Vol. 24 No. 1 (2023)
Critica

Opening space at the border. On the emergence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza from the Mexican American periphery

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Markéta Riebová
Palacký University, Olomouc
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59533/Verb.2023.24.1.6

Published 27-06-2023

How to Cite

Riebová, M. (2023). Opening space at the border. On the emergence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza from the Mexican American periphery. Verbum – Analecta Neolatina, 24(1), 123–140. https://doi.org/10.59533/Verb.2023.24.1.6
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The following article deals with the literary representation of the Mexican American border in the work of the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza (1987). Anzaldúa’s writing comes out of her lived experience. She uses the location of her origin, its historical and cultural background and personal memories as one of the sources of her theorizing where the Mexican American borderline becomes a metaphor for all types of crossings: geopolitical, social, ethnic, sexual. Her status of an “outsider within” endows her with a sense of a layered complexity that is masterly reflected in the hybrid structure of the text itself and its literary language. In this way, it is deeply inspirational to other bordering locations - Central Europe being one of them – and thus overcomes its local status. Divided into four parts, the analysis evolves around the topics of the writer’s voice, body, space and language.

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