Anzaldúa's "Borderlands" as LANDmark in my practice 🫀 (self-selected text)

Juanita Arango, Los trapos de mi(s) piel(es), 2024, fabric and drawing-based installation, Daniels Faculty, Toronto.

Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa

I've included the concept of borderlands since the first work I made that explicitly involved Latin American politics and themes of land and diasporic bodies in/of Abya Yala, El Sur es Nuestro Norte (2023). My fascination with installation-based work started aching for a conceptual framework beyond the materials and techniques involved. So I encountered Anzaldúa and we fell in love instantly.

In my most recent work, Los trapos de mi(s) piel(es) (2024), I dug deep in research, deeper than ever before, restless on researching around the concept of Mestizaje throughout the whole summer in my drawing classes with Derek Liddington, who pushed me to dig into the internal and personal attachments of this concept instead of teasing it from the outside and only externally. Once again, I returned to the borderlands of my identit(ies) and Anzaldúa embraced me, providing her perspective on Mestizaje, on how she owned it and re-appropriated it to her own context and personal experiences, and portrayed her own journey navigating what her identit(ies) meant around and within this concept, as she created her(own)self, through her own form of art: beautiful poetry, in her tongues (Spanish and English). And I also learned of the in-betweeness, so essential to the borderlands, where we as people with identities in the  in-between (both products of the colonizer and the colonized, and also subjects of our own respect, with different cultural and diasporic identities, as well as individualities beyond our diverse races and ethnicities of our ancestors), embrace living within these borders of our mixed selves, embracing the ambiguity, the clashing and contrary identities, that constitute us. For Anzaldúa, la mestiza identity transcends duality, healing the “splits” in intersectional identities.

Of course, as I did more research later, I realized Anzaldúa's Latina phenomenology and postcolonial feminist philosophies was not the only perspective out there (or the only one I would agree on). As I've expressed in another post, I have aligned more with Mariana Ortega's philosophies of the self in her "In-Between" (2016), more updated and actualized to the contemporary times, while acknowledging the great value of Anzaldúa's work for the Latinx queer femme-identifying authors to come.

Still, her inspiration and influences remain essential to my conceptualization of my artwork and overarching practice, as her philosophy has definitely marked the way I conceive my identit(ies) and how my multiplicity has room to be expressed through all the ways possibles in my work.

For this reason, I aim to honour her inspiration in the choice of installation-based work I am doing for my thesis project. The decision of centring a hammock as the container of many analogies, metaphors, and the breadth of the collective stories that give it life, come fundamentally from the idea of the borderlands, as this physical border to cross, to interject, to look at from different perspectives, and ultimately, to use as vehicle to navigate our identit(ies) and the world around it. Installation allows me to do this work, cutting through space and shaping the space like a sculpture, making the body of the people experiencing the work to shift, encounter the borderlands represented in the hammock, be immersed in the space, move around, and embark in the experience, by placing themselves in the in-between space the hammock provides, a social and cultural terrain more than a mere divide, for us to confront our(selfs).

The quilt embracing the hammock, as a community-built archival narrative, allows to illustrate the nuances of narratives at the interstices of marginalized identities and captures the multitudes and ambiguities of migration, place-making, belonging, kinship, and joy at the margins.

My Summary of La consciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness. Borderlands: the new mestiza = La frontera (pp. 77-91)

In her poetry book, Anzaldúa challenges how one thinks about identity by presenting borders as a social and cultural terrain, more than a mere divide. In Chapter 7, she talks about la mestiza, a figure rooted from her experience as a Chicana lesbian, who faces the dilemma of being racially mixed, describing it as a struggle of flesh, borders, and an inner war, where she experiences opposing messages and a clash of cultures within. Her stance comes from Chicana culture specifically, where she deals with clashes of white, Mexican, and even Indigenous culture that contradict each other, confusing and complicating her identit(ies). However, she embraces the contradictions, which duel both the oppressor and oppressed within her, refuting the dominant colonial narratives and cultural beliefs in Latinx and Chicanx collective imaginary. By acknowledging la mestiza’s psychological borders, and her push towards a tolerance for ambiguity amongst multiple possibilities and perspectives, rigid boundaries start bending within her, and flexibility allows her to explore opposing concepts inside her. 
Anzaldúa embraces circularity in her inhabiting of her being(s), as an Indigenous way of perceiving time. Linear thinking is no longer an option, as rational thinking don’t allow for la mestiza’s complex identities to exist, but force the mind to move towards a single, final destination, while la mestiza exists in multiples. She needs to shift out of singularity and embrace the multitudes and constant circularity of her being(s). Lastly, the author proposes a new, mestiza consciousness, which isn’t merely identities coming together or balancing opposing views, but it is a third, new element that comes from continuous creative motion that breaks singular, linear and unitary aspects of new paradigms. For Anzaldúa, la mestiza identity transcends duality, healing the “splits” in intersectional identities. 

Bibliography

Anzaldúa, Gloria. "La consciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness." In Borderlands = La Frontera : The New Mestiza, 77-91. 1st ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.

Arango, Juanita. Los trapos de mi(s) pieles. 2024. Fabric and drawing-based installation, graffiti, fabric paint. Photo by Juanita Arango. South Borden Building, Toronto.

Arango, Juanita. El Sur es Nuestro Norte. 2023. Screenprinting and graffiti-based installation. Toronto.

Ortega, Mariana. In-between : Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/lib/utoronto/reader.action?docID=4452738&ppg=1