La Frontera By Gloria Anzaldúa Analysis

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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 and inscribed upon the body itself. This shift, from territoriality to …show more content…
She clearly understands home-as-territoriality to be imbued with a violence when she writes that cisheteronormativity instills with lesbians of color a “[f]ear of going home” due to the likely possibility of social and familial rejection as well as the potential for even physical violence. The fact that home-as-territoriality will be the subject rejecting rather than she is what justifies the statement “[n]ot me sold out my people but they me.” Cisheteronormativity, then, is an incredibly powerful agent in forcing Anzaldúa to change her narrative of home, to be able to be “at home” even as she leaves home-as-territoriality. In fact, for many queer Mestizas who are forced to leave or are afraid of returning to home-as-territoriality the narrative of home-as-corporality becomes incredibly important to create home anywhere. Though this is not the only system of violence which influences

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