anzaldua

Most comments about Anzaldua start by saying "she is a Chicana lesbian feminist" as if that is the main point of her critical perspective. I do not mean to deny her positioning as significant but I am suspicions very soon about the labeling as "radical" and the consecutive reclusion of her argument to some radical place.
In any case she does speak about and from a margin and a border. She speaks as a Chicana form Aztlan, this is not born in Mexico and emigrated to the us, but indigenous, then colonized by Spanish and then colonized by the us. She speaks about the emergence of a new mestiza one that is not only "born" form the violent sexual encounter of colonizers/colonized but that occupies a space in between: her territory has been cut in tow and now is a constantly crossing borders in between the us and the Mexico. None of this places is more her own than any other in both she is marginal and an other in both it is the space of the border with the constant flow of people, with the constant encounters, a space of interaction more than division in which she localizes herself. She recognizes the migration oto the US as part of a tradition: "we have a tradition of walks. Today we are witnessing la migraci'on de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odessey to the historical/mythological Aztl'an. This time the traffic is form south to north" (11) This is why she recognizes home as a fractured location: "This is my home. This thin edge of barbwire" (3) she claims is where "los atravesados live: the squint-eyeed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome .... those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the "normal". (3) She produces a narrative of origin: of the mestizo, of herself and of the life in the border: " la migra" deporting us citizens who are Chicanos, the "mythical" foundation of Mexico city as a subjection of the feminine to the patriarchal order. The Mexicans are born as a hybrid mixed race "one that had never existed before" (5) and form this and further mixtures with indigenous and the the indigenous of the US Sothwest that Chicanos come form. It is her position as women what defines her and not any big revolutionary possess that in the name of "the people" have reproduced patriarchal structures and exploitation of women, what defines her critical standpoint. It is also the in-betweenness of language and the simultaneous use of both English and Spanish that make her capable of communication. Finally she writes in a self reflective style, not in terms of a theoretical critique, nor as fiction and not just as autobiography, she collapses some of this, and somehow opens up a particular space of/for writing. I still refuse the idea of hybridity, not so much in her work but for the implications it has latter used as a category. As it has been said so much (hall?) hybridity implies too much the mixture of different and separated entities that all of a sudden combine. In this I still love Mary Douglas and her constant remainder of what is the logic that separates first and then understand what happens when separate things come together. It is in blurring the boundaries tha the political possibility emerges, the posssibility of reveling against what has made "us belive that the ndian woman in us is a betrayer. We indiana y mestizas, police the indian in us, brutalize and condemn her. Male culture has done a good job in us."
To this Melissa Wright would propose that in the practice mestizas are not only finding this as a path for struggle but it is in the resignification process that some room of manuver can be gained too. In this the play of theri boriding crossing experience and in their capacity to deal with the two georgraphies and unfold both identities gives sepcific situation that wright sees some of the mestizas finding thier way [this is a bit " individual agency" oriented]. The mestizas working in the maquiladoras Wright analyzes are not claerly heroic, as in cases it implies individual paths to positions of power in the factory and reproducing the relations in which other mestizas are underpaid. She points that "Cruicial to this endavour is a critical enquiry into teh relationship between the border as a metaphor for myriad social divisions and the border as a material space that is policed, enforced and physically crossed" (Wright 116).


Her position is