“An Artist in the Sense of a Shaman”

Chapter 2, “‘An Artist in the Sense of a Shaman’: Border Arte as Decolonial Practice,” considers critiques of Anzaldúa’s use of Indigenous mythology and her and other scholars’ responses to them and proposes that Anzaldúa is not romanticizing an Indigenous past but, instead, is engaging in a practice of what she calls “border arte,” original creative expression formed in the moment of the artistic endeavor. Border artists consciously draw from their awareness of being in colonized spaces and work not to preserve a past but to create new assemblages informed by one’s ancestry and the artist’s particular cultural moment. The chapter also traces Anzaldúa’s earliest thinking about la naguala in Borderlands / La Frontera and identifies a shamanic, shapeshifting pattern in this text and her others.