Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was a self described Chicana/Tejana/lesbian/dyke/feminist/writer/poet/cultural theorist. She is best known for her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza about growing up on the U.S./Mexican border.
Anzaldúa was born in 1942 in Rio Grande Valley, Texas. At a young age, she developed an extremely rare hormonal imbalance, and was menstruating from the age of three months. She would later say that “I had no sexual identity because this whole part of my body was in constant pain all of the time. … I couldn’t play like other kids. I couldn’t open my legs, my mother had to put a little piece of rag there. My breasts started growing when I was about six, so she made me this little girdle. I was totally alienated from this part of my body.” and that she was “born a queer.”
Anzaldúa found solace in books, and would spend her free time creating stories to share with her siblings. She graduated as valedictorian of her high school class, despite the fact that she suffered from discrimination due to the fact that she spoke Spanish. She was able to prove her teachers wrong about “Meskin” children, and was the only Chicana in advanced high school classes. She continued her education at Texas Women’s University. During her two years there, she was able to bond with other queer students and became involved with the Chicano and feminist movements. She then attended Pan American University, where she graduated with a bachelors degree in English, Art, and Secondary Education in 1969. Anzaldúa then taught for several years in the public school system, facing the same racial discrimination as she had as a student. In her summer breaks, she attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned a masters in English and Education.
In 1973, Anzaldúa relocated to Indiana, working as a liaison between the public school system and migrant farm worker’s children. She began to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, and took a creative writing course. Anzaldúa began exploring feminist theory in her writing, and was active in a number of political movements including the farmworkers movement as well as Chicano youth associations, although she disliked their male, heteronormative focus. In 1977, Anzaldúa moved to California and joined the Feminist Writers Guild, where she quickly became dissatisfied with the focus on writings of white, middle-class feminists. Two years later, she teamed up with Chicana lesbian playwright Cherrie Moraga to co-edit the ground breaking ‘This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour’. The book was published in 1983, and is now considered essential feminist reading, as the various authors including Audre Lorde deal with the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality in their letters, poetry, stories, essays and artwork. It won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.
Throughout the 1980’s, Anzaldúa continued teaching, writing and travelling to hold workshops and lecture. In 1987, Anzaldúa published her best known work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, in which she discusses growing up on the U.S.-Mexico border, life as a Chicana-Tejana lesbian feminist including her experiences with heteronormativity, colonialism, and male dominance. She also develops her theory of “the new mestiza” and “mestiza consciousness,” in which she feels that barriers should be broken down so that we can fight against the male/female gender binary. In her book, Anzaldúa switches between Chicano Spanish and English, intending for the reader to have to piece together her language and narrative, just as feminists have to struggle to have their ideas heard in a patriarchal society. A year later, she returned to graduate school to pursue her doctorate.
In 1990, still disassified with the lack of a platform for writers of colour, Anzaldúa published her second edited collection entitled Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Anzaldúa continued to write, contributing fiction, poetry and essays to the second-wave feminist journal Conditions and continuing to develop feminist and queer theory. In 1993, she published two bilingual children’s books featuring a strong, female protagonist,
Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro lado and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/Prietita y la llorona (1995). In 2000, she published Interviews/Entrevistas, delving keeping into both her own biography and her theories and works in progress. In 2002, she published her final work this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation. Two years later, she died from complications of diabetes, and in 2005 she was posthumously awarded a doctorate in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Anzaldúa was an internationally recognized as a leading cultural theorist and a highly innovative author, who stated that “While I advocate putting Chicana, tejana, working-class, dyke-feminist poet, writer theorist in front of my name, I do so for reasons different than those of the dominant culture… so that the Chicana and lesbian and all the other persons in me don’t get erased, omitted, or killed.” During her lifetime, she won a number of awards for her work, including the Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award, Lesbians Rights Award, Sappho Award of Distinction, National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2001, an anthology entitled Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa’s Life and Work Transformed Our Own, featuring 30 contributors reflecting on the impact of her writing, conversation and life was published, and in 2012, she was named one of the 31 LGBT history “icons” by the organisers of LGBT History Month. In her honour, the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize is now awarded annually in conjunction with the Anzaldúa Literary Trust to a poet whose work explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. Anzaldúa’s published, and unpublished manuscripts now form part of the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.