Austin LD
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, born September 26, 1942 in Jesus Maria of the Valley (Texas) and died 15 May 2004 in Santa Cruz, is a writer, poet, scholar and feminist Chicana lesbian.
Anzaldúa was born in the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas Sept. 26, 1942, of Urbano and Amalia Anzaldúa. When she was eleven, his family moved to Hargill (Texas). Despite the racism, sexism and other forms of oppression it undergoes as Tejana (Texas with Hispanic and Latin American origins) of the sixth generation, despite the death of her father when she was 14, Anzaldúa was able to continue his studies University. She received a license to Pan American University and MA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Adult, she worked several years as a school teacher before going to Austin for his mastery. After graduation, she moved to California where she earned a living by his writings, lectures and teaching quarters at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Florida Atlantic University and others. She became known as Co-Leader This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) with Cherrie Moraga, directing Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (1990), et en codirigeant This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002). Elle écrivit également Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Ses écrits tissent l’anglais et l’espagnol en une seule langue, une idée qui découle de sa situation aux « frontières », une position d’identités multiples. Son essai autobiographique, La Prieta, est paru en English (for the most part) This Bridge Called My Back and Spanish (for the most part) on Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres en los Estados Unidos tercermundistas). Literary award from the National Endowment for the Arts rewarded Anzaldúa in 1991 (the same year as Barbara Hammer).
It has greatly helped to define more broadly feminism, as she participated in the development of the field of Chicano cultural theory and queer theory. One of his contributions was to introduce into the academic world of the United States the term "miscegenation" in the sense of a state located beyond design "-is one or the other." In his theoretical work, Anzaldúa calls for "New mestizo" (new mestiza), which she describes as a conscious person and its inextricable contradictory identities. Itself made use Nahuatl word "patlache" (lesbian) to describe themselves. It employs the new "angles of vision" to overcome the binary thinking of the Western world. The post-colonial feminism illustrates the thinking of the "new mestiza".
While the race usually divided people, Anzaldúa calls people of different races to confront their fears in order to move towards a less odious and more useful world. In The Conciencia the Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness, a text that appears repeatedly in the course of women’s studies, Anzaldúa notes that separatism invoked by Chicanos/Chicanas does not advance the cause, but maintains the same racial division in instead. Several of Anzaldúa work challenge the status quo between the movements in which it undertook, in order to make a real difference in the world rather than for specific groups.
Anzaldúa was interested in spirituality: his grandmother was a curandera (traditional healer). In several of his works, it refers to his devotion to the Virgen de Guadalupe (Virgin of Guadalupe), the Nahuatl/Toltec deities and Orishas Oshun Yoruba and Yemayá. In his later writings, she has developed the concepts of spiritual activism and nepantleras to describe the ways in which contemporary social actors could combine spirituality with political activism to enable revolutionary change.
She died May 15, 2004, at her home in Santa Cruz, from complications due to diabetes. It was a few weeks to complete her thesis and received his doctorate at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Why am I compelled to write Because it is the writing that saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I have to keep the spirit of my revolt and keep me alive. Because the world I created in my writings that compensates the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, I associated with him a handful to grasp. – "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers," This Bridge Called My Back
At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we must give up the opposite bank, the division between the two fighters to death is somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once, and we see both through the snake’s eyes and the eyes of the eagle. Or maybe we decide to separate us from the dominant culture, through profit and loss, and across the border in an entirely new and separate territory. Or we can take another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react. – "The Conciencia the Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness"
Bridges are thresholds to other realities, primitive symbols, archetypes of consciousness evolution. They are places of passage, pipes and connectors that connote transition, crossing borders and changing perspectives. Bridges dévident of liminal spaces (thresholds) between worlds, spaces I call Nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning earth in the middle. Transformations occur in this in-between, a space unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always in transition, without clearly defined boundaries. Nepantla is tierra desconodica and live in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of movement-a sobering and even alarming feeling. Most of us are so often Nepantla it became a sort of "home". Although this condition connects us to other ideas, other people and other worlds, we feel threatened by these new connections and changes they cause. – "(Un) natural bridges" (in This Bridge We Call Home)
Living in a multicultural society, we cross the worlds of others without judgment. We live in the pockets of others, we occupy the territories of the other, we live in close contact and intimacy with each other at home, at school, at work. Are we complicit Us and them, white and colored, Christians and Jews, self and Other, oppressor and oppressed. We are all in the position of being simultaneously inside/outside. The Spanish word "nosotras" means "us." Theorizing being inside/outside I wrote the word with a bar between our (us) and otras (others). Today, the division between the majority of "us" and "them" remains intact. This country will not recognize its walls or boundaries, where people are arrested or stopped by to themselves, the lines they are not allowed to exceed… the future belongs to those who cultivate cultural differences and sensitivities quiemploient these skills to forge a hybrid consciousness that transcends the mentality of "us" against "them" and we will lead us to a position connecting other extreme of our realities cultural. –Interviews/Entrevistas