New Mestiza, Old Divisions

Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you—from the new mestizas” (x). Anzaldúa’s ask at the end of the introduction to Borderlands is far from unreasonable: recognize the New Mestiza as a legitimate identity, and let them tell you how to perceive them. However, Anzaldúa’s invitation doesn’t end at that halfway point—she continues on past, presenting a forward framework for a world that both can’t put aside past transgressions and is more than happy to set aside past transgressors. Borderlands presents the advent of the New Mestiza as a unifying event that connects and heals all cultures, especially those affected by centuries of colonial oppression, yet Anzaldúa’s vision of this future excludes the most visibly oppressive groups, leaving behind a narrow vision of identity-based solidarity that falls short of its universalizing and harmonizing ambitions.

Anzaldúa structures Borderlands to mythologize the creation of the New Mestiza as the unifying culmination of the cyclical Aztec story of creation and destruction. Borderlands begins with an account of the oppression of the Indigenous woman (the India) by both the colonizers and the Indigenous men they have perverted, ending with the note that, with colonization’s insertion of patriarchy, the India “leaves the familiar and safe homeground to venture into the unknown and possibly dangerous terrain”(26). The rest of the book lives in the Mestiza consciousness, this liminal space between white, Indigenous, Mexicana, and queer cultures, documenting the trials and tribulations Anzaldúa undergoes, increasingly supported by a unified model of identity she calls the New Mestiza.

At the beginning of her seventh and final chapter, titled ‘Towards a New Consciousness,’ Anzaldúa finally states the New Mestiza consciousness explicitly as a solution: it is a theory of inclusivity, of “embracing the four major races of the world,” at the “confluence” of multiple holistic ethnic streams, signifying permanent unification (83). In support of this reunification, Anzaldúa self-referentially quotes from the ancient Chinese divination book I Ching: “All movements are accomplished in six stages, and the seventh brings return” (93). Here, the return that the book asserts is not one of universal unification but a return of the mestiza to her status of centuries past—not the status of her white or Spanish ancestors, but a return to the status of the indigenous woman mentioned in the first chapter, before the colonization and patriarchy took away her freedoms and oppressed her. Nonetheless, Anzaldúa’s solution to inter-group oppression is presented as not only a cure for her experiences of oppression as a mestiza, but also as the eventual salvation of humanity from strife and conflict.

Anzaldúa’s justification for the New Mestiza’s creation relies on a history of victimization and oppression that ultimately excludes groups she deems oppressive from her vision for universal harmony. Anzaldúa’s poem Don’t Give In, Chicanita depicts a world where “the Gringos are gone—/see how they kill one another/… [and then] perhaps we’ll be members of a new species/… carrying the best of all the cultures (202-3). This vision of the future presents the destruction of white culture as inevitable due to their intra-group conflict; in her view, the “best of all the cultures” exists in a future world where that destruction has already occurred, and they are not part of the New Mestiza coalition of all races.

Anzaldúa’s claim that mestiza consciousness can break down the duality of agency and passivism (and, presumably, collapse the dualities into relationships that “connect us with each other and the planet”) isn’t consistent with her vision for the future of the New Mestiza (86).

The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. 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. (85-86)

The operational goal of the mestiza consciousness is to free the mestiza from being the marginalized ‘object’ of the objectifying oppressor. If successful, divisions between groups would cease to exist as distinctions wouldn’t exist in their dualistic framework anymore. Notwithstanding, Anzaldúa’s aforementioned poem ‘Don’t Give In, Chicanita’ displays the same subject-object duality she claims to break down: Anzaldúa asks the reader to “see how they kill one another,” ‘they’ being the Gringos, the subject of that sentence, the oversimplified and stereotyped that would “rather forget [their] brutish acts” than feel guilty (203, 91). Anzaldúa doesn’t break down the subject-object duality—she reverses it instead, creating a new framework where the linguistic oppressor is the New Mestiza, and the subjects of that oppression are those whom the New Mestizas deem oppressors and exclude. Anzaldúa claims this linguistic combat as a means of uniting, but instead it serves to separate and prolongs the warfare it condemns. Oppressors see no redemption in her framework beyond being tenatively “allowed” to serve as allies: they must realize that their earnest efforts and charity will not be “helping us but following [the non-white peoples’] lead” (90). That this framing could “bring us to the end of rape, of violence, [and] of war” is a sentiment that misunderstands what the New Mestiza is and can achieve (86). The New Mestiza may take this duality from the white oppressor, but in reversing it, Anzaldúa alienates the white person by refusing partnership and making no clear distinction between the reformed and the continuously oppressive.

Anzaldúa’s broader mentions of broader intersectionality exist ut aliquid fieri videatur in terms of larger cross-cultural harmony, but the bare claim of her writing is that the colonization-induced historical oppression and unintended racial mixing, along with the inevitable return of the indigenous woman, require the creation of a new identity to reclaim the power that is rightfully theirs. This in itself is a valid and internally consistent framework. However, feigning it is a universalizing model for peace and harmony is a fundamental misunderstanding of the inclusivity of the New Mestiza in its current formation and its implications for Anzaldúa’s extended ambitions. Anzaldúa notes that, by inhabiting the borderlands, the mestiza “sustain[s] contradictions” and turns “ambivalence into something else” (85). By misrepresenting the advent of the New Mestiza and its broader implications, Anzaldúa turns something else—that is, a legitimate framework for mestiza identity—into ambivalence.

Works Cited