For several years now, at least since the 2000 census, the United States has in one way or another told itself that it needs to come to terms with what it means to live in a country of over forty million Latinos/as. Latina actors grace the covers of People magazine, Latin beats percolate through the earbuds of iPods, and McDonald's serves up breakfast burritos alongside its McMuffins. In the academic world, the increasing consciousness of the Latino/a presence in the United States means that it is now unthinkable for any major university not to have a program of studies focusing on the histories and cultures of this ill-defined population; it means border theory is increasingly present on our syllabi; and it means that we all nod our heads wisely when the name “Gloria Anzaldúa” is mentioned. For years before her untimely death, Anzaldúa complained bitterly about being “repeatedly tokeni[zed]” (“Haciendo Caras” xvi), as one of the same half dozen women continually called on as a resource for academic collaboration. Being a token meant that she saw clearly how she was both overhyped and treated less than seriously; worse, she felt drained of the energy that would allow her to continue her literary and political work.

The Rio Grande Valley, also known as the Magic Valley, is situated in the southeastern tip of Texas, circumscribed on the east by the Gulf of Mexico and on the south by the Rio Grande and the Mexican borderlands. Here, among the tall, green, swaying palm trees, the short, squatty mesquite trees, and the endless rows of verdant agricultural fields, Gloria Anzaldúa grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. The Magic Valley has produced a series of distinguished scholars, poets, and novelists, including Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, the Saldivar clan (Sonia Saldivar-Hull, Ramon Saldivar, and José Saldivar), Américo Paredes, and of course Anzaldúa. Although I do not claim the same stature as the above luminaries, I too grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1940s and 1950s, in a tiny town called Rio Hondo, population 701, which is but a few miles from Hargill, Texas, where Anzaldúa was born (1942) and raised. It is from this personal perspective, of one who grew up in the rich farmlands of the Magic Valley and experienced the economic and sociohistorical context of the era, that I propose to discuss Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Specifically, I focus on the sense of place, race, language, and sexuality that characterized the area and Anzaldúa's brilliant insights in the narrative she wove and reconfigured in the pages of Borderlands.

In time, the Texas-born and California-rooted Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004) may be regarded as a key American writer of our late twentieth century. In the interim, she is a foundational figure for the fields, markets, and affects known as Latina/o—studies, literature, theory, and metaphysics. Her most traveled concepts, such as “borderlands,” have also made a good impression in more legitimized areas of intellectual inquiry, including postcolonial theory and cultural studies. This last achievement has led the critic Frances R. Aparicio to note that the notion of “border subject” elaborated by Anzaldúa and others has “been the most important concept that Latino studies has contributed to cultural studies in the United States, Europe, and Latin America” (13).

Gloria Anzaldúa is known as a poet, a postcolonial theoretician, the author of Borderlands / la Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), and the editor or coeditor of important anthologies. She also wrote two books for children, Friends from the Other Side / Amigos del otro lado (1993) and Prietita and the Ghost Woman / Prietita y la Llorona (1995). Here Anzaldúa honed her sense of “conocimientos,” other ways of knowing. She imprinted her heroine, Prietita, as a “bridge”—a way of transforming the world. For Anzaldúa, writing books for children was an important step of activism because children would effect necessary cultural and social transformations.

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.

Knowing of Gloria Anzaldúa's work from her 1981 coedited volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color when I came across Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) at a gay and lesbian bookstore, I immediately picked it up. It would not be altogether hyperbolic to say that amid the contingencies of life and reading, that was one of my luckiest finds.