...Anzaldua’s “Borderlands/La Frontera” is an argument of the formation of Self from deep within the landscape of the margins, that “thin, razor edged barb-wired” liminal place between cultures where movement is foreclosed and survival means adapting one’s spirit and emotions and psyche to this new harsh sociopolitical environment. She notes early on that this is not only a physical space but a spiritual, sexual and emotional one, too. She calls upon a methodology that is a synthesis of psychology, cultural studies and specifically Chicana feminism to describe this setting. As tempting as it may be, Anzaldua refuses to wallow in victimhood but seeks to discover the power (and power of resistance) from within this new “third” Self, a mestiza...
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...where I start to realize that failing a class does make you fall behind. In order to make up for the class that I failed, I will be taking six classes for next semester. As you can see, education has shaped my life; it has taught me that there is no time to waste. One of the hardest things that education has to offer to students I would say is reading. Not everyone has the time to sit or lie down and read a book. I am one of those students that do not like to read because it does not catch my attention. The only time that I do read is when the professors assigns it to me. However, when I do read those readings, I always learn new things such as, what has and could happen in real life. For instance, the book that I identify with is Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzalduá. In her writing she shows us a new direction that women need to take in order to free themselves psychologically, spiritually, and sexually. Furthermore, Anzalduá argues that as a result of the traditional patriarchal system that benefits men and exploits women, the Latina woman is at the crossroads or between borders when it comes to her culture and way of being as an individual. I can identify with this literature because it has many things that I have heard and seen. In chapter two for instance, she writes, “Today some of us have a fourth choice: entering the world by way of education and...
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...Discussing notions of cultural borderlands in relation to Anzalùa’s own experience within the Mexican American context serves as a first step towards the negotiation of the experience of other ethnic groups interacting with mainstream American culture. Exploring the aesthetics of border narratives in the way Anzaldùa constructs it together with the mechanisms of stereotyping and the politics of ethnic identity representations she opts for urges a new conception of the literary creation situated in-between multiple ideological and symbolic borders. The hybrid construct around which the rhetoric of boder is built becomes dialogic: it witnesses the presence of mainstream culture and marginal- ethnic culture .The latter is endowed by the power...
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...En 101 4 February 2015 Inner Relief Gloria Anzaldua uses words to describe how she felt just like many other people can relate to especially with discussing feelings of growing up. Anzaldua is an advocate and a realist. She was devastated, stuck between cultures and ancestries. She did not know which way to turn. She pushed forward and took action. Anzaldua describes herself, “As a Mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out, yet every country is mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover”(Anzaldua 102). In this depiction of who she is, she sees it as what it is. A common theme within Anzaldua is dialogue of being right or being happy. Acceptance is one thing that Anzaldua strives for, but cannot fully grasp. It is with this struggle Anzaldua constructs a new mestizo consciousness to deal with or combat such systemic marginalization. She sees the problems with society, culture, societal norms, and even herself. Chapter 7 in the beginning tries to focus on the, “struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, and inner war”(Anzaldua 100). This is similar to the previous paragraphs quote of having no country. Alzaldua faces the dilemma of mix breed. Generations of her family are from Mexico, but now she is an American, where norms impressed upon her are much more radically different than of her ancestors. She is different from her family while also being different than the white American value system at that time. This is what the quote above is refereeing...
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...The Personal is Still the Political “Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you” (Berlin). These iconic lyrics were part of a cheerful duet in a 1940’s Broadway musical making jest that a woman could compete against a man in various tasks such as singing and archery. Little did society know that women truly believed that this was the case, and it was an idea worth fighting for. Over the course of the twentieth-century, women have fought and protested for equality among men in a male-dominate society. Women have rallied under one of the best known slogans of the movement the “personal is political”, the concept that the personal (private) life should be addressed equally with the public (political) life that had yet to integrate women into its realm. “the personal is political refers to the private life or “realm” of women having anything to do with marriage, children or household roles and the public realm of men having anything to do with business, politics, art, or sports. Renowed poet and writer Gloria Anzaldua has her own interpretation of what the “personal is political” means and what she was challenging specifically when she argued using her own experiences such as the loss of culture through the loss of language, and sexism in language as a starting point. “The personal is political” played a very significant role in helping shape the women’s rights movement from its roots all the way to its end in the 1960’s with the advent of the Civil...
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...Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a much so divided passage that attests the unpredictability of living in the psychic, social, and social territory some place in the middle of México and the United States. With Gloria Anzaldúa calling the United States/Mexico border "una herida abierta", an open wound, is actually justifiable. The agony and delight of the borderlands, maybe no more noteworthy or lesser than the feelings mixed by living anyplace contradictions proliferate, societies conflict and merge, and life is existed on an edge; which originate from a wound that won't mend but is perpetually recuperating. These grounds have dependably been here; the waterway of individuals has streamed for a considerable length...
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...ramifications of a society that moves beyond binary labels? Is this a tangible project? Could the model of the mestiza consciousness be used universally? Do you identify any limitations? In order to close out this conversation I would make the link to our next session, where we will be discussing Masculinity and Privilege, by emphasizing Anzaldúa’s assertion of the need for a new masculinity. She talks about present-day machismo as “the result of hierarchical male dominance” (83), and makes an explicit call to men: “we demand the admission/acknowledgement/disclosure/testimony that they wound us, violate us, are afraid of us and of our power […] But more than words, we demand acts” (84). Anzaldúa’s views will thus help create a bridge between Borderlands and the readings for the following week, starting with bell hooks’ “Men:...
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...and a film that truly help clarify what borders are and how each type is unique by focusing on the borders themes of Language Use, Self-Identifications vs. Ascribed Labels, Gendered Identities and Machismo. In Gloria Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa builds on how Chicano Spanish is a border tongue and writes, “ [...] for people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor standard English, what resource is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity too, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves -- a language with terms that are neither español ni inglés, but both. [...] because we are complex, heterogeneous people, we speak many languages.” (Anzaldúa 77) Here, Anzaldúa gets at the manifest of Language use in Chicano culture and elaborates on the various types of languages they speak such as working class Spanish, Tex-Mex Spanish, Pachuco Spanish and much more. Language itself is “ethnic marker” on the basis of cultural differences and Anzaldúa makes notice of how this culture particularly is unique in the case of their many complex tongues. Saying all Spanish is the same would create chaos, as we can see in Borderlands even native tongue from one culture can have significant differences, you can just imagine the variety of sorts of Spanish from all around the world such as contrasts between Spain Spanish to Dominican Spanish, to Guatemalan Spanish...
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...are used to control on individual, institutional, and cultural levels. The US-Mexico border embodies and establishes an “us vs. them” mentality with parameters of inclusion and exclusion, creating the ability to marginalize and oppress those trying to cross over. However, from this despicable truth, social transformation is brewing and forming in the suffering of artists existing in the midst of this oppression. Through their experiences, they create art that not only reflects their culture and ethnicity, but also celebrates the very category that is used to marginalize and control, bringing awareness to their plight. Gloria Anzaldua an author and poet, brings awareness to borders in her essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), using her talent as a means for social transformation. Anzaldúa posits there is more to a border than a simple divide and borders can exist in both actual and implied spaces. Through her poetry and prose Anzaldua cultivates cultural appreciation and calls for public awareness of the oppressed, specifically speaking to her own experience of linguistic borders. She writes “In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives” (Anzaldua p.39). Anzaldua’s experience of oppression and marginalization based on her...
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...GLORIA ANZALDUA How to Tame a Wild Tongue Gloria Anzaldua was born in 1942 in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. At age eleven. she began working in the fields as a migrant worker and then on her family's land after the death of her father. Working her way through school, she eventually became a schoolteacher and then an academic, speaking and writing about feminis t, lesbian, and Chicana issues and about autobiography. She is best known for This Bridge CalJed My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color ( 1981), which she edited with Cherrie Moraga, and BorderlandsfLa Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Anzaldua died in 2004. "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" is from BorderlandsfLa Frontera. In it, Anzaldua is concerned with many kinds of borders - between nations, cultures, classes, genders, languages. When she writes, "So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language" (par. 27), Anzaldua is arguing for the ways in which identity is intertwined with the way we speak and for the ways in which people can be made to feel ashamed of their own tongues. Keeping hers wild - ignoring the closing of linguistic borders - is Anzaldua's way of asserting her identity. "We're going to have to control your tongue," the dentist says, pulling out all the metal from my mouth. Silver bits plop and tinkle into the basin. My mouth is a motherlode.· The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a whiff of the stench when I gasp. "I can't cap that tooth yet, you're still draining," he...
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...Christopher Cox Patricia Huhn English 121 20 February 2012 Education and Language Education and its effects on the individual is the primary focus of the essays by Richard Rodriguez, Leslie Silko, Firoozeh Dumas, and Gloria Anzaldua. Rodriquez’s “Achievement of Desire” illustrates how education can take the place of one’s cultural tradition in pursuit of knowledge. The loss of language is the focus of Silko’s speech, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”. “The F Word” by Firoozeh Dumas shows how profound words in one language can be funny in another, as well as hurtful. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua, she talks about how the education system tried to remove her culture by taking away her language. The two authors take opposite views on education and how it directly affected their lives. While embracing education by becoming a scholarship boy, Rodriquez shows how his desire for knowledge overcame his families’ desire for cultural tradition. Anzaldua expresses her feelings about how education continually tried to forcefully remove her Spanish heritage. The term “scholarship boy” came from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and means that the student must move between two culturally extreme environments during their progression of education. In Rodriquez’s account of his early educational experiences, he demonstrates Hoggart’s core definition of being a scholarship boy to the tee. While finishing his dissertation...
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...The Effects of Clashing Cultures Our world today is populated with distinctive cultures and their unique languages, communication, beliefs, etc. that make our universe exquisitely diverse. As human beings, we tend to adapt to our own culture quite fast and we become used to perceiving our group of people as the only thing that is "good." We fear wanting to assimilate or broaden our knowledge to other cultures, for it is our natural instinct to shut out anything unfamiliar to us. In her essay, "Arts of the Contact Zone," Mary Louise Pratt argues for importance of understanding the point where two cultures clash, the contact zone, and that it can be powerful to engage in one's culture by expanding our grasp of knowledge and wisdom in the diversity we live in today. Pratt introduces three major concepts in her argument that exemplify the objective of her essay: the contact zone, autoethnographic texts, and transculturation. Upon viewing two other pieces by Richard Rodriguez, “The Achievement of Desire” and Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Rodriguez and Anzaldua demonstrate Pratt's argument by supporting her concepts about the influence of contact zones between two juxtaposing cultures. In her argument, "Arts of the Contact Zone," Pratt introduces the theme of her argument, the contact zones: the point where cultures clash and come together in unison. Where one culture has a lot more power than the other. A contact zone is the root of how...
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...Registered Nurse Language Laura Lynch Nevada State College ABSTRACT This paper discusses the significance of utilizing standard language and writing skills as it relates to multiple tiers of communication required in the nursing profession, as well as the importance of maintaining these elite level communication skills. In addition, this paper also includes a comparison between two minority authors that argue for the importance of their respective Chicana and black, “native tongues “. The pros and cons of their arguments is contrasted against authors’ Allen, Chapman, O’Connor and Francis (2007), whom address the significance of language and writing within the area of professional nursing that upholds the elite verbal and written communication standards practiced in nursing today. The Communications and the Language of Nursing The language spoken in the profession of nursing requires a wide spectrum of core communication skills that provide a verbal bridge of common understanding of illness, healing, wellness or prevention. These skills require the continual change and transformation of the nursing profession’s language. From the perspective of the patient’s bedside and nurse-to-nurse communications, through the nurse to the specialist, the criteria for common core can be acknowledged. Additionally, the personal slang and reflections of self identification shared in Anzaldua and hooks’ essays demonstrates the immediate need for the requirement of a common core language...
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...Madeline Steffey Intersectionality with Kimberle Crenshaw and Gloria Anzaldua Intersectionality can be described as the study of the intersection of different forms of discrimination experienced by individuals who are members of multiple minority groups. For example, a Hispanic woman faces barriers in society not only because she is Hispanic, but also because she is a woman and one could not fully understand her oppression without taking both of these aspects into consideration. Kimberly Crenshaw and Gloria Anzaldua both provide accounts of intersectionality and utilize different approaches in their explanations. I will begin by analyzing their approaches separately, then I will explain how Crenshaw might object to Anzaldua’s account because it does not contain adequate factual evidence or realistic solutions. As a response from Anzaldua to Crenshaw’s objections, I will assert that Anzaldua effectively used personal and cultural experiences to reflect on intersectionality. Throughout her life, Anzaldua felt like she lived within borders. That in order to live and survive, she had to cross borders continuously. This is because multiple aspects of her life typically result in societal discrimination. She is unique in that she is a minority in several ways such as being a mix of Mexican and Anglo-Saxon, as well as being a lesbian. These aspects overlap and intertwine, which results in intersectionality. When crossing borders, one has to adapt to the different norms that are...
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...Ecofeminism and Monsanto There are many different kinds of ecofeminist theories, but most are based on the belief that the patriarchal societies we live in create destruction in their need to dominate humans and nature. Ecofeminism is a belief that all struggles are connected, and are the cause of patriarchy playing “...god by manipulating, controlling and attempting to transcend nature” (Mcguire 4). This is why Ecofeminists are committed to challenging all hierarchies, oppressions, and dualistic thinking that empowers patriarchy, and deems “Otherness” as inferior. It is through this feminist theory I would like to analyze the destructive power of Monsanto, the largest agricultural corporation in the United States, has in the Unites States particularly in the farm industry, the effect they created in the food supply, and their effect as a global corporation. In order to analyze the impact of Monsanto, a feminist lens of intersectionality is needed to see how the genetically modified seeds created by Monsanto lead to their domination of the nature and humans. According to Kimberle Crenshaw, “...any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner” (58). Crenshaw argues that an experience is greater than a sum of two factors, and instead that the experience is unique due to these factors. In the case of Monsanto, I will analyze the unique effects this corporation has created in their quest to maximize their profits....
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