Gloria Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera Analysis

In Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, the question of home is always close at hand. Questions such as what does it mean to be home and what is a home are constantly circulating throughout the text and tend to haunt the Mestiza body as a raced, foreign, and oriental body. She writes that “…in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano [emphasis original] is in my system. I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back.” This is a crucial interjection made by Anzaldúa because it indicates a framework in which the narrative of home is transformed from the materiality of home as a territoriality, as physical space demarcated within the boundaries of land towards a theorization of home as imminently corporeal …show more content…
This tune is particularly important because the humming, an assemblage between frequencies, affect, the mucous membrane, and various other components, arranges the space affectively, it creates a block of sound that imbues the space with meaning and comfort regardless of its physical composition. The child, in this example, much like Anzaldúa, carries home with them. This form of homemaking becomes particularly important for Anzaldúa because she indicates that it is her immersion in her cultural roots (“rural, peasant, isolated, mexicanismo” ) that allows her to carry home. It is not the material artifacts that Anzaldúa carries with her, but it is the affective arrangement of lines and speeds that becomes important. She arranges home not within the materiality of space—a buying of land, a movement of furniture, a collection of art hung on the wall—but rather arranges home through the lines and speeds she brings with her—the quickness of her speech and its slippage between various English and Spanish dialects, the intensity of her gaze, the ways in which she feels the air around her. The question of home as lines and speeds surrounds her entire narrative of return. She