I hope you won't mind that today's profile of Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2005) is less formal than the other encyclopedic profiles I've been writing thus far in celebration of Mixed Experience History Month.
I first encountered Anzaldúa's work in college when I read Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizo (1987). It was in this book, a blend of poetry, essay and memoir, that Anzaldúa fully fleshed out the notion of "mestizaje" as a useful concept for the American academy. Her "new mestiza" was an individual who was aware of her conflicting and meshing identities and used her unique position as neither this nor that as a prism to provide new insights. That's fancy language to say she wrote about being Mixed. Her Mixed experience was that of being a Mexican immigrant and lesbian.
I read her book at a time I was very much struggling with my identity. I longed to be a part of the Stanford black community, but really wasn't. I knew many black people on campus, but my closest circle of friends were white or Latino, friendships I had made as a freshman resident of Casa Zapata. I felt that I lived in the borderland between races, and it was an amazing affirmation to read that someone else understood that. Anzaldúa's book was one of the first moments it registered for me that I had Permission to write about my Mixed experience.
Anzaldúa, in an interview, on how the Mixed experience is an inclusive one:
I think what's probably one of the riskier things that I did in Borderlands/La Frontera was to open up the concept of mestizaje, of the new mestiza and hybridity, to be non-exclusive, to be inclusive of white people and people from other communities. And the risk was in having again Euro-Americans take over the space. And I don't think that's happened very much.
