Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria E. Anzaldúa

At its deeper stage, la facultad is “anything that breaks into one’s everyday mode of perception, that causes a break in one’s defenses and resistance, anything that takes one from one’s habitual grounding, causes the depth to open up, causes a shift in perception.” It is through this secondary stage that awareness - “the experiencing of the soul” - is reached. At its first stage, la facultad is a “survival tactic” developed by those who have suffered and experienced oppression it is an ability to capture danger, a threat, through the smell of another or through a tingling on the skin.

This faculty, which breaks the habitual modes of seeing reality and the patterns of consciousness, she tells us, does not reside in reason but in the body. In the chapter “Entering Into the Serpent,” Anzaldúa introduces the concept of la facultad, which she defines as an ability, a faculty to capture the depth of the soul, the self. As a writer who inscribes upon her body generations of pain and torture from marginalization, it represents a plunging into the depth of the soul, the place of darkness and fear from which she will discover the way to a new mestiza consciousness. We soon discover that the borderlands people that inhabit Anzaldúa’s work are “the females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign.” As a Chicana, lesbian writer, Anzaldúa’s book represents the uncompromised marking of a space and identity. It’s an act of cultural re-appropriation. Anzaldúa’s borderlands are the regions between Texas and Mexico where she was born and raised, exactly in the geographical space where political legitimacy and illegitimacy is disputed on the basis of language and skin color.

It is an autobiography, an historical and social critique, a manifesto of Chicana identity, a theoretical and practical understanding of borders and their effect on the body and the psyche of those who populate them, and also a storytelling session.

From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.įrom the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below.įrom the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.īorderlands/La Frontera by Chicana writer and poet Gloria Anzaldúa is an indefinable work.

Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria E. Anzaldúa