NEPANTLA/COATLICUE/CONOCIMIENTO.

• Author: Torres, Gerald

BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA. By Gloria Anzaldua. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. 1987. (Aunt Lute Books 2012 ed.). Pp. 300. $22.95.

INTRODUCTION

I was asked to review the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Gloria Anzaldua's landmark book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. (1) Even though the secondary literature on this book is voluminous, (2) interestingly, there is very little legal use of her work despite its centrality to feminist theory and its critique of identity politics as they had emerged in critical theory. (3) So what is she saying to those who study law, its uses, and its institutions?

Reading Borderlands, one is struck by how many of the ideas that Anzaldua surfaces have become commonplace in legal literature, although such literature fails to reference Anzaldua's critical use of these terms. She complicates ideas and fuses form and meaning in ways that challenge conventional readings. Her work gives necessary cultural articulation to methodologies of expression and standpoint epistemology. Borderlands is an example of how resistance to conventional expressive forms is part of the critique of those forms and their ideological baggage. Critical race theory (CRT) has often used this idea. For example, the early work of Patricia Williams and Derrick Bell illustrates this move. (4)

This Review will first examine the crucial concepts that Anzaldua deploys in developing her theoretical perspective. It will then consider how these ideas have been used in legal analysis, especially in critical legal studies (CLS) and CRT. Many will likely object that the ideas Anzaldua uses were developed independently of the legal context, which is likely true because some of these ideas were in the air during certain historical moments. Whether they retain the critical cutting edge emblematic of Anzaldua's work is a separate question but necessary to assess her work's impact in legal scholarship.

One of the critical things to remember is that Anzaldua's work is an example of reflexive scholarship, which has marked the scholarship of both CLS and CRT. (5) Thus it was central to her work that she was a seventh-generation American, a Chicana, a lesbian, a type-1 diabetic, and a working-class activist. Her identity construction presaged labeling her analytic and epistemic position as intersectional. (6) Anzaldua's work was embodied in this way. Her material position provided a vantage point into the historical conditions that gave birth to her situation and the necessity for a new mestizaje epistemic. Yet, despite her commitment to the materiality of knowledge (especially self-knowledge), she remains firmly nondeterminist.

For many Chicano students and scholars, and for Anzaldua, the first step was to recognize the embeddedness of their experience to understand how it produced discontinuities with received historical narratives and observed social life. (7) The official stories were often one expression of the marginalization they experienced. Jose David Saldivar, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford, learned that "culture ... always lived somewhere else--never in my own backyard." (8) Professor Ella Maria Diaz goes directly to Anzaldua to capture this sense of being in-between: "Flying away from the center of my universe ... I entered a state of Nepantla in the Anzalduan sense." (9) She goes on to explain,

"Nepantla" is a Nahuatl word for "a space between two bodies of water, the space between two worlds." Physically it is a limited space, but according to Gloria Anzaldua, Nepantla is also conceptually infinite; it is a "space where you are not this or that but where you are changing." A physically confining yet theoretically expansive space.... (10) As both Saldivar and Diaz describe, Anzaldua also explains the process of needing to move away to understand the place you left. (11) By inhabiting an "in-betweenness," you can construct critical and creative space that permits you to know how the processes that alienated you from the sources of authenticity were also those that tried to reduce the complexity of the identity that is at the heart of mestizaje. (12) An aesthetic and a political economy emerge from this third place. The aesthetic and political economy are transcultural and anticolonial. (13) Borders are crossed and recrossed, and language and expression generally become sites of contestation and manifestations of the multiple epistemologically required consciousnesses. (14) As I will discuss later, the concept of Nepantla, or both personal and temporal inbetweenness, the links between where we are, where we are from, and where we are excluded physically and psychically, is at the root of both CRT and LatCrit. (15)

Before turning to Anzaldua directly, I think it is important to point out that emerging literature criticizes her for erasing Blackness and essentializing Indigeneity. (16) While I will not explore this criticism in depth, it strikes me as missing the point of Anzaldua's project. While she does not ignore the presence of Afro-descendants in the construction of the mestizaje, it is not a central focus of her inquiry and, in many ways, not central to the initial cultural milieu with which she was embedded. The same could be said of the elision of Asian presence. The point of Anzaldua's construction of the border as a theoretical space is that it is perforce complex. Moreover, the colonial project that formed Mexican culture was, by the time Anzaldua was writing, already a distinct admixture of Spanish and British imperial designs that took a specific form in Texas. (17)

The colonial project of the Spanish was distinct from that of the British and the French. (18) How each colonizing power dealt with native people was complicated by specific colonial projects. For example, native people in the Americas whom Spain colonized were made subjects of the crown and were not recognized as having a distinct political existence. (19) Labor was extracted from them and given a legal gloss through the institution of the encomienda. (20) The British colonial project excluded native people from the polity that the settlers were constructing, and the native nations were recognized as having a separate political existence. Thus, treaties were initially a device for regulating Native people even as the wars of extermination continued. (21) Each European power brutally oppressed the people it encountered, but each had a fundamentally different juridical basis for doing so. (22) The large maroon communities in Central and South America added a layer of complexity. (23) They linked the post-colonial fate of Afro-descendants and Indigenous people in ways fundamentally different from how their destinies are linked in Anglo-North America. (24)

The impact of slavery and Afro-descendants on the colonial projects similarly had complex implications that differed from country to country, especially after the colonies claimed their independence. Black people were always present but in different ways. Black people were present in the Western and Latin American colonial expansion if for no other reason than that a Muslim Caliphate occupied the Iberian Peninsula for over 700 years. The Muslim colonists came out of North Africa and into the Iberian Peninsula, creating the administrative territory of Al-Andalus.

It is instructive to remember that Pueblo historian Joe Sando wrote, "The first white man our people saw was a black man." (25) Sando was referring to the Moroccan guide, Esteban, who was the first non-Native to enter Pueblo territory. (26) The extension of empire by the United States with its annexation of Texas made Black chattel slavery legal again in a territory that had outlawed it almost eleven years earlier. In the years before Texas' independence, fewer than 500 enslaved Black people were in the region, and it is likely they were smuggled in by the settlers from the east. The foundational law of the Republic of Texas annulled Mexico's Emancipation Proclamation and stripped Black residents of citizenship. This change in juridical condition meant that free Texas residents of African descent could be re-enslaved, opening the door to reimposing slavery as an institution.

Nonetheless, the ideology of racial purity was driven onto the rocks of the mestizaje. (27) In Texas and elsewhere, Afro-mestizos complicated the picture. Though they were initially treated as Blacks and were thus subject to re-enslavement or deportation, the imperatives of social reality intruded. Professor Martha Menchaca described the process:

Later that year, after many Anglo Americans claimed the Act was unjust, on 12 December 1840 the Texas Congress revised its position and exempted some Blacks from enslavement and deportation. This policy change allowed certain free Blacks to remain in Texas if they could prove that during Spanish and Mexican rule they had not been slaves. The exemption was passed in recognition that in Texas it was common for Mexicans to be of mixed Spanish, Indian, and Black ancestry, and thus they were not part of the enslaved Black population brought to Texas by Anglo settlers. (28) Rules governing marriage and property further unsettled efforts to reproduce in Texas the same racial regime that existed in other parts of the American South. As the new leaders of Texas tried to institute firm rules against miscegenation, they had to confront the reality that interracial marriage was common in Mexico. If the new regulations of the Republic of Texas made those marriages invalid, the claim of heirs would be insecure. (29) Land, an essential source of wealth, would be up for grabs. Even the wealth of established families would become unstable. (30) It was a situation that required accommodating the reality of social life in the colonized territory.

What this illustrates is that certain borders were made to be secure for reasons that both revealed and upended the prevailing racial...