Entremundos/Amongworlds ENTREMUNDOS/AMONGWORLDS

EntreMundos/AmongWorlds ENTREMUNDOS/AMONGWORLDS

New Perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Edited By AnaLouise Keating ENTREMUNDOS/AMONGWORLDS © AnaLouise Keating, 2005. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-6721-3 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-60593-0 ISBN 978-1-4039-7713-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403977137 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from Library of Congress A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2005 10987654321 para Gloria, Hilda, y todas almas afines Contents

Agradecimientos/Acknowledgments x Foreword xiii

Introduction shifting worlds, una entrada 1 AnaLouise Keating

Part 1 autohistoria y autohistoria-teoría.... (re)writing self, (re)writing culture 1 Gloria y yo: Writing silence and the search for the fronteriza voice 15 Zulma Y. Méndez 2 The 1,001-Piece Nights of Gloria Anzaldúa: Autohistoria-teoría at Florida Atlantic University 17 Caren S. Neile 3 Reclaiming Pleasure: Reading the Body in “People Should Not Die in June in South Texas” 29 Mary Loving Blanchard 4 Daughter of Coatlicue: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa 41 Irene Lara 5 Living in the House of Nepantla 57 Irene Reti

Part 2 nepantla....pathways to change 6 La Gloriosa Travesura de la Musa Que Cruza/The Misbehaving Glory(a) of the Border-Crossing Muse: Transgression in Anzaldúa’s Children’s Stories 63 Edith M. Vásquez viii Contents

7 Apertures of In-Betweeness, of Selves in the Middle 77 Mariana Ortega 8 From within Germinative Stasis: Creating Active Subjectivity, Resistant Agency 85 María Lugones 9 Negotiating Paradoxical Spaces: Women, Disabilities, and the Experience of Nepantla 101 Carrie McMaster

Part 3 nos/otras....intersecting selves/ intersecting others 10 What Do You Learn from What You See? Gloria Anzaldúa and Double-Vision in the Teaching of Writing 109 Eve Wiederhold 11 Reading National Identities: The Radical Disruptions of Borderlands/La Frontera 121 Beth Berila 12 Teaching la Conciencia de la Mestiza in the Midst of White Privilege 129 Simona J. Hill 13 “Know Me Unbroken”: Peeling Back the Silenced Rind of the Queer Mouth 139 Mark W. Bundy 14 New Pathways toward Understanding Self-in-Relation: Anzaldúan (Re)Visions for Developmental Psychology 147 Kelli Zaytoun

Part 4 conocimientos.... expanding the vision 15 “So Much Meat”: Gloria Anzaldúa, the Mind/Body Split, and Exerting Control over My Fat Body 163 Elena Levy-Navarro 16 Champion of the Spirit: Anzaldúa’s Critique of Rationalist Epistemology 171 Amala Levine Contents ix

17 Shifting the Shapes of Things to Come: The Presence of the Future in the Philosophy of Gloria Anzaldúa 185 Jane Caputi 18 “Doing Mestizaje”: When Epistemology Becomes Ethics 195 Monica Torres

Part 5 el mundo zurdo, the new tribalism.... forging new alliances 19 This Is Personal: Revisiting Gloria Anzaldúa from within the Borderlands 207 Lee Maracle 20 Spirit, Culture, Sex: Elements of the Creative Process in Anzaldúa’s Poetry 213 Linda Garber 21 Radical Rhetoric: Anger, Activism, and Change 227 Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar 22 Tierra Tremenda: The Earth’s Agony and Ecstasy in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa 233 Inés Hernández-Ávila 23 Shifting Perspectives: Spiritual Activism, Social Transformation, and the Politics of Spirit 241 AnaLouise Keating

References 255 List of Contributors 265 Index 271 Agradecimientos/Acknowledgments

I am blessed to be surrounded by so many wonderful people y espiritús. Thank you, contributors, for your encouragement, your excitement about this project, your patience, your willingness to revise, and your carefully crafted words. Thank you to my friends/colleagues/familia: Nadine Barrett, Renae Bredin, Tom and JoAnn Keating, Chester and Priscilla Lynton, Carrie McMaster, Deborah Miranda, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Patricia Stukes, Jane Keating-Vraspier, Doreen Watson, Kelli Zaytoun...Thank you for your encouraging phone calls, e-mails, and conversations, for your wisdom and advice, for your many other forms of assistance as well. Thank you, Claire Sahlin, for being such a thoughtful, supportive, generous colleague (everyone working in university settings should be so lucky!). Thanks to Glenda Lehrmann and the other FIRST librarians at TWU for assistance with research. Thanks to Dru Merriman for help with copying. Thank you, TWU estudientes in my 2003 and 2004 seminar course, Gloria Anzaldúa: Theorizing & the Politics of Imagination, for your feedback and your excitement about Gloria’s theories. Thank you, Hilda Anzaldúa, Kit Quan, y Irene Reti, for doing so very much to preserve Gloria’s words. Thank you, Liliana Wilson Grez for allowing us to use your artwork for the cover, and for being so flexible about the format. Gracias to the following writers, who inspire and challenge me: Paula Gunn Allen, M. Jacqui Alexander, James Baldwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leela Fernandes, Joy Harjo, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Thich Nhat Hanh, Timothy Powell, Jane Roberts, Chela Sandoval. Thanks to everyone at Palgrave MacMillan, especially Gabriella Pearce, Erin Ivy, and Lynn Vande Stouwe. Thanks to Maran Elancheran for your sharp copy-editing eye. Thanks to mi esposo, Eddy Lynton, for your advice, wisdom, encouragement, inspiration, humor, patience, y más. Gracias to our daughter, Jamitrice, for your questions, comments, and confidence. I thank you both for understanding/accepting/tolerating my workaholic tendencies; I am blessed to have you both in my life. And of course I thank Gloria, my dear writing comadre, mentor, and friend. Comadre: gracias por todo, for encouraging me to take on this project (even before this bridge was finished and you told me I must be as crazy Agradecimientos/Acknowledgments xi as you), for opening your house to me during the years I worked on this book and others, for the meals and walks on West Cliff, for all the conversations we shared, for suggesting possible contributors and Liliana’s cover art, for insightful comments on the book proposal, table of contents, and contributors’ drafts, and—most especially—for your shaman aesthetics, your risk-taking inspiration, your bold vision, and your encouragement over the years. Orishas y espiritus, thank you for guiding me, whispering words of encouragement that nourish body/heart/mind/spirit and inspire vision. Foreword Unfinished Words: The Crossing of Gloria Anzaldúa Chela Sandoval

There is a kind of emptying out here—a hollowing, and a holying.

Gloria Anzaldúa was a prolific writer, yet most of her writings remain unpublished, “unpolished, still,” she would say. Gloria earned her living by teaching, and she was a consummate teacher. In that way, as much as through her writings, Anzaldúa’s ideas traveled globally.1 This book, EntreMundos, was the last book Gloria and I discussed before she died. EntreMundos is “another way to name the borderlands,” she thought aloud, another word for that “alter-space.” It is possible to locate such alter-spaces, these borderlands, geographically, materially, yes. But that space entremundos, between worlds, Anzaldúa insisted, also exists in consciousness and culture, in all economies of power. The term “entremundos” situates in language this place that can be experienced and described even though its nature is change—constituted always in-relation-to. For Anzaldúa, entremundos is a science fiction world-of-possibility born of privilege, oppression, hope, and horror. Horror and evil always result from the inequities of oppression, Gloria says, but so too do hope and goodness. In Anzaldúa’s hands the methodology of the oppressed transformed into a promise, a way to imple- ment a global methodology of emancipation. Anzaldúa was a resolute theorist of hope. This book, EntreMundos/AmongWorlds, constitutes a communion-table on which the authors lay out the altering work of Gloria Anzaldúa’s contributions. No other collection marks or honors her transition similarly, for this book was conceived with Anzaldúa’s blessing and before her death. In this first book-publication since her transition, we whom she called “nos/otras” are translating and extending the meanings and senses of her work. And Anzaldúa loved, admired, and encouraged the senses that are xiv Chela Sandoval made here—and that will be made—by authors such as María Lugones, Irene Reti, Jane Caputi, and AnaLouise Keating. This book, she told me in 2002, will “redraw my work,” will advance, explain, and go beyond it. She asserts that “it thrills me and...validates me as a writer that people can take my images or ideas and work them out in their own way and write their own theories” (qtd. in Reuman 5).2 And indeed, EntreMundos’ chapters are comprised of scholarship that has traveled in relation to, alongside of, through, and beyond Anzaldúa’s work, just as she had wished. The five sections of EntreMundos combine to outline Anzaldúa’s theoretical and methodological contributions to Mestiz@ Studies, to Chican@, Latin@, and Xican Studies, to feminist and LGBTQ Studies, to emancipatory and peace studies, indeed, to critical and cultural theory across disciplines. Gloria believed that the dialectical interchange of these five “sections” could comprise an internationally useful methodology for emancipation which has risen out of experiences of oppression. Part one of EntreMundos is based upon the Anzaldúan idea that all social change begins through a technique of spoken-word-art-performance-activism, what she calls “autohistoria- teoría.” This technique can forcibly induce practitioners, she would say, into la conciencia de la mestiza, a condition of being she calls the “nepantla,” or in-between state. Parts two and three of this book concern the nepantla state and also make visible new collectives of people Anzaldúa calls “nos/ otras”—the we’s in the others, the others in us. Autohistoria-teoria, nepantlerista citizenship, and the recognition of nos/otras allow practitioners access to what Keating describes as the heart of part five, the “connectionist” and spiritual mode of thinking Anzaldúa calls “conocimientos.” Lastly, Gloria believed that the creative and communicative performance-process of autohistoria-teoría; the in-between state of nepantla peopled by nos/otras; and the elevated connectionist consciousness of conocimientos, when uti- lized together, will generate oppositional modes of “tribal” consciousness and spiritual politics that are capable of developing planetary life connec- tions. This creation of new tribalisms and planetary alliances through el mundo zurdo is the idea that structures part five of EntreMundos.3 Like Foucault with his archeology, or Barthes with his semiology, Anzaldúa hoped this five-stage methodology of emancipation would have global consequences. For Gloria, a life lived entremundos and the radical perception of borderlands and mestiz@ consciousness were generated in the crossing, in the interrelationship between these principles.4 Once activated, this dialectic can be recognized as a social theory and method capable of remapping disciplinary and global borders. Those of us who knew Gloria Anzaldúa know that these five techniques comprise the guiding principles by which she lived her own life. Gloria’s speech and writing enacted the truths of autohistoria-teoría; she lived as a nepantlerista and treated nos/otras as Foreword xv her countrypeople; and her politics and spirituality were united in her awareness of conocimientos. Gloria traveled the world, and had tremen- dous influence as a public intellectual. Through all the difficulties of travel, however, she never gave up her dedication to calling up the global affinities and new tribalisms she believed would be the outcome of these enacted principles. U.S. third-world feminist activists during the 1970s developed skills that became honed further after the 1981 publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Gloria Anzaldúa was one of the great translators and developers of these skills. In June of that year we traveled in the back seat of a car headed east, sharing ideas like the “tightrope between worlds, el mundo zurdo,” and “oppositional consciousness in its differential form.” Gloria showed me how to throw the I-Ching for answers, and I carried her books while she performed This Bridge Called My Back in Boston. Much later I said “come to Santa Cruz with me and Ro, Ruth and Lata, Gloria Watkins, Lorna, Shirley, Teish, Osa, Ekua, Rhee and Histcon and we’ll dream at lunch over books, survive earthquakes and children, deaths and academia, write, and build what we learn into love.” Once there she would tell me academia was burning my writing and I would tell her I should edit hers. Our group allied as “almas afines”—that was what she called the crossing. During that decade we became another cadre of lesbians of color dreaming U.S. third-world feminism into a weave of coalition; from out of nepantla our dreams became webs. Anzaldúa was an inventor, a lover of technology, science, physics, M- and string theory. We shared a fascination with science fiction and horror—that which forced our shifts and challenged the burdens of who we were. In part it was her dedication to science that brought us to nepantla, to the borderlands of differential consciousness, conocimientos, to the physics of love.5 Spiritual activism became our term for the theoretical-ethical-moral- emotional-intellectual work we pledged to do as U.S. third-world feminists. We believed that no social change for justice was possible if that change was not informed by a physics of love, a mode of civic affinity that would instruct our political and worldly organizations, our societies. Gloria Anzaldúa, U.S. third-world feminist theorist and Chicana lesbian activist, dedicated her life to mapping the social facts of personal and civic love. Today, Anzaldúa’s data extends around the globe. It encodes a physics of love and demands an ordered science that disorders war. In days past we dreamt of this new order, of loss and decay, of friendship and peace, of hope and the future, of science fiction. We now leave these dreams to other generations, to third-world feminists, Chican@s and citizen-warriors, citizen-lovers and queergenders, to nepantleras. In Gloria Anzaldúa we have a name, a method, a language, a xvi Chela Sandoval linguistic terrorism aimed to lift us higher. Gloria wrote that she yearned “to pass on to the next generation the spiritual activism I’ve inherited from my cultures” (“let us be the healing of the wounds”). The editor of EntreMundos, AnaLouise Keating, sees with the clarity of a next generation, those who resonate with and have taken up the social-justice and spiritual warriorship dimensions of Anzaldúa’s political project. This book EntreMundos, advances Gloria Anzaldúa’s legacy. As I write in January 2005, the planet trembles from the earthquake and tsunami in south Asia and east Africa. The vibration connects ethnic communities of survivors across the planet. While the rumble of planetary threat continues, Gloria Anzaldúa’s messages of hope, healing, social justice, love, and U.S. third-world feminism continue to resonate around the world.

Notes

1. See for instance Anzaldúa’s Interviews/Entrevistas and Maria Lugones’s “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception.” 2. See also this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation. 3. For descriptions of these principles see “shifting worlds,” AnaLouise Keating’s introduction to this book, as well as Anzaldúa’s Interviews/Entrevistas. 4. For more on this topic see my “AfterBridge: Technologies of Crossing.” 5. See Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/LaFrontera.