LILIANA VARGAS - MONROY Knowledge from the borderlands

Feminism & Psychology

22(2) 261270

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DOI: 10.1177/0959353511415969

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Special Feature Contribution

IV. Knowledge from theborderlands: Revisitingthe paradigmatic mestizaof Gloria Anzaldua

Liliana Vargas-MonroyPontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota-Colombia

Keywords

Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua, Latin America, Postcolonial theory, Women-of-color

feminism

The publication in 1987 of Borderlands/La Frontera strengthened the theoreticalwork of a group of women, feminists and Latin Americans who had been born orwere living in the United States and who expressed in their work This Bridge CalledMy Back (Anzaldua and Moraga, 1981), Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (Gomez et al.,1983) and Loving the War Years (Moraga, 1983), among others the experience ofinhabiting a territory between two worlds. The paradigmatic work of GloriaAnzaldua marked a point of inection for their discussions, consolidating perhapsthe eld of what has been referred to as a women-of-color feminism, a feminism in thediaspora, clearly postcolonial and on the border. This article considers two issues inrelation to the work of Anzaldua. The rst refers to the peculiarities and dierencesthat distinguish her work in relation to certain proposals of white feminism (inparticular, I will draw upon the work of Donna Haraway). The second is relatedto the epistemological consequences of this dierentiation.

Two mestiza sisters

I will begin my discussion considering some elements of Donna Haraways work,particularly regarding the rst chapter of her (1997) bookModest Witness@SecondMillenium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. In thischapter, Haraway uses the work of Anzaldua to construct the image of theMestiza Cosmica. In her discussion, she describes a Lynn Randolph painting

Corresponding author:

Liliana Vargas-Monroy, Facultad de Psicologa-Universidad Javeriana. Carrera 5a no 39-00. Bogota-Colombia,

S.A., Bogota, Colombia

Email: [email protected]

which clearly resembles the physical features of Anzaldua. I will begin with afragment of the text which condenses the dierences I would like to draw attentionto, italicizing below what will serve as the central point of my reection:

A mestiza stands with one foot in Texas and one foot in Mexico. She is taming a

diamond-back rattlesnake with one hand and manipulating the Hubble telescope with

another . . .. La Mestiza Cosmica is the kind of modest witness coming into existence

at the end of the Second Christian Millennium, when what can count as freedom,

justice, knowledge, and skill are again very much at stake in the mutated experimental

way of life . . .. La Mestiza Cosmica is historically specic, located in a particular time,

place, and body; she is, therefore, a gure representing the kind of global conscious-

ness a modest witness should cultivate. The rattlesnake and the four hands suggest a

mode of consciousness called the Coatlicue state, associated with an Aztec goddess, as

theorized by Gloria Anzaldua. Not unlike Anzaldua, who maintains a necessarily eclec-

tic altar on her computer, Randolphs mestiza joins the snake and the Hubble telescope to

demonstrate the kind of vision needed in the New World Order. (Haraway, 1997: 20)

Using the dierence proposed between the Mestiza Cosmica and Anzalduasmestiza, I suggest that this contrast evokes two dierent narratives: one, the nar-rative that Haraway builds from her idea of a cyborg conscience, and the other thenarrative that Anzaldua has constructed in Borderlands/La Frontera.

The work of Donna Haraway implies a strong critique of certain forms of sci-entic knowledge. In this text, Haraway (1997) critiques the experimental point ofdeparture that develops a particular form of testimony, dening modesty as one ofits central virtues.1 The virtue of modesty that characterizes the Modest Witness the scientist implies the concealment of its positions, emotions and opinions, witha certain inexpressiveness which renders invisible the subject who is speaking.Haraway proposes, with some humor, that this allows him (sic) to speak as alegitimate ventriloquist of the objective world:

Modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity. This is the virtue

that guarantees that the modest witness is the legitimate and authorized ventriloquist

for the object world, adding nothing from his mere opinions, from his biasing embodi-

ment. And so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts. He

bears witness: he is objective; he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects. His

subjectivity is his objectivity. His narratives have a magical power they lose all

trace of their history as stories, as products of partisan projects, as contestable rep-

resentations, or as constructed documents in their potent capacity to dene the facts.

The narratives become clear mirrors, fully magical mirrors, without once appealing to

the transcendental or the magical. (1997: 24)

For Haraway (1997), the Modest Witness is the basis for the model of westernscience, both European and masculine, which has followed us to the present dayand which has facilitated the notion of objectivity, establishing a strong

262 Feminism & Psychology 22(2)

dierentiation between the object and subject of knowledge. This form of disem-bodied knowledge, through dierent discursive mechanisms, brings about the con-cealment of its positions and interests. Against the Modest Witness, Harawayintroduces a new subject of knowledge which she calls the Mutated ModestWitness who is capable of an embodied form of knowledge.

In this way, Haraway (1997) does not completely abandon the Modest Witness;rather, because of her faith in science (I sign into this religion she says to us in hertext Crittercam: Haraway, 2007: 185), she suggests the Mutated Modest Witnesswith a viewpoint that is situated and has not only the capacity to reect, but also todiract knowledge. Her proposal is a critique of illustrated science, which para-doxically is located within the same tradition, indicating a mutation in its path.This is why Haraway can arm her faith in science; it is also why her mestiza isaccompanied by the Hubble telescope.

The fragment quoted initially seems to indicate that she nds material for thisnew Mutated Modest Witness in the new Mestiza proposed by Anzaldua (2007) inBorderlands/La Frontera. Nevertheless, the fragment also clearly indicates that theline separating Randolphs mestiza and Anzalduas mestiza is not a tenuous one:The Mestiza Cosmica connects the snake and the telescope of Hubble, whileAnzalduas mestiza identies with the snake and with the state of consciencecalled Coatlicue, proposed in the mystical tradition, within the knowledge of theindigenous Mexican cultures (Haraway, 1997: 37). This is why Anzalduas mestizanecessarily supports an eclectic altar, perhaps distinguishing her destiny from thatof the Mestiza Cosmica. The two mestizas are, however, sisters and it could beconcluded that Haraway nds in the one (Anzalduas mestiza) the inspiration forthe other.

Two forms of knowledge

This dierentiation makes it possible to suggest that the two mestizas, althoughsisters, respond to dierent traditions and trajectories of knowledge. Harawaysmestiza continues in the scientic tradition (and it is possible to clearly locate her inthe Critical Studies of Science), whilst Anzalduas mestiza, in spite of giving inspi-ration to some elements of the Mestiza Cosmica, cannot be located within thistradition2 and is better placed in what the post-colonial Latin American theoristshave called border thinking (Mignolo, 2003).

In the introduction of the Spanish edition of his book Local Histories, GlobalDesigns, Mignolo (2003) proposes the denomination of gnosis to capture a widerrange of forms of knowledge which philosophy and epistemology contributed tocasting away (in this he is following the ideas of the African theorist Valentin Y.Mundimbe [1988]). The origin of the word gnosis refers to knowledge in general,without specifying the dierence between doxa (common opinion) and episteme(formalized knowledge). Mignolo proposes a border gnosis or border thinking asa kind of knowledge from a subaltern perspective. This implies a knowledge oth-erwise, a knowledge conceived from the borders of the modern /colonial

Vargas-Monroy 263

world system. Hence border thinking could be a powerful and emergent form ofcomprehension or episteme that absorbs hegemonic forms of knowledge from theperspective of the subaltern (Mignolo, 2003).

As subaltern, queer and someone of the third world in the United States,Anzaldua (2007) recognizes herself as being multiply situated, complex, contradic-tory and many in one. This is why she chooses to narrate her experience fromcategories that are not part of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, where she is con-tradictorily immersed. Thus, she constructs new histories and a new and powerfulnarrative that proposes not only another history, but also another subjectivity, oneunimaginable from the advantageous position of the Cyclops-type self-satised eyeof the dominant subject. (Haraway, 1997: 9).

Anzalduas (2007) theory arises then from her own history and connects with theemergence of new spaces, of new narratives of refuges, which she constructs byweaving her histories with the subaltern knowledge of the indigenous Mexicanpeople. In considering fragments of the texts of Anzaldua, I will present particu-lar points where border feminism involves epistemological ruptures and challengesfor scientic knowledge (including their mutated versions) as well as for psychol-ogy, a clear inheritor of this form of thought. In doing this, I would like to bringout some of the possible queries that could be posed in this sense from the work ofAnzaldua.

Knowledge in the borderlands

But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the

embodiment of the hieros gamos, the coming together of opposite qualities within.

(Anzaldua, 2007: 41)

Anzaldua inhabits multiple identities. Her territory: Borderland (La Frontera) is aphysical, geographical place of uncertainty.3 This place opens the possibility of anew psychological, sexual and spiritual politics (Perez, 2005) that provides thespace for new forms of knowledge. Like a mestiza in multiple senses,4 Anzaldualives in this border ground, a place of mixture that is not only racial:

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of

an unnatural boundary. It is a constant state of transition. The prohibited and for-

bidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint eye, the perverse, the

queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in

short those who cross over, pass over, or go through the connes of the normal.

(Anzaldua, 2007: 25)

Borderlands are a place of instability. In contrast to the canons of westernthought, which look for the certainties of dierentiations and which constructtheir own imagery from identities based on these dierentiations, the borderland


appears as undetermined, a place which is constantly in transition and which pro-duces a feeling of unease. In this way, if illustrated science generates strong andestablished binary logics, subversion arises with the promise of the territories oftransition and borders. Lugones (1994) sees the gure of the mestiza as one ofresistance, capable of inhabiting these borderlands, since she herself isunclassiable.

In dierent texts, Anzaldua (2002, 2007, 2009) suggests a form of knowledgewhich challenges the rational dichotomy of the modern/colonial world system andmakes the way to the borderland possible. Her elaborations, therefore, have adierent point of demarcation working from an undetermined area between fem-inist critique, theory and the narrative. Her writing also departs from many of thetraditional forms of writing in the disciplines of the West. For Anzaldua, writingmust be alive and must produce transformations. When she writes, she goes tonarratives which rearticulate and recreate indigenous traditions, recovering thevoice of another type of knowledge; in her writing the word jumps, hurts andheals; it is, in fact, a spellbinding word.

This knowledge has a dierent voice, an intonation and a melody that speaks,and is impossible to nd in the voice of the Modest Witness; Anzalduas voice isalive and her writing has a force, implying a trip and a transition.5 In this way it isimpossible to separate words such as knowledge, charm and transformation inher work:

I look at my ngers, see plumes growing there. From the ngers my feathers, black

and red ink drips across the page. Escribo con la tinta de mi sangre. I write in red. Ink.

Intimately knowing the smooth touch of article, its speechlessness, before I spill myself

on the insides of trees. (Anzaldua, 2007: 93)

In the following fragment written in Spanish,6 Anzaldua considers writing as amuse. It is a muse that tortures and awakens self-consciousness:

Musa bruja, venga. Cubrese con una sabana y espante mis demonios que a rempu-

jones y a cachetadas me roban la pluma, me rompen el sueno. Musa, misericordia!

Ogame, musa bruja Por que huye uste en mi cara? Su grito me desarrolla de mi

caracola, me sacude el alma. Vieja qutese de aqu con sus manos de navaja. Ya no me

despedaze mi cara. Vaya con sus pinches unas que me desgarran de los ojos hasta los

talones. Vayese a la tiznada. Que no me coman, le digo. Que no me coman sus nueve

dedos canbales.

Hija negra de la noche, carnala Por que me sacas las tripas, por que cardas mis

entranas?

Este hilvanando palabras con tripas me esta matando. Jija de la noche vete a la

chingada! (Anzaldua, 2007: 72)

Vargas-Monroy 265

After considering border identities, border knowledge and forms of writingwhich come from those borders, it is possible to indicate some of the challengesto traditional forms of scientic knowledge that arise from the work of Anzaldua.Firstly, it should be recognized that her work operates from a dierent place fromthat which characterizes scientic reason. This new point of departure makes pos-sible a way of thinking about forms of knowledge that cannot be separated fromthe experience of transition and transformation. This is why it is a matter of think-ing through categories such as mestiza which do not t the logics of dichotomy.

The journey through reading/writing is another key element in the work ofAnzaldua. The experience of her writing and our reading therefore becomes trans-formative, presenting the possibility of re-writing ones own history.

Autohistory-theory: A path from our own subjectivityto the social world

The struggle is inner: Chicano, Indio, American Indian, mojado, Mexicano, immi-

grant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian our psyches

resemble the border towns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has

always been inner and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must

come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing

happens in the real world unless it rst happens in the images in our heads. (Anzaldua,

2007: 109)

The category of autohistory-theory brings together some of the elements of whatmight be thought of as the methodological proposal of Anzaldua (Keating, 2005), aproposal that comes through an exercise with our own subjectivity. Subjectivitythen emerges as a central element, articulating the possibilities of social transfor-mation. It is a matter of invoking ones own history (the struggle is inner) andrecreating larger histories (played out in outer terrains), since only in this way isthere a possibility of social transformation (nothing happens in the world unless itrst happens in the images in our heads). In this way our own psychology anddesires are the source of transformation.

It is perhaps from this point that the multiple interpellations that Anzalduaswork make to psychology become clearer. Her ideas and images speak about asubjective world clearly intersecting with the social. However, as border knowl-edge, we would only nd elements close to her proposals in discussions that are alsoon the borders of the discipline and that constitute a critique of modern thought(e.g. Enriquez, 1992; Owusu-Bempah and Howitt, 2000).

It is therefore possible to say that in at least three ways the work of Anzaldua(2007) demonstrates dierences as regards modern thought (as well as scienticpsychology). The rst one is related to the rebellious opposition to binaries that ismade clear by the idea of borderlands; the second one aims to eliminate the dis-tinction between the knower and the known, positing instead a vision of our own


subjectivity as the center of knowledge; and nally the third one rejects (scien-tic) control, and rather appeals to the experiences of uncertainty, transition andcrisis.

Interpellating Latin American feminism

Within Latin American feminism, Anzalduas proposals have stimulated a Mestizafeminism (Saldivar-Hull, 2000), which allows a movement from identity to post-identity politics, thus challenging essentialist visions of women. In this way, itopens a space for the recognition of minority subjectivities.

The question of autonomy and identity considered by many to be a feature ofLatin-American feminism (Alvarez et al., 2002, Curiel, 2009), is challenged byGloria Anzalduas category La Frontera (Borderland) which opens a space fora non-essentialist epistemology. This is an epistemology of frontier capable ofthinking identity conicts and contradictions in many creative ways:

The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual border-

lands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically

present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of dierent

races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes

touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. (Anzaldua,

2007: 27)

The displacement from an essentialist way of thinking to a non-essentialist per-spective has been signaled as a movement to decolonize feminism (Suarez Navasand Hernandez, 2008). This movement contributes to a more complex feminismand to the constitution of an always mobile feminine subject.

Stories as a way of healing

Finally, I would like to use some examples of how, in Anzalduas work, narrativeinterweaves with theory and experience. In the third part of Borderlands/LaFrontera, Anzaldua (2007) recovers the gure of Coyolxauhqui, the ancientAztec goddess, who was cut into pieces due to the rivalries with her brother. Thebig stone that represents Coyolxauhqui was found accidentally in an excavationnear the Templo Mayor in 1978. In dierent writings, Anzaldua (2007, 2009)invokes the memory of this mutilated body, which she considers a metaphor foreverything that has been broken in the mestiza, an inner state that must be over-come to create self-awareness (Kattau, 2007). Anzaldua proposes that the recon-struction of the dismembered goddess is synonymous with change and the return ofexiled emotions, creating the possibility of healing. In this sense, for Anzaldua, thefact that the stone was found symbolizes a kind of return of all the personal andsocial fragmentations we experience, and indicates a means of transition for ourown healing (Anzaldua, 2009).

Vargas-Monroy 267

Anazaldua invokes Coyolxauhqui as a way of explaining her feelings. In thefollowing excerpt Anzaldua calls to the fragmented goddess during the terroristattack on New York (and the US Pentagon) on September 11, 2001:

The day the towers fell, me sent como [I felt like] Coyolxauhqui, la luna [the moon].

Algo me agarro y me sacudio [Something grabbed me and shook me], frightening la

sombra [soul] out of my body. I fell in pieces into that pitch-black brooding place.

Each violent image of the towers collapsing, transmitted live all over the world then

repeated a thousand times on TV, sucked the breath out of me, each image etched on

my minds eye. Wounded, I fell into shock, cold and clammy. The moment frag-

mented me, dissociating me from myself. Arresting every vital organ in me, it

would not release me. (Anzaldua, 2009: 218)

In a similar vein, Anzaldua appeals to the gure of Coyolxauhqui to speak aboutthe fragmentations that must be healed, and Coatlicue, the mother of Coyolxauhqui,illustrates this healing. Her proposal again appears as a narrative: Coatlicue, theserpent goddess of the darkness and the light, contains all contradictions. Shereigned before the Aztecs came to be a military and warlike bureaucracy, at whichpoint she was forgotten (Anzaldua, 2007). Because of her misfortunes, Coatlicue canstill help us to nd the way, to re-compose what we have lost:

Coatlicue depicts the contradictory. In her gure, all the symbols important to the

religion and philosophy of the Aztecs are integrated. Like Medusa, the Gorgon, she is

a symbol of the fusion of opposites: the eagle and the serpent, heaven and the under-

world, life and death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror . . . when we are not

living up to our potentialities and thereby impeding the evolution of the soul or worse.

Coatlicue the Earth opens and plunges us into her maw, devours us. By keeping the

conscious mind occupied or immobile, the germination work takes place in the deep,

dark earth of the unconscious. (Anzaldua, 2007: 69)

In following Anzaldua in the exercise of constructing new narratives, it is pos-sible to wonder if in these times humankind is inhabiting the black ground in whichCoatlicue, goddess of multiplicity, keeps her detainees immobile until they success-fully integrate, thus bringing opposites closer. As the western mind is busy andimmobilized, perhaps something is germinating in the dark, deep ground of theunconscious (Aigner-Varoz, 2000). Anzaldua speaks to us about a knowledge thatrefuses to disappear. This knowledge is in a battle to the death with other forms ofknowledge that have lost the way to the borderlands.

Notes

1. This concurred with the arguments of Shapin and Schaffer (1985) in their studies onRobert Boyle, a scientist of the 17th century who was considered one of the founding

fathers of experimental science (identified in the work as a modest witness).


2. Discussing this issue, Paula Moya (1997) makes a critique of postmodern feminism. To

Moya, postmodern feminism has generated a way of considering the differences thatparadoxically eliminate such differences. I am following this critique when I insist onthe distinction between the Mestiza Cosmica and Anzalduas mestiza.

3. Recovering a Nahuatl word, Anzaldua calls the borderlands: Nepantla, the spaces inbetween worlds. Her proposal is that transformation occurs in these places which areunstable and unpredictable, producing fear and anxiety.

4. Mestiza is a word that designates a person of mixed race, in Latin America the offspring

of a Spanish American and an American Indian. In Anzalduas work the word could beused as a metaphor of different kinds of mixtures.

5. Keating (2005) proposes that Anzaldua shapes her theory as transformative writing or

Shaman aesthetics; her stories (prose and poetry) have the ability to transform thestoryteller and the listener into someone or something else.

6. Boderlands/La Frontera is written in three languages: Nahualt, Spanish and English. This

is a gesture that contests the dominance of English as the main academic language.

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Liliana Vargas-Monroy is associate professor in Psychology and Cultural Studies atthe Ponticia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota-Colombia.


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LILIANA VARGAS - MONROY Knowledge from the borderlands