[a] pages 16-35, the preface to the first edition and Chapter 1: “The Homeland, Aztlán, El otro México.
[b] Anzaldúa describes the border between the U.S. and Mexico. This “unnatural boundary” is a place of “transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (25). Anzaldúa historicizes this border, by describing the migration of the first inhabitants into what is now the Southwestern U.S.A., inhabiting Texas as early as 35000 B.C.E. (26). The Spanish invaded Mexico in the 1500s, and eventually, mixing with the Indians, moved into Texas and the rest of the Southwest as well (27). Anglos from the U.S.A. then illegally moved into Texas in the 1800s, driving tejanos from the land. Anzaldúa problematizes the glorification of Alamo: “It became (and still is) a symbol that legitimized the imperialist takeover” (28).
Texas was set up as a republic, and the tejanos “overnight, became the foreigners” (28). The United States pushed the boundary of Texas further south in 1848 with the Treat of Guadalupe-Hidalog, making many Mexican citizens suddenly U.S. citizens (if that). Anzaldúa describes the treatment of Mexicans in the new Texas: “Con el destierro y el exilio fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados—we were jerked out by the roots, truncates, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from out identity and our history” (29-30). In 1915, Mexican-Americans began to resist the colonization, but the response from Anglos and the Texas Rangers was lynching, the use of the U.S. military, and removal of Mexican-Americans from their land. Mexican-American land-owners were forced into sharecropping and to work for U.S. corporations (31).
Anzaldúa flashes forward to the present situation at the border, where Mexicans are trying to migrate across el rÃÂo Grande because “the choice is to stay in Mexico and starve or move north and live” (32). The work situation in Mexico is atrocious because of Mexico’s economic dependence on the U.S. There is high unemployment and “One-fourth of all Mexicans work at maquiladoras; most are young women” (32). Mexican immigrants, mostly “illegal,” “find a welcome hand holding out only suffering, pain, and ignoble death” (34). Wages are not fair as the workers are undocumented, and coyotes often sell mexÃÂcanas into prostitution or into maid-hood to do housework (34).
Anzaldúa represents the borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico in very violent words: “Reagon calls [the border] a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has created a shock culturle, a border culture, a third country, a closed country” (33). The home of the mexÃÂcana immigrant is “this thin edge of / barbwire” (35). The violence of this border is not just interpersonal, but internal: “1,950 mile-long open wound / dividing a pueblo, a culture, / running down the length of my body, / staking fence rods in my flesh, / splits me splits me / me raja me raja” (24).
[c] As I read this part of the book, I am filled with anger—anger at what my country has done to mexÃÂcanos, angry as what white supremacy has caused in this country’s history, angry at the lies that are told in our history books, that glorify the Alamo and hide the experiences of thousands or millions of tejanos and mexÃÂcanos in the Southwest, angry at norteamericanos who wnat people to “speak like us” because they’re in America now. If Mexico invaded and conquered the United States, would these same norteamericanos want to stop speaking English and start speaking Spanish? No. In fact, they would fight back, like tejanos tried in the early 1900s—the tejanos who were met with murder, lynching, displacement, and military attacks.
I am not only angry as I read this. I am sad. I am hurt to think of a woman who is desperately trying to find a better life being sold into prostitution in Chicago after borrowing money to pay thousands to be smuggled in. I am moved by Anzaldúa’s words that conflate the fence that creates a wound in the land, between two countries, with the wound that is “running down the length of my body, / staking fence rods in my flesh, / splits me” (24). Someone who is raised on the border feels this pain in a more obvious way than others, feels the wound inside them that is created by this awful situation. But I think we all must feel this pain inside us, a gut-wrenching wound caused by this hatred for the other, this separation from our siblings.
I cannot stand the poem I read by William H. Wharton that reads, “The Anglo-American race are destined / to be forever the proprietors / of this land of promise and fulfillment” (29). The poem is full of jingoism, disgust for the “savage” tejanos and a white supremacy view that somehow Anglos are more enlightened and civilized. I am disgusted by this hate in this poem. I am disgusted because I hear it today in the voice of George W. Bush, of so many Americans. Isn’t it so great that we brought jobs to Mexico? Isn’t it great that we brought democracy to Iraq? This jingoism, imperialism is disgusting. I am tired of the “America as savior” myth. “The wilderness of Texas” was not “redeemed / by the Anglo-American blood & enterprise” (29), but was instead stained by this blood of tejanos, spilled by the weapons of Anglo hate. I’m pissed.
[d] With many things that I read, I am left with the question of “What can I do?” I can educate people on a person-to-person situation as to what is going on here, but I want to enact some further change, something I can see. I want to see the education system changed to tell the truth, but when textbook companies create history textbooks to sell to the audience of the white Texan educational system (meaning the white men in charge), how can textbooks change?
[e] Obviously this chapter reveals institutional power and the ability to create hegemony with that power. Norteamericanos do not know the truth about what happened in Texas and Mexico in regards to the Anglo invasion because Anglos have power in education, in the publishing industry, and in our government. This chapter serves to make it obvious just how much white supremacy reigns in this country. I see horizontal oppression when Anzaldúa describes mexÃÂcana immigrants workering as housemaids for Latina households for impoverishing wages. The substantial cruelty of this situation is atrocious: it is institutionalized, largely on the margins of perception (to white people), and causes psychological harm and physical harm to the victims.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999.
