SOURCE: Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender, Class, Ethnicity, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora, pp. 11-31. New York: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1998.

In the following essay, originally published in a 1994 issue of Cultural Critique, Yarbro-Bejarano discusses Anzaldúa's theory of mestiza or border consciousness in relation to the theory of difference and the mixed critical reaction to Borderlands/La Frontera.

In 1979, Audre Lorde denounced the pernicious practice of the ‘Special Third World Women's Issue’ (100). Ten years later, the title of one of the chapters in Trinh T. Minh-ha's Woman, Native, Other—‘Difference: A Special Third World Women's Issue’—alludes to the lingering practice of acknowledging the subject of race and ethnicity but placing it on the margins conceptually through ‘special issues’ of journals or ‘special panels’ at conferences. In her ‘Feminism and Racism...