Anzaldua, Gloria

Anzaldua, Gloria Borderlands: La Frontera The New Mestiza San Francisco: Aunt Lute. 1999.
“Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an “alien” element” (Preface to the first edition).
“the “alien” element has become familiar—never comfortable, not with society’s clamor to uphold the old, to rejoin the flock, to go with the herd. No, not comfortable but home” (Preface to the first edition).

This is an excellent description of the social pressure which helped to create guilt. If one is not “joining the flock” then one sees oneself as defective, thus the guilt. It also speaks to a space created by individual women to survive this cultural nature, but I’m not sure how.

“The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it” (29).
“Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through culture” (38).

This makes one wonder how women, or any marginalized group, ever made it “out”. It was culturally acceptable to “put women in their place”. A male expectation so often repeated that it became a part of the social structure and the overall culture? Ends up creating guilt, shame, etc.

“Because, according to Christianity and most other major religions, woman is carnal, animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected. Protected from herself. Woman is the stranger, the other. She is man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frezy of anger and fear” (39).
“In my culture, selfishness is condemned, especially in women; humility and selflessness, the absence of selfishness, is considered a virtue” (40).
“We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Razza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged” (42).

So, by living virtuous lives women could avoid being abandoned. Even so, the thoughts that selfishness or self sufficiency were poor forms of behavior for women were so ingrained as to be manipulated by a sense of guilt.

“For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the language; for people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people whocannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language?” (77)

How does this play in? I KNOW it must, but I don’t know how.

“From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, and “alien” consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands” (99).
“At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes” (100-01).
“Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness” (104).

This speaks directly to the “ramifications” of guilt rhetoric in that they oppose the breaking down of paradigms and do not or cannot straddle two or more cultures. That new mythos has no room for guilt rhetoric.

“The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (109).
But then, doesn’t guilt rhetoric create an awareness (i.e., that there are starving children in Rwanda)? But it still has ramifications.