The last stanza of Anzaldúa’s poem “To Live in the Borderlands” is instructional in nature and contains two distinct suggestions. This advice is pointed towards those living in “the Borderlands” which seems to represent a non-physical space of both racial and gender difference. Therefore “sin fronteras” suggests that those who do not have a single racial identity or who do not fall into the gender binary must accept all others who are in a similar crossroad of race, gender or both. The last line of the poem “be a crossroads” follows up on the suggestion of living “sin fronteras”, and extends the invitation to not only accept all others who do not fall into distinct categories of race or gender, but also to act as a crossroads, a point of connection and solidarity for these people.
The transitions between English and Spanish in the poem function as the voice of the author as a bilingual person who most likely switches between the two languages in their everyday life and also as a voice of Spanish speaking person insulting them for being mixed race. Particularly the lines “ni gabacha, eras mestiza, mulata // … // you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat” show this rejection and name calling the author has endured from other Spanish speaking people in their own terms. The effect of this is to place the reader more in the author’s position, and to make the insults from Spanish speaking people more real and nuanced rather than substituting in semi-equivalent English insults.