The author of To Live in the Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua, is of mixed race as she tells us in second and third stanza of the poem. The poem continues to discuss how torn she is living in the “borderlands” “caught in the crossfire between camps.” The author cannot choose a side as she doesn’t fit in with any specific one as seen in this stanza:
To live in the Borderlands means knowing that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,
is no longer speaking to you,
the mexicanas call you rajetas, that denying the Anglo inside you
is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;
The poem switches between English and Spanish which is a linguistic representation of the fact that she is stuck between cultures and doesn’t fit in entirely with any. In other words, to live in the borderlands is to not have a voice and to not fit in with any specific culture. That is why the last stanza of the poem reads: “To survive the borderlands / you must live sin fronteras / be a crossroads.” In English, “sin fronteras” translates to “without borders.” The author is implying that to survive, you have to be a bridge between cultures and to help people from different cultures and ethnicities understand each other.
Gloria Anzaldúa, “To Live In the Borderlands Means You,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 194-195.