her unorthodox sexual desires in the physical world, to deny their existence would have been a lie.
“While I advocate putting Chicana, tejana, working-class, dyke-feminist poet, writer theorist in front of my name, I do so for reasons different than those of the dominant culture… so that the Chicana and lesbian and all the other persons in me don’t get erased, omitted, or killed,” she one wrote.
Her most famous autobiographical work, the 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, was written in two English dialects and six Spanish ones, making it deliberately difficult for non-bilinguals to read. She wanted to demonstrate the frustrations of not being able to easily access a culture while also recreating the dialects of everyday people living by the US-Mexico border; a place where distinct cultures, races, languages, and sexualities regularly collide.
Her book incorporated poetry, history, and critical essay to discuss the complex spiritual and physical realities of living on the U.S.–Mexico border. It ultimately champions a new “mestiza consciousness,” a flexible, inclusive identity that rises above rigid cultural, racial, and gender binaries. Indeed, her own work embodied this consciousness, making it feel as thrilling and fresh today as when it was first published.
During her lifetime, she wrote poetry, essays, short stories, published autobiographical narratives, edited collections of writing from women of color, and even released some children’s books. Her work won numerous awards, including the Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award, the Lesbians Rights Award, Sappho Award of Distinction, and the National Endowment for the Arts’ Fiction Award.
When she died from diabetes complications in 2004 at the age of 61, she was almost done writing Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, a book she planned to submit as her PhD dissertation. Though she never finished her PhD, the book was eventually published 11 years after her death.
Nonetheless, her work has been included in over 100 anthologies to date, and her essays now form a cornerstone of postcolonial queer and feminist theory, an academic discipline that seeks to liberate society by honestly discussing personal and cultural differences rather than acting as if they shouldn’t exist.
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