Day: February 16, 2018

The last few lines of Anzaldúa’s poem suggest that living in the space that she calls “the Borderlands” requires being able to walk freely between the identities that cross or border one another. As the speaker in “To Live in the Borderlands” provides several examples of how identities and languages can cause conflict among one another, they also maintain that it is necessary to allow these elements to converge. By incorporating Spanish into her poem, Anzaldúa demonstrates her ability to fluidly move between cultures and confront what results from these two languages meeting in her poem, fully embodying her statement that living the Borderlands requires one to “be a crossroads.”

The use of Spanish interwoven through English is reminiscent of “Spanglish” and directly addresses people who are bilingual in English and Spanish, effectively cutting off those who do not speak Spanish from fully understanding the poem. Although a monolingual English speaker could look up the meaning of the words, this demands the non-Spanish speaking reader to work to be at the same level of understanding as readers who are bilingual. The use and italicization of the Spanish words in this poem also serve to highlight the weight they hold in the poem. While I was reading this work, I thought of the poem “The Space Between Skin is Called a Wound,” which describes the experience of someone who lives between two cultures but is unable to move between them with the same fluidity that Anzaldúa does because they are not a speaker of two languages.

 

Reference

Gloria Anzaldúa, “To Live In the Borderlands Means You,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 194-195.

In the poem “To Live in the Boarderlands,” by Gloria Anzaldua, the stanza, “to survive the Boarderlands/ you must live sin fronteras/ be a crossroads” closes the poem. The poem discusses living in the borderland and not fully being one identity or another. Rather than identifying as one thing, the poet is a combination of thing. These different identities may be conflicting with each other. The poem discusses the poets confusion of these conflicting identities. This results in the confusion of where the poets place is within their community where they feel they may not fully belong. In the final stanza, sin fronteras translates to without boarders. This can be understood as to survive the borderlands you must live without borders. In other words, you must be able to cross over from one identity to the next. This is further displayed with the poets use of transitioning between the English and Spanish language. The poet never fully speaks English and never fully speaks Spanish. By doing so they are able to merge their identities and cultures into one. They are able to live in both situations. They can transition from one identity to the other because both identities are theirs.

Gloria Anzaldúa, “To Live In the Borderlands Means You,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 194-195.

“To Live in the Borderlands” by Gloria Anzaldua discusses issues in the borderlands between America and Mexico in order to bring up conflicts between identities and facets of a person within an individual. The poem is written in two different languages—Spanish and English—which show that duality has clearly influenced the author’s life.

In order to fully understand the poem, one must understand both the English and Spanish words. I know how to understand the transitions between the two languages because I took an undergraduate course in Spanish. Using both languages may be the author’s way of showing the mingling of two cultures.

In the last stanza of the poem, Anzaldua writes, “To survive the Borderlands/you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads” (Anzaldua, 3). “Sin fronteras” means to live without borders.  I understand this last stanza to mean that people in the borderlands must conform and assimilate into both cultures. She describes people of the borderlands to have no sense of belonging because they are torn between two cultures, and have a new culture that has formed in the borderlands.

-CB

References

Anzaldua, G. “To Live in the Borderlands.” Borderlands-La Frontera. Aunt Lute Books, 1987, pp. 194-195.  http://www.revistascisan.unam.mx/Voices/pdfs /7422.pdf