Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza’ is a critically acclaimed piece of work by Gloria Anzaldua which was published in 1987. The book can be described as a semi-autobiography because the author delves into a range of personal events; from growing up in a changing social community to her journey as a woman of color in academia and life in general. These experiences served as an inspiration from the book which addresses a variety of topics such as social class, race, colonialism, gender, social norms and an overall identity.
The first chapter of La Frontera, entitled ‘The Homeland; Aztlan’, primarily focuses on the author tracing her roots. She specifically details how her Aztec ancestors migrated across the Unites States (from the north to the south west, then to central Mexico) and how they finally returned to south western US. She strongly states how her people, the Chicanos, were the oldest dated inhabitants of the US. Her ethnicity is ‘Mestiza’ and Chicano which means she has cultures from north and South America embedded in her. Anzaldua acknowledges the unnatural nature of the borderland since she feels that it splits her due to her sense of belonging to multiple cultures. She wants to be free to interact with her people in their homeland and uses the metaphor of the sea and eagles since they both do not have borders and are free to wander.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The culture of a community is closely tied to their sense of freedom and ownership of their homeland. Anzaldua shows how her people have lost their ownership of their land. Her grandma ‘Mama Locha’ lost ancestral land, their cultural burial site for generations. They then could not visit this sacred ancestral land or even bury their relatives there. The author aptly uses the imagery of drought and barren land to show the sadness and anguish after the takeover of her native land. This loss of land is directly translatable to the ultimate loss of power, language and ethnic identity. The borderlands in the poem present the context of an undefined space, of people without an actual home being forced to choose between the northern culture (American) or the southern culture (Mexico). Anzaldua still believes in a homeland, Aztlan, where her people (the Chicanos) have control over their resources, identity and culture.
