One day in May 2004 Gloria Anzaldua passed away. Alfred Arteaga, the California Chicano poet, mentioned the news in his lecture on a rainy night in Tokyo, and I uttered a short "Ah!" That must have been an expression of surprise. But then, there is nothing to be surprised about as it is only too natural for anybody to die one day, sooner or later. Our mortality is 100 percent as it has always been.
When I went home that night I took out from my meager bookshelves a worn-out copy of her remarkable bilingual book Borderlands/La frontera. It was published in 1987 and I read it in the following year. Surely it counted among the books that irreversibly changed the course of my life.
I was first attracted by its title. "Borderland" means the territory adjacent to the frontier. When written in plural, "borderlands," it must mean "both sides" of the line, both imaginary and physical, that separates two states. On the cover there is a horizontal line just under the word "Borderlands," and below is written in italics the Spanish word "La frontera." It looks as if "the line of separation" (la frontera) served as a denominator, whereas "borderlands" in plural were placed as a numerator. The books subtitle was "A New Mestiza." Once I began reading it, I knew at once that this was a bomb masquerading as a book. It belongs with The Commnunist Manifesto, Les damnes de la terre, The Fire Next Time, or Rhizome.
Because of its language, first of all. English and Spanish are constantly pulling and tugging with each other, switching from the one to the other according to the topics, showing the kind of page-scape that I'd never seen before. Oddities do appear, such as seriously exotic names, which turns out to be the names of Aztec gods in Nahuatl. Woven and narrated in the book are the memories and reflections of and on the wild dancing and cries of the people, especially of the women, who struggle collectively to open up the space for survival between two estados unidos, those of Mexico and America, that share the longest frontera on the surface of this planet.
Being born and raised in a very poor Mexican family in southern Texas, she had to hide from her family's eyes just to read and write. Literacy was something suspicious, or considered a luxury. For her, multilingualism was a regular state of mind. Several different strains of Spanish and several different sorts of English, each of them reflecting the history, regionalism, social classes, genderization, in their vocabulary and locutions. "Two, three, four worlds" talk to you at the same time, contradicting with each other, tearing up your soul, making you willy-nilly an astute juggler of cultures!
Her subject matter is admirably reflected in her style, in her switching of languages, in her passionate rhythms. Doesn't she have a way with words, I muttered to myself, and ever since I've been hooked. Place yourself always at the crossroad, is her first and ultimate message as I received it. I don't think we need any ceremony of mourning for Gloria Anzaldua. Her voice, her style, her cultural gesture, all are alive and well and felt even stronger at this moment, in our moment and momentum of global, mass errancy, here and everywhere.
