Literary Critics

"Alienated from her mother culture, ‘alien' in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self. Petrified, she can’t respond, her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits."

"Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?"

"The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war."

"Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision."

"I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep"

"When you go through a heavy difficult time, and you don't have the resources, you can't go to anybody in the society or in the community, you finally fall back on yourself. What I did was that I started breathing. I had to like breathing and to start meditating in order to get through the pain and that whole difficult period. And all that reconnected me with nature, from which I had gotten away. So this is why I like to live at the ocean, like I do now here in Santa Cruz. You know, to live near the ocean means that you just go there and then get another infusion of energy. All the petty problems you have fall away because of the presence of the ocean. It therefore is a real spiritual presence for me. I feel that way with some trees, the wind, serpents, snakes, deserts, too. So in the periods that I was going through, my very darkest times when there was nobody there for me, I realized that at least I had to be there for me."

"An addiction (a repetitious act) is a ritual to help one through a trying time; its repetition safeguards the passage, it becomes one's talisman, one's touchstone. If it sticks around after having outlived its usefulness, we become "stuck" in it and it takes possession of us. But we need to be arrested. Some past experience or condition has created this need. This stopping is a survival mechanism, but one which must vanish when it's no longer needed if growth is to occur."

"only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body--flesh and bone--and from the Earth's body--stone, sky, liquid, soil."

"Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out."

"I also want Chicano kids to hear stuff about la Llorona, about the border, et cetera, as early as possible. I don't want them to wait until they are eighteen or nineteen to get that information. I think it is very important that they get to know their culture already as children. Here in California I met a lot of young Chicanos and Chicanas who didn't have a clue about their own Chicano culture. They lost it all. However, later on, when they were already twenty, twenty-five or even thirty years old, they took classes in Chicano studies to learn more about their ancestors, their history and culture. But I want the kids to already have access to this kind of information. That is why I started writing children's books. So far I have had two bilingual books published, and I am writing the third one at the moment. This is going to be more for juvenile readers, little boys and girls who are like ages eleven to twelve. Next I want to write a book for young adults who are about fifteen to sixteen years old as well. With my children's books I want to provide them with more knowledge about their roots and, by doing so, give them the chance to choose. To choose whether they want to be completely assimilated, whether they want to be border people, or whether they want to be isolationists."

"I am a seventh generation American and so I don't have any 'real Mexican' roots. So this is what happened to someone living at the border like me: My ancestors have always lived with the land here in Texas. My indigenous ancestors go back twenty to twenty-five thousand years and that is how old I am in this country. My Spanish ancestors have been in this land since the European takeover which pulled migration from Spain to Mexico. Texas was part of a Mexican state called Tamaulipas. And Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and part of California and Colorado, were part of the northern section of Mexico. It was almost half of Mexico that the U.S. cheated Mexico out of when they bought it by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. By doing so they created the borderlands. The Anzaldúas lived right at the border. Therefore the ones of our family who ended up north of the border, in the U.S., were the Anzaldúas with an accent, whereas the ones that still lived in Mexico dropped their accent after a while. As the generations then went by, we lost contact with each other. Nowadays the Anzaldúas in the United States no longer know the Anzalduas in Mexico. The border split my family, so to speak."

"More and more people today become border people because the pace of society has increased. Just think about multi-media, computers and World Wide Web, for example. By the Internet you can communicate instantly with someone in India or somewhere else in the world, like Australia, Hungary or China. We are all living in a society where these borders are transgressed constantly."

"The feeling of not belonging to any culture at all, of being an exile in all the different cultures. You feel like there are all these gaps, these cracks in the world. In that case I would draw a crack in the world. Then I start thinking: "Okay, what does this say about my gender, my race, the discipline of writing, the U.S. society in general and finally about the whole world?" And I start seeing all these cracks, these things that don't fit. People pass as though they were average or normal; however, everybody is different. There is no such thing as normal or average. And your culture says: "That is reality!" Women are this way, men are this way, white people are this way. And you start seeing behind that reality. You see the cracks and realize that there are other realities. Women can be this or that, whites can be this or that. Besides physical reality there might be a spiritual reality. A parallel world, a world of the supernatural. After having realized all these cracks, I start articulating them and I do this particularly in the theory. I have stories where these women, these prietas-they are all prietas-actually have access to other worlds through these cracks. So I take these major things, I just go with it and work it out as much as I can. I bring the concept of borders and borderlands more into unraveling all that, too. And I now call it Nepantla, which is a Nahuatl word for the space between two bodies of water, the space between two worlds. It is a limited space, a space where you are not this or that but where you are changing. You haven't got into the new identity yet and haven't left the old identity behind either-you are in a kind of transition. And that is what Nepantla stands for. It is very awkward, uncomfortable and frustrating to be in that Nepantla because you are in the midst of transformation."

"Gender is an important issue, too, as in most of the major religions in the world-like Christianity, Hindi and Islam-women are second-place and inferior. Women are regarded as nothing and often treated worse than cattle. In all these religions there is that attitude underneath. But yes, Christianity has cleaned up a lot of that. However, if you look at all the violence towards women, women are battered, molested, raped or killed-for example, one out of every three women in this country gets molested-there is a deep hatred and fear of women. So, yeah, the white culture emphasizes that we are all equal, men and women. However, underneath all that there is this violence against women, all this negative stuff about women. So if you can see through that illusion, through those cracks, you can see to that reality-of Protestantism, Christianity, Judaism, Hindi, Islam and Moslem, the major religions in the world-that they still have that negative attitude towards women as they continue to regard and treat them as inferior beings."

"Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants."

"Like a stone thrown into a pool, this book's ripples have touched people on numerous shores, affecting scholars and activists throughout the world."

"At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off all together as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react."

"That focal point or fulcrum, that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is where the possibility of uniting all that is separate occurs. This assembly is not one where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness."

"The soul uses everything to further its own making. … States which disrupt the smooth flow (complacency) of life are exactly what propel the soul to do its work: make soul, increase consciousness of itself. Our greatest disappointments and painful experiences—if we can make meaning out of them—can lead us toward becoming more of who we are."

"They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven't. We haven't."

"Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement--an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of “home.” Though this state links us to other ideas, people, and worlds, we feel threatened by these new connections and the change they engender."

"A misinformed people is a subjugated people."

"The Chicano Movement coalesced identity and I have a lot of respect for it despite its sexist attitudes. For that reason it started diminishing. It's not dead, but the male aspect of it is diminishing because the men would not confront thing but racial issues. The movement to me is now like a mosaic with all these little pieces. The little pieces are the ones that are now being activated so that a poet like Lorna Dee Cervantes is her own little miniature movement. Francisco Alarcón, Norma Alarcón, José Limón, all the people who are writing are carrying out the struggle against domination and subordination in the kinds of things they focus on-language, folklore, just anything."

"I did participate in the Chicano Movement. Actually, I started out with MECHA, a Mexican American youth organization. Also I was involved with different farm worker activities in South Texas and later in Indiana. When I became more recognized as a writer, I started articulating a lot of these feminist ideas that were a kind of continuation of the Chicano Movement. But I call it "El Movimiento Macha." A marimacha is a woman who is very assertive. That is what they used to call dykes, marimachas, half-and-halfs. You were different, you were queer, not normal, you were marimacha. I had been witnessing all these Chicana writers, activists, artists and professors who were very strong and therefore very marimacha. So I named it "El Movimiento Macha" as the Chicano Civil Rights Movement kind of petered out. And there were women like myself, many Chicanas, who were already questioning, having problems with the guys who were ignoring women's issues. Therefore, in the eighties and nineties, there are all these women-Chicana activists, writers and artists-around, and I listen to them, read them and reflect their influence on my life as well. What you could say is that in the sixties and the early seventies the Chicanos were at the controls. They were the ones who were visible, the Chicano leaders. Then in the eighties and nineties, the women have become visible. I see a lot of Chicanas when I travel. They come up to me, and while we are talking I ask them about their role models. They mention names like Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa and other Chicana authors. It is, and will continue to be, women that they are reading, that they respect. Not the guys. So it-the Chicano Movement-has shifted into the Movimiento Macha."

"when Chicanas read Borderlands, when it was read by little Chicanas in particular, it somehow legitimated them. They saw that I was code-switching, which is what a lot of Chicanas were doing in real life as well, and for the first time after reading that book they seemed to realize, "Oh, my way of writing and speaking is okay" and, "Oh, she is writing about La Virgen de Guadalupe, about la Llorona, about the corridos, the gringos, the abusive, et cetera. So if she [Gloria Anzaldúa] does it, why not me as well?" The book gave them permission to do the same thing. So they started using code-switching and writing about all the issues they have to deal with in daily life. To them, it was like somebody was saying: You are just as important as a woman as anybody from another race. And the experiences that you have are worth being told and written about."

"My whole struggle is to change the disciplines, to change the genres, to change how people look at a poem, at theory or at children's books. So I have to struggle between how many of these rules I can break and how I still can have readers read the book without getting frustrated."

"The works of Chicana lesbian writers Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Emma Pérez, Ana Castillo, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carla Trujillo, and many others bring out the pain and isolation, but, as important, their joys, self-respect, courage, and dignity."

"The migrants' plight has transformed border crossings into a key image in contemporary Latin American art and poetry. José Martí, who lived in exile in New York, said that shame of the indigenous mother culture is at the core of Latin America's dependency, fueling the sell-out of natural resources and the cycle of poverty. Gamaliel Churata concurs. It is no coincidence that the main theorization on this issue has come from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, a mestiza born and raised on the border. She writes: "The U.S. Mexican border is an open wound where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. . . . We, indias y mestizas, police the Indian in us, brutalize and condemn her." In her work, the negative space that defines women by what they "are not" (nonwhite, non-male), is transformed into creative space, by a will "to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. " Her work indicates the difficult edge all mestizos navigate, the hidden rage and complex paradoxes that women poets often acknowledge."

"What W. E. B. Du Bois described as the "veil" that barred African Americans from the White American world can be productively understood in relation to Latinx subjectivities by drawing on Anzaldúa's theorization of exclusion in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). For Anzaldúa, borders are recursive structures that can be reproduced on a number of scales, such that the "color line" (in Du Bois' terms) is just one of many possible sites for the production of exclusion and double-consciousness. In her formulation of a New Mestiza Consciousness, the racial and economic exclusion caused by colonialism must always be understood in relation to the sexual and gender domination of patriarchy. Anzaldúa's Chicana feminism involves the experience of multiple forms of double-consciousness in response to the multiplicity of power. In some places, Anzaldúa characterizes her lesbian Chicana feminist consciousness as a "Shadow-Beast... that refuses to take orders from outside authorities... that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed" (1987:38)...What Du Bois' navigates as transcendence around and above the exclusionary veil, allowing him to access both the Black and White worlds, Anzaldúa approaches with a hopeful ambivalence: she is without country as a Mestiza, yet possesses all countries through the potential for feminine kinship: she is without race as a lesbian, yet identifies with all races as part of a queer diaspora; and she is without culture as a staunch critic of patriarchal beliefs and practices, yet fully cultural as a creative participant in the production of an emergent reality (1987:102-103)."

"I saw Anzaldúa in action at a workshop on the creative process. "How's that for drama?" she asked us, having covered a portable blackboard with drawings. "I lecture with pictures," she explained, going on to trace the significance of these personal hieroglyphics. After she read us one of her poems in Spanish: "I know that was frustrating for many of you, but I wanted you to see what it feels like to be locked out of the language because you don't know it. I was punished for speaking Spanish in school.""

"What I like about Chicana writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, and others is that they have very important things to say. They have a vision, a feminist vision."

"Gloria Anzaldúa, disentangling the heavy hanging strands fringing the cave of mestiza consciousness, finds speechlessness compounded by femaleness, and both by the fact of being alien, "queer," not a woman in her culture's eyes. Her sense of identity is more complicated than Baca's because she's forced to transform many layers of negativity surrounding femaleness itself-images of Malintzin, the Indian woman as betrayer, of la chingada, the Indian woman as the fucked-one, of la Llorona, eternally mourning, long-suffering mother-and to confront the despot duality of simplistic masculine/feminine: I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.""

"The most striking change during the past 20 years can be seen in attitudes toward homophobia. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an almost total silence hung over gay and lesbian advocacy. No openly gay person could be a movement leader. Today homophobia persists; most progressive, straight Chicanos as well as Chicanas still fail to see gay and lesbian rights as another struggle of other oppressed people. Too many still fail to see homophobia as a sometimes murderous force of discrimination. But the situation has improved, especially in some major cities, in academia and among youth...The work of Chicana lesbian artists and intellectuals such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga has been crucial to this liberation, with benefits going beyond las lesbianas. Wherever one finds strong voices for women among Chicanas, they often come from Lesbians."

""To survive the borderlands/you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads." Those words convey Gloria E. Anzaldúa's essence as she wrote so powerfully about the many kinds of borderlands we confront in life...Her death from diabetes marks the loss of a great feminist philosopher whose ideas live on."

"I consider the whole Bloomsbury group—excepting only J. M. Keynes—to be the most overrated literary phenomenon of our times. Above all, Lytton Strachey: Strachey who has recently been accorded a two-volume biography, and whose only achievement was to trivialize history, to empty it of its real content and meaning, in order to raise a few complacent titters from the radical chic of his time."

"His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentful of his tittering."

"Felt the virtues of the Victorian times so condemned by Mr Strachey. The simple honesties can always be made a butt by the impish unrealiabilites."

"I've been reading Eminent Victorians... It seems to me downright wicked in its heart."

"I remember how those who had appreciated only the wittily destructive portions of Eminent Victorians rubbed their hands in delighted anticipation of Queen Victoria. Now, the cynical Mr. Strachey would fairly let himself go, with the real Aunt Sally for his target. Mr. Strachey did nothing of the kind. If ever a great character was handled tenderly, with an insight tempered by affection, it was the Queen Victoria of his biography. His beautiful final paragraph was but the culmination of an attitude he had steadily maintained. And it is surely not too much to say that he changed the mind not only of his contemporaries but of his seniors about the central figure of a great era."

"Whether or not its immediate success may be ascribed the post-war disillusionment with formerly accepted values and institutions, Eminent Victorians rapidly and solidly established itself as a biographical classic. Rarely, if ever, had psychological penetration, a talent for dramatic depiction of character, and a brilliant style been employed together to better effect. In the space of two hundred pages, by what Asquith called his "subtle and suggestive art," Strachey succeeded in re-absorbing English biography into the realm of literature. Not that the chorus of acclaim was unanimous or wholehearted. Almost everyone, then and now, was and is willing to grant Strachey stylistic excellence. But in the forty years since the first appearance of Eminent Victorians, the book has been under more or less continuous and vehement attack; and has, in turn, been no less vigorously defended."

"Pass a person through your mind, with all the documents, and see what comes out. That seems to be your method. Also, choose them, in the first place, because you dislike them."

"To mark a man's faults and failings was, for Johnson, to indicate where he had diverged from his true relation to God; for Strachey it was an agreeable intellectual pastime, which flattered his sense of superiority both to his subject and to the illusion-ridden mob."

"It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them...dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior motives."

"Madame, I am the civilization they are fighting for."

"The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. … With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one."

"In a recently published volume—the most trenchant and brilliant series of biographical and historical studies which I have read for a long time—Mr. Lytton Strachey, under the modest title 'Eminent Victorians', has put on his canvas four figures (as unlike one another as any four people could be), Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and General Gordon. None of the four can be said to have contributed much of permanent importance to the literature or art or science of their time; but each of them, in his or her day, was a prominent and potent personality; and perhaps one may be allowed to say that they are in less danger than ever of being forgotten, now that they have been re-created for the English readers of the future (not in a spirit of blind hero-worship) by Mr. Strachey's subtle and suggestive art."

"[His reply to the chairman's other stock question, which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: "Tell me, Mr. Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to violate your sister?" With an air of noble virtue:] "I would try to get between them.""

"If this is dying, then I don't think much of it."

"I would not have his books in my house."

"The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art."