SOURCE: Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. “Mestiza Consciousness and Politics: Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera.” In Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature, pp. 59-79. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Saldívar-Hull elucidates Anzaldúa's theory of mestiza consciousness in Borderlands/La Frontera, viewing it as an articulation of “the politics of feminism on the border.”

Who, me confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.

—Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” in This Bridge Called My Back

In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa presents an explicit articulation of the politics of feminism on the border. Soon after the publication of this text, “the border” quickly became a fashionable metaphor used by many feminist Chicana/o studies and cultural studies critics and scholars.¹ Anzaldúa's theoretical statements illustrate the dialectical position in which feminists on the border “find themselves...