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For Gloria Anzaldúa: Collecting America, Performing Friendship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ivy Schweitzer
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Extract

It was an unexpectedly chilly day in May 2004 when the news flashed across various electronic mailing lists that Gloria Anzaldúa had died from complications related to diabetes. I was in the midst of teaching a course on contemporary issues in feminism to a formidable group of undergraduate women and men, in which we were reading “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” and “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” These are my favorite essays from Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a text published in 1987 and still crucial to any understanding of identity and politics in feminism today. The announcement, made by Anzaldúa's coeditor and compañera, Cherrie Moraga, requested that we construct homemade shrines to honor Anzaldúa's presence and aid her passing. My classroom was in Dartmouth Hall, a venerable eighteenth-century building only a stone's throw from Baker Library, whose tower sports a weathervane with the image of Dartmouth's founder, Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, teaching a crosslegged, befeathered, and pipe-smoking Indian, Samson Occom, his most famous student, beneath the symbolic lone pine. Into the graywalled room, I brought objects that seemed out of place there and incendiary: candles, flowers, incense, and books—an armful of wellthumbed volumes containing the nearly talismanic words, her own and those of others, that Anzaldúa struggled to bring into print.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 1: Special Topic: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature , January 2006 , pp. 285 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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References

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