Gloria Anzaldua

Question 1

Gloria Anzaldua

Answer 1

Gloria Anzaldúa was born in 1942, in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. She
worked, along with her parents and her siblings, as a migrant worker in Arkansas.
Due to an endocrine anomaly, she menstruates at only three months, and because of
this, she stops growing at the age of twelve. This will lead her to recount her sufferance
in the society of that time that did not understand her.
She lived with her family in a city on the border of Texas and Mexico, and her personal
experiences of cultural and social marginalization are present in her works.
Anzaldúa died in 2004, at her home in California from complications due to diabetes.

In 1968, Gloria graduated in Arts in the Pan-American University of Texas.
He taught first in a school of bilingual students and then in a school of students with
mental and emotional disabilities. Her career develops in California through university
courses on feminism.

Question 2

Anzaldùa ideas:

Answer 2

Gloria specializes in Chicanos Studies and one of her most important works is surely
the one written with Cherrie Moraga, an American activist, writer and playwright of
Chicana origin: The Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color. This
work will be fundamental to post-colonial and queer feminism.
Gloria’s thought is centered on the “mestiza consciousness”.
It is the ability to cross and embrace the inherent differences in each personality.
This aspect develops in people who live together between two or more cultures or
identities. For this reason, she often uses writing, mixing Spanish and English as if they
were one language, as a combination of language and identity.

Question 3

Works of Anzaldua

Answer 3

 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
 The Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color  postcolonial and queer feminism.
 Light in the Dark: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality  contains
philosophical theories, such as: the nepantleras, the Coyolxauhqui
imperative (named for the Aztec Goddess Coyolxāuhqui), spiritual activism,
and others.
 La Pieta  autobiographical essay published in English and in Spanish. This
work deals with her manifestation of thoughts and horrors that have constituted
her life in Texas.
 Nightvoice  talks about sexual abuse by her cousins