Borderlands/La Frontera Quotes

“Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.”
― Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?”
― Ray Gwyn Smith, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.

Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. The Writing is my whole life, it is my obsession. This vampire which is my talent does not suffer other suitors. Daily I court it, offer my neck to its teeth. This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body--flesh and bone--and from the Earth's body--stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices.”
― Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“I will have my serpent’s tongue - my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“This land was Mexican once,
was Indian always
and is.
And will be again.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“It is our custom
to consume
the person we love.
Taboo flesh: swollen
genitalia nipples
the scrotum the vulva
the soles of the feet
the palm of the hand
heart and liver taste best.
Cannibalism is blessed.

I'll wear your jawbone
round my neck
listen to your vertebrae
bone tapping bone in my wrists.
I'll string your fingers round my waist -
what a rigorous embrace.
Over my heart I'll wear
a brooch with a lock of hair.
Nights I'll sleep cradling
your skull sharpening
my teeth on your toothless grin.

Sundays there's Mass and communion
and I'll put your relics to rest.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Nothing happens in the "real" world unless it first happens in the images in our heads”
― Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera : La Nueva Mestiza

“Esos movimientos de rebeldia que tenemos en la sangre nosotros los mexicanos surgen como rios desbocanados en mis venas.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.”
― Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera : La Nueva Mestiza

“Humans fear the supernatural, both the undivine ( the animal impulses such as sexuality, the unconscious, the unknown, the alien) and the divine (the superhuman, the god in us).
Culture and religion seek to protect us from these two forces.
The female, by virtue of creating entities of flash and blood in her stomach (she bleeds every month but does not die) by virtue of being in tune with nature's cycles, is feared. Because, according to Christianity and most other major religions, woman is carnal, animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected. Protected from herself. Woman is the stranger, the other. She is man's recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of anger and fear.”
― Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera : La Nueva Mestiza

“Compañera, cuando amábamos
(for Juanita Ramos and other spik dykes)

¿Volverán, campañera, esas tardes sordas
Cuando nos amábamos tiradas en las sombras bajo otoño?
Mis ojos clavados en tu mirada
Tu mirada que siempre retiraba al mundo
Esas tardes cuando nos acostábamos en las nubes
Mano en mano nos paseábamos por las calles
Entre niños jugando handball
Vendedores y sus sabores de carne chamuzcada.
La gente mirando nuestras manos
Nos pescaban los ojos y se sonreían
cómplices en este asunto del aire suave.
En un café u otro nos sentábamos bien cerquita.
Nos gustaba todo: las bodegas tiznadas
La música de Silvio, el ruido de los trenes
Y habichuelas. Compañera,
¿Volverán esas tardes sordas cuando nos amábamos?
¿Te acuerdas cuando te decía ¡tócame!?
¿Cuándo ilesa carne buscaba carne y dientes labios
En los laberintos de tus bocas?
Esas tardes, islas no descubiertas
Cuando caminábamos hasta la orilla.
Mis dedos lentos andaban las lomas de tus pechos,
Recorriendo la llanura de tu espalda
Tus moras hinchándose en mi boca
La cueva mojada y racima.
Tu corazón en mi lengua hasta en mis sueños.
Dos pescadoras nadando en los mares
Buscando esa perla.
¿No te acuerdas como nos amábamos, compañera?
¿Volverán esas tardes cuando vacilábamos
Pasos largos, manos entrelazadas en la playa?
Las gaviotas y las brizas
Dos manfloras vagas en una isla de mutua melodía.
Tus tiernas palmas y los planetas que se caián.
Esas tardes tiñadas de mojo
Cuando nos entregábamos a las olas
Cuando nos tirábamos
En el zacate del parque
Dos cuerpos de mujer bajo los árboles
Mirando los barcos cruzando el río
Tus pestañas barriendo mi cara
Dormitando, oliendo tu piel de amapola.
Dos extranjeras al borde del abismo
Yo caía descabellada encima de tu cuerpo
Sobre las lunas llenas de tus pechos
Esas tardes cuando se mecía el mundo con mi resuello
Dos mujeres que hacían una sola sombra bailarina
Esas tardes andábamos hasta que las lámparas
Se prendían en las avenidas.
¿Volverán,
Compañera, esas tardes  cuando nos amábanos?”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry 'home' on my back.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“An addiction (a repetitious act) is a ritual to help one through a trying time; its repetition safeguards the passage, it becomes one's talisman, one's touchstone. If it sticks around after having outlived its usefulness, we become "stuck" in it and it takes possession of us. But we need to be arrested. Some past experience or condition has created this need. This stopping is a survival mechanism, but one which must vanish when it's no longer needed if growth is to occur.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Maimed, mad and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift.
There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender.
What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like pother queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the comig together of opposit qualities within.”
― Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera : La Nueva Mestiza

“Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados -- we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have injured me in the name of protecting me.”
― Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“So yes, though 'home' permeates every sine and cartilage in my body, I too am afraid of going home.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“But the skin of the earth is seamless. The sea cannot be fenced, El mar does not stop at borders”
― Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and, for, this, is proudly defiant. All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority — outer as well as inner — it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps, we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.”
― Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 5th Edition: The New Mestiza 5th Edition

“My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman's history of resistance. The Aztec female rites of mourning were rites of defiance protesting the cultural changes which disrupted the equality and balance between female and male, and protesting their demotion to a lesser status, their denigration. Like la Llorona, the Indian woman's only means of protest was wailing.”
― Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands / La Frontera

“In the Borderlands

you are the battleground

where enemies are kin to each other;

you are at home, a stranger,

the border disputes have been settled

the volley of shots have scattered the truce

you are wounded, lost in action

dead, fighting back;”
― Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera : La Nueva Mestiza

“We call ourselves Mexican-American to signify we are neither Mexican nor American, but more the noun 'American' than the adjective 'Mexican'...This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity— we don't identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don't totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“I don't want to know, I don't want to be seen. My resistance, my refusal to know some truth about myself brings on that paralysis, depression -- brings on the Coatlicue state. At first I feel exposed and opened to the depth of my dissatisfaction. Then I feel myself closing, hiding, holding myself together rather than allowing myself to fall apart.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent)....It is a path of knowledge -- one of knowing (and of learning) the history of oppression of our raza. It is a way of balancing, of mitigating duality.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“I write the myths in me, the myths I am, the myths I want to become. The word, the image and the feeling have a palatable energy, a kind of power. Con imágenes domo mi miedo, cruzo los abismos que tengo por dentro. Con palabras me hago piedra, pájaro, puente de serpientes arrastrando a ras del suelo todo lo que soy, todo lo que algún día seré.”
― Gloria Anzald?a, Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera by Gloria Anzald?a