La Prieta By Evangelina Anzaldúa

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was a brilliant, American writer who focused on creating works that dealt with Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Throughout her writing career, Anzaldúa played an important role in the Chicano/a movement and the Chicana feminist movement by composing essays about her experiences as a mestiza. The Chicano and Chicana movement, also called the Chicano/a Civil Rights Movement or El Movimiento, was a civil rights movement extending the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s with the stated goal of achieving Mexican American empowerment (López 79). The purpose of the Chicana feminist movement was to fight for equality and break down barriers for women (Gandhi 72). Regardless of the …show more content…
In her essay “La Prieta,” she begins by saying, “When I was born, Mamágrande Locha inspected my buttocks looking for the dark blotch, the sign of indio, or worse, of mulatto blood” (220). In this sentence or passage, she clearly points out that she faced discrimination since the moment she was born, and even worse, the discrimination began with her family. Anzaldúa’s family was not content with her brown skin. In fact, her grandmother had fair skin and blue eyes and was even part German. According to Anzaldúa, her grandmother made smart remarks like, “Too bad mihijita was morena, muy prieta” (220). Her grandmother and the rest of her family would continuously tease her for being a dark-skinned woman. In addition, Anzaldúa’s mother would tell her to stay away from the sun or else she would risk getting darker. The fact that she dealt with discrimination against her skin color at such a young age prepared Anzaldúa for the discrimination she would face in the future. Anzaldúa acknowledged that her skin color would influence the way she would be treated for the rest of her life. Furthermore, Anzaldúa was also discriminated against for being a woman. In her essay “La Prieta,” she mentions that early in her childhood, she had to deal with the shame of being a woman. Anzaldúa began menstruating when she was only three months old and began developing breasts at seven. In “La …show more content…
In fact, when Anzaldúa tried to become an active supporter of the feminist movement, her voice was suppressed because of her status as a woman of color. Therefore, in the 1980s Anzaldúa co-edited The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with Cherríe Moraga in hopes that she would help other women of color have their voice heard. In addition, she wanted her voice heard. This Bridge Called My Back is a powerful book filled with different stories about experiences different women faced in their lives. The experiences faced by these women all have one thing in common; they each involve some kind of discrimination for either being a woman, being a race other than white, or both. In the introduction to The Bridge Called My Back, Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga both do an excellent job in explaining what the book is about and what it stands for. This book of six sections is “intended to reflect what these women feel to be the major areas of concern for Third World women in the U.S” (xxiv). The six sections include: “1) how visibility/invisibility as women of color forms our radicalism; 2) the ways in which Third World women derive a feminist political theory specific-ally from our racial/cultural background and experience; 3) the destructive and demoralizing effects of racism in the women's move-ment; 4) the cultural, class, and sexuality differences that