In her essay “Literary Wetback,” Chicana poet Alicia Gaspar de Alba describes growing up in La Frontera, a border town that itself felt neither American nor Mexican, while at the same time somehow being a combination of both. In her youth, she tended to integrate others’ perspective that one could not be in a cultural “border state” -- authentically Mexican, Spanish, and American as a valid identity. To support this, Gaspar de Alba gives an example of “cultural schizophrenia”: “At home I was pura Mejicana. At school I was an American citizen.” At home she was punished for speaking English, and at school for speaking Spanish outside of Spanish class. Expressing herself in either language within a forbidden setting came to be delightfully