Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “I Had To Go Down.” Gloria Anzaldúa was a groundbreaking, perhaps even groundclaiming theorist and poet. She is by far best known for her 1987 book, Borderlands/La Frontera. It is much easier to identify it as her most influential and enduring work than it is to place it into a genre. Is it theory? History? Poetry? Memoir? It is all this – and more. Anzaldúa’s work can be challenging. It is a dense text with complex concepts, and some readers find it hard to understand. And it can be unsettling, especially to white (male) readers who might find their notions of privilege and status being called into question. This difficulty – this textual, psychological, social difficulty – is quite deliberate on Anzaldúa’s part. She confronts her readers as she upends dominant views of race, language, white privilege, gender and sexuality, and “ownership” of contested land between the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. In short, Borderlands/La Frontera is not an easy read nor is it inte