La frontera/Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldúa

What borders do you have in your life? How visible are they? Can other people see them and make judgments? How do you balance them? Choose between them? Defend them?

We focused on chapters 1, 2, 5, and 6 and spent most of our time discussing the language chapter (5) as well as our feelings about reading a book which has so much non-English in it. It made us think about the privileges we have and what our expectations are. We also read through quotes we had highlighted in the selected chapters.

CHAPTER 1
p. 25 “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and the forbidden are its inhabitants.”

CHAPTER 2
p. 41 “What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other.”

CHAPTER 5
p. 75 “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” – Ray Gwyn Smith
p. 76 “In my culture they are all words that are derogatory if applied to women – I’ve never heard them applied to men.”
p. 80 “our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against us.”
“if a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue she also has a low estimation of me.”
p. 81 “…as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.”
p. 84 “As a culture, we call ourselves Spanish when referring to ourselves as a linguistic group and when copping out. It is then that we forget our predominant Indian genes. We are 70 to 80% Indian. We call ourselves Hispanic or Spanish–American or Latin American or Latin when linking ourselves to other Spanish speaking peoples of the Western hemisphere and when copping out. We call ourselves Mexican-American to signify we are neither Mexican nor American, but more the noun “American” than the adjective “Mexican” (and when copping out).”
p. 85 “When not copping out, when we know we are more than nothing, we call ourselves Mexican, referring to race and ancestry; mestizo when affirming both our Indian and Spanish (but we hardly ever own our Black ancestry); Chicano when referring to a politically aware people born and/or raised in the U.S.; raza when referring to Chicanos; tejanos when we are Chicanos from Texas.”

CHAPTER 6
p. 88 “…the Indians, did not split the artistic fro the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life. The religious social and aesthetic purposes of art were all intertwined.”