Abstracts of papers: 

The Chimalpahin Conference 2008:

Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness

This paper examines what I term “critical mythogenesis” in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/la Frontera. As a double act of reinterpreting old myths and creating new myths, Anzaldúa’s critical mythogenesis (1) problematizes the mythmaking process in which the history of U.S.-Mexican borderlands is configured into the frontier myth that gives hegemonic force to Anglo-androcentric ideas of America by abjecting Chicano/a Others and their cultures; (2) self-reflexively creates a new myth from the perspective of a Chicana lesbian formerly excluded from the mythmaking process because of her race, gender, and sexuality in order to tell her own (hi)stories and imagine more dynamic and relational views of selfhood and nationhood. 

This text of highly mixed genres (history, memoir, poem, manifesto, and myth) written in several languages (Castilian Spanish, English, Tex-Mex English, and the North Mexican dialect) is itself a new myth that transforms the dispossessing history of U.S.-Mexican borderlands marked by ambivalence and unrest into a fertile ground for a new consciousness that is in a constant state of renegotiation of various boundaries of race, gender, class, and sexuality, creates coalitions with other marginalized peoples, and imagines “home” as always provisional. However, Anzaldúa’s new myth does not come out of nothing. To create a new myth, Anzaldúa deploys the pre-Columbian Aztec myths of Coatlicue that have been repressed by the Anglo-male-centered versions of American history. 

By tracing how the mythic figure of Coatlicue that originally contained and balanced the dualities of life/death, male/female, and light/dark was divided into Coatlicue (the whore) who embodied darkness, sexuality, and female evil and into Guadalupe (the virgin mother) who was purified, Christianized, and desexed, Anzaldúa points out that these mythic transformations are intertwined with the history of U.S.-Mexican borderlands marked by Spanish colonization and US annexation, exploitation, and dislocation. Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s critical mythogenesis reconfigures the history of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands as a simultaneously wounding and healing site of cultural grafting that breeds what she calls mestiza consciousness, a new historical consciousness. By re-interpreting the myths of Coatlicue as the unsettling in-between-ness of the borderlands, Anzaldúa argues that despite its paralyzing qualities the “Coatlicue state” is a necessary condition for a border subject with mestiza consciousness. What emerges from the recognition of the ambiguous state of the borderlands is not a unitary, coherent, and stable subjectivity but a heterogeneous, fluid, and multiple subjectivity created by “racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization” (Anzaldúa 77). 

More important, mestiza consciousness is a politically conscious act of recognizing one’s multicultural inheritance, of consciously breaking away from oppressive histories, and of reinterpreting history with a new perspective. Therefore, Anzaldúa’s new myth as a historically situated narrative of continual reinvention and multiplied possibilities reconfigures the borderlands history as a site of ongoing interactions of multiple communities that transcend the geographic, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual borders hegemonic American myths consolidated and aims to return historical agency to those who have been repressed and thus forgotten in both America’s history and its mythologies.

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