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.