Gloria Anzaldúa

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (b. 1942–d. 2004) was born in Raymondsville, Texas, in the lower Rio Grande Valley. She received a BA in English, Art, and Secondary Education from Pan American University, and an MA in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin in 1972. She later enrolled in UT’s doctoral program in comparative literature after having worked for the state of Indiana as a liaison between migrant farmworkers’ children and the public schools. She left the program and moved to California in 1977, where she supported herself as an independent scholar. Anzaldúa spent several years (1981–1985) on the East Coast, including three years in Brooklyn. In 1986, she moved to Santa Cruz, California; in 1988, after being denied entry to the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she enrolled in their doctorate program in literature. She continued to live in Santa Cruz but traveled and lectured extensively, holding writer-in-residencies and distinguished visiting professorships at The Loft (Minneapolis), Pomona College, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of California at San Diego, among others. She was awarded a PhD in Literature from UCSC posthumously. Anzaldúa began her career as a poet and editor of Chicana, Latina, and US Third World women’s literature and thought. In 1981, along with Cherríe Moraga, she co-edited the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a cornerstone of 20th-century women of color feminist thought. Anzaldúa edited Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color in 1990. She is well known for her writing and thinking about borders and borderlands, as well as her contributions to the development of queer theory and her theories of the new mestiza and mestiza consciousness. Stemming from her own experiences living and working in the contemporary US-Mexico borderlands, Anzaldúa’s development of the concept of the borderlands as a unique social, psychological, linguistic, political, and spiritual place has been applied to numerous geographic and temporal contexts. In her most well-known work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) Anzaldúa combines epistemologies, disciplines, and languages. She discusses and critiques Chicana/Chicano and Catholic culture while referencing Aztec and Yoruba deities and writes in several languages, including Spanish, English, Nahuatl, and caló. The work touches on major themes in Anzaldúa’s life and work, including Chicana/Chicano identity, mestizaje, spirituality, the importance of writing, and the connections between the physical and psychic selves. Anzaldúa also published several children’s books, including Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del Otro Lado (1993). In 2002 she published her last work, the co-edited anthology This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. She died in 2004 from complications from diabetes. In 2022, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley unveiled a Literary Landmark for Anzaldúa at the library of its Edinburg campus, giving visibility to her ongoing legacy. In June 2022 the Anzaldúa Literary Trust created the official Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa website for Anzaldúa and her work. The site also offers an online altar space in honor of Anzaldúa.