Anzaldua’s writing often revolves largely around the concepts of social and cultural marginalization, and is heavily influenced by her own complex identity as a queer Chicana-Tejana and by her experience growing up along the U.S.-Mexican border. Her literary contributions to the Chicana community as well as to the fields of feminist and queer theory situated Anzaldua as a leading contributor to these areas through post-modern writing. Her semi-autobiographical book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza was one of those banned from the Arizona public school system in an effort to prevent Mexican-American studies from being taught to high school students. This failed effort to silence radical and outspoken voices like that of Anzaldua in Borderlands goes to show just how necessary her movement of Chicana women is. In the voice of Anzaldua herself, “A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.”

 

Anzaldua is most well known for her semi-autobiographical book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, and published numerous other works during her lifetime. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color was co-written by Cherrie Moraga and gained much attention after it was published in 1981. Anzaldua also co-wrote Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienda Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (1990) and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002). She has also published a number of children’s books including Prietita Has a Friend, Friends from the Other Side - Amigos del Otro Lado, and Prietita y La Llorona.

 

Language

Anzaldua often incorporates many different languages, sub-languages, and hybrid languages into her writing through the method of “code-switching.” Code-switching involves alternating back and forth between different languages, which Anzaldua does seamlessly in many of her works, often not pausing to translate for English speakers. At the time, this technique was almost unprecedented and Anzaldua helped pave the way for future authors to use similar methods in their writing. She uses not only standard English and Spanish, but also other dialects including slang English, Mexican Spanish, Chicano Spanish (spoken in the southwest U.S.), and pachuco, a rough street slang. In Borderlands/La Frontera, the many languages used represent the complicated and sometimes contradictory identities of Chicanx living in the United States. By treating each as equally important within her writing, Anzaldua legitimizes the informal and hybrid Spanish-English dialects as being equally important. The blurring of language Anzaldua demonstrates works to break down the idea of there being definite borders between the United States and Mexico.

 

Mestiza consciousness and border culture

One consistency throughout Anzaldua’s writing concerning Chicanx identity is her insistence on recognizing and celebrating all aspects of her mixed ethnic background. She addresses the problem that many Chicanx individuals who live near the border of the U.S. and Mexico face, which is the issue of how to deal with an identity that is multi-faceted and often contradictory. In Borderlands/La Frontera she asserts that “the future is mestiza,” and demands an acceptance of all three cultures she sees as making up her identity: white, Mexican, and Indian. In this book, she reclaims previously negative terms such as “half-breed” and “mestiza,” and makes them positive and future-oriented. Anzaldua sees the United States as becoming a nation of mestizas, where no one feels that they must choose one single part of themselves in order to be accepted. By embracing her tricultural identity, Anzaldua challenges the idea of borders as strictly defined. Instead, she criticizes them as artificial boundaries, boxing people into identities that don’t wholly represent who they really are. There is much more overlap than we might suspect.

 

Feminist and queer theory:

In much of her writing, Anzaldua seeks to bring together women of color in order to highlight the unique challenges they face as members of multiple marginalized groups. In This Bridge Called My Back, she challenges white feminists to acknowledge their own privilege and to recognize how Latinas, as well as African American, Asian American, and other minority women experience sexism on a different and often more frequent and harmful level. Although she most often identifies as a lesbian in her own writing, Anzaldua has expressed feeling sexual attraction towards both men and women, and even animals and trees. Much like her multi-sided ethnic identity, Anzaldua sees her sexuality as all-encompassing and unable to be defined as one thing or another.

 

Spirituality

Although often ignored by critics, Anzaldua has expressed how important of a role spirituality plays in Borderlands/La Frontera as well as her other works. Religion along the border often takes on a hybrid form, as different aspects of spirituality are blended together into a syncretic form. In an interview about her work, she says, “My spirituality I call spiritual mestizaje...my philosophy is like philosophical mestizaje where I take from all different cultures - for instance, from the cultures of Latin America, the people of color and also the Europeans.”

 

Activism

Activism is at the heart of a vast majority of Anzaldua’s work. Much of her writing seeks to give voices to marginalized groups, whether that may be women, Latinx individuals, members of the LGBTQ community, or a combination of the three. Borderlands/La Frontera serves almost as a manifesto for Chicana women living in the southwest U.S. and calls for change not only among this community, but throughout the United States. Her voice was also at the forefront of the intersectional feminist movement, often giving voices to those ignored by the more mainstream movement led by white women. This is especially evident in her works such as This Bridge Called My Back and Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienda Caras, which bring together the voices of non-white women in order to create a diverse and unique anthology of female writers.