To inhabit such a place is to inhabit a state of in-between-ness, a space where the ground is aggressively claimed, but the people who belong to it, and those seeking to cross it, are rejected. This is a place that Chicana scholar and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa describes as “an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries,” a place she refers to using the Nahuatl word for middle space, nepantla. “Living in this liminal zone,” she writes, “means being in a constant state of displacement.”
