Reading and Rereading Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera

Listeners who did not share Gillian’s TV viewing habits in the 1980s and ‘90s can find the Pace salsa ad here.

We make reference to not only Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza but also Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro, edited by AnaLouise Keating.

For more on Anzaldúa’s “doodles,” see Suzanne Bost’s “Messy Archives and Materials that Matter: Making Knowledge with the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Papers.”

Read an interview between Gloria Anzaldúa and Patti Blanco here.

Read Paula M.L. Moya’s “Postmodernism, Realism, and the Politics of Identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism” here.

Steph refers to Melissa Castillo Planas’s book A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture, Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies” (paywall), and to the artists Delilah Montoya, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, and Scherezade García.

We reference the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

For more on the Chicano Movement, see Valerie Mendoza’s “Chicano! A History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement” and Jessie Kratz’s “El Movimiento: The Chicano Movement and Hispanic Identity in the United States.”

For a discussion of Trump’s border wall, see Alex Guillén’s article on Politico.

For a discussion of corridos, see Celestino Fernández’s “Corridos: (Mostly) True Stories in Verse with Music.”

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the University of Leicester's School of Arts, Media and Communication for use of recording equipment; to India Downton for her invaluable expertise; and to the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK and the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali

Gillian Roberts: and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands, from different countries, with multiple passports. 

Welcome to our first “Classics in Border Studies” episode. Our special guest today is Dr. Stephanie Lewthwaite, Associate Professor in American History in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her first monograph, entitled Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles: a Transnational Perspective, 1890 to 1940, was published in 2009. This book examines the impact of reform policy and ideology on Mexican immigrant and second-generation Mexican American communities in the rural, urban, and suburban territories of greater Los Angeles. This book highlights the shifting boundaries of race and citizenship in the Progressive and New Deal eras, assessing the significance of reform in shaping acculturation, racialization, and new patterns of cross-border and second-generation activism. Her second monograph, A Contested Art: Modernism and Mestizaje in New Mexico, was published in 2015, and it won the British Association for American Studies annual book prize. Woo-hoo! This book examined the encounter between Spanish-speaking Hispanos and Anglo-American writers and artists in the early 20th century, the influence on Anglos’ modernist ventures, Hispano art forms, Hispano artists' responses to preservationist circles in the marketplace, the cultural encounter and its production of appropriation, conflict, and loss, but also new transformations in Hispano painting, photography, and sculpture, generating alternative lines of modernist innovation and mestizo creativity. These lines expressed their cultural and ethnic affiliations with local Native peoples and with Mexico, and a vision of New Mexico as a place shaped by the fissures of modernity and the dynamics of cultural conflict and exchange. Steph is currently working on two monographs. First, The Politics of Place and Memory in Contemporary Latinx Art, which explores the work of contemporary Latinx artists in documenting geographies of historical trauma and violence across diverse media painting, photography, mixed-media, installation, and site-specific performance art, specifically the practice and writings of artists of Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban descent working and living in the United States since the 1970s. Second, she's also working on a book about the contemporary Chicana photographer Delilah Montoya, which explores Montoya's experimentation with different photographic genres. Fun fact: Steph is a big fan of large dogs, most especially the Scottish Deerhound. Welcome, Steph.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Oh, thank you very much, Gillian. That was a lovely introduction.

Zalfa Feghali: We're very happy you're here and also very unsurprised that you are writing two books at the same time.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Oh, when they will actually come out is another thing.

Gillian Roberts: Well, when they do, you can come back.

Zalfa Feghali: Steph, we wanted to ask you: what got you into border studies in the first place?

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Yeah, I think I got into border studies probably unintentionally. It wasn't something, it wasn't really a defined field that I saw and thought, oh that looks interesting to me. I think at the heart of my work is this interest in different encounters, particularly cross-cultural encounters. I went to Warwick, I did a modern European history degree, and it was as part of that degree, my undergraduate years, that I did some modules on the Americas. And I had this course on fiction of the Americas. And I had this real fascination, actually, firstly, with the Caribbean. And I remember this idea, some scholar said, you know, the Caribbean is the place where the world met. And that, for me, that just got me. I was really fascinated by that. And so slowly, I think, as I moved into my MA years, I did an MA at Warwick—History of Race in the Americas—that's when I began to really look towards the site-specific border, the US-Mexico border. I did my dissertation on reconfigurations of Aztlán, which is the ancestral homeland, of course, the Chicano homeland. And I did, you know, start looking a little bit at Anzaldúa for that dissertation. And I think really my experimentation, you know, my more experimentation, I think, with border studies has really come probably after I joined Nottingham, my first teaching post. And really, I was very much encouraged to be very interdisciplinary. And that really started moving me more towards the border, towards visual culture, towards cultural studies. As you said, Gillian, I did do that, my PhD project, which then became the first book, was on social reform programs and responses to Mexican migrants and families and second generation in Los Angeles. So the physical border was always there, but I don't really think it was until I started to move into sort of cultural studies, that interdisciplinarity, where I began to think about the border, not just as a physical site, but as a metaphorical border, the different types of borders that people cross in their everyday lives. And of course, that's where Anzaldúa comes in.

Gillian Roberts: I think that's really interesting how you're speaking about the interdisciplinarity of our department. I should have said Steph's my colleague. 

Zalfa Feghali: And my former PhD supervisor. 

Gillian Roberts: That too! But the way that interdisciplinarity sort of lends itself to border studies and/or the site of the border. Can you say a little bit more about that? How this interdisciplinary framework, institutional framework, seemed to draw you to that location?

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Yeah, I think it enabled me to look at culture, cultural forms. It also enabled me to think about identity and subjectivities and to think about these encounters that people have. I was really, really fascinated by Indigeneity, by this real mixture, I think, between Indigenous, African, and European peoples in the borderlands, but I wanted to see how that manifested in cultural forms as well. So I ended up, I think, picking up maybe a love of mine that I never really followed, because before university, I did an art foundation course. And I wasn't even thinking, should I go to university? Do I want to do an academic subject? I think I had the space and the room, I think, at Nottingham to pick up on an earlier interest of mine and to think about cultural forms, to think about visual culture in particular, as what I always feel is an alternative form of literacy. You know, that really fascinated me. You know, how do people express their multiple subjectivities in different ways and particularly through visual culture, even if they are talking about specific sort of cultural and ethnic encounters that happened in their own family, for example. I mean, you mentioned Delilah Montoya, and her photography is a lot about documenting her own mestiza heritage, actually. And she uses photography to do that. So these things, this interdisciplinarity, that ability to experiment has been really, really productive, I think. I found it really helpful.

Gillian Roberts: It's amazing because it sounds like border studies engendered in you a shift in the kind of historian that you are, but actually, you know, the disclosure of the Art Foundation degree aspirations, obviously that was in you all along and it just enabled your, well, your circumstances catching up to your interests and allowing that intersection. That's amazing.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Yeah. I wasn't very good at art, by the way. I didn’t go on to do a fine art degree.

Gillian Roberts: Do we believe her, Zalfa?

Zalfa Feghali: I don't think there's anything that Steph isn't very good at. 

Gillian Roberts: No. 

Zalfa Feghali: That's just my biased opinion.

Gillian Roberts: I share that biased opinion.

Zalfa Feghali: I was going to make a joke about Steph being a recovering historian. But again, that disclosure has just put that, put that to bed. So as Gillian said, you're here because we are 

Gillian Roberts: Big fans of yours. 

Zalfa Feghali: As Gillian said, we are today recording our first special episode called “Classics in Border Studies” in which we look at texts or broadly conceived texts in border studies that we might understand to be foundational. And that's kind of really, really a wide array of cultural artifacts that we might categorize in that way. One of the things that I know I read first in my academic career was Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, which is what you're here to talk about today, Steph. And it's one of the texts that I think is described so often with a word that I hate viscerally. And, you know, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about words that I hate, but the word “seminal” is used to describe this book. 

Gillian Roberts: Ugh!

Zalfa Feghali: So much. And I just think people need to not do that and just say “foundational” or “hugely important,” but we do not need, or central. Anyway, folks, this is an appeal: please, please stop using this word, just ever. 

Gillian Roberts: Can we cancel “seminal?” 

Zalfa Feghali: It has been cancelled as far as I'm concerned, in this room. 

Gillian Roberts: You've heard it here. 

Zalfa Feghali: In this room of three. So “Classics in Border Studies” as a segment or a kind of episode in which we go deep and think about a text that has really shaped the field that we decided that we are part of. Gillian, when did you first encounter or come to spend time with Gloria Anzaldúa's foundational text?

Gillian Roberts: My first encounter with this vital text was actually indirect. So when I was doing my PhD, I was looking at Canadian literary prize winners. I wouldn't move on to focusing exclusively on the border until my postdoc project. And when I rocked up to the University of Leeds, as one does, at the beginning of my PhD, I had a pretty clear idea of what I was going to write my thesis on. And for our listeners overseas, the UK PhD is very different from the North American one in that you just start writing your thesis straight away. You don't do any coursework. You don't do comps. So you've got to know what your project is already and who's going to supervise it. And you hit the ground running. Only my PhD supervisor, she wanted me to read lots of things quite far outside what I ended up writing on, which was what I came to write about anyway, which is, you know, amazing, because this was stuff that I hadn't read before. Patricia Hill Collins, for instance, all kinds of feminist theory, and I think I was trying to retrace in my mind what text this was. I think maybe it was a like a co-authored or a co-edited collection by Chandra Mohanty, and it was and there was an essay in it. And this essay, I believe, was Paula M.L. Moya's “Postmodernism, Realism, and the Politics of Identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism.” Because the thing that sticks out, like, I couldn't even remember what book or, you know, what article it was initially. But I just remember sitting down with my supervisor having done all this reading. And she said, what do you think? And I said, this idea of mestiza consciousness: it sounds really amazing, but like, how do you get one? How does it actually happen? And It wasn't until after my PhD that I wrote on something else entirely, where I was focusing my scholarly attention on borders and border studies, and I read La Frontera finally, that it all kind of clicked into place. Not that I know how I would still go about, you know, having one. Go about acquiring one, that's not the question here. But just the way in which the mestiza consciousness emerges from this very site-specific border in the land that Anzaldúa writes about. And then all of a sudden, the contours of the mestiza consciousness really, I think, come into view in relation to that space. Zalfa, tell us about your first encounter with Anzaldúa.

Zalfa Feghali: I can't be sure, but I think it was while I was doing my MA. So I did an MA at an American university in Beirut, or the American University in Beirut, and we had to do comps. So.

Gillian Roberts: God, for an MA!

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. It was a two-year MA. Um, and so we had to do comps and that was great. And we had to, with the comps, as I recall, we had to have a certain number of periods, because I was doing it in English literature and the MA in English literature, and our specialism and the quote unquote “specialism” would be what we wrote our thesis on. And I already knew I wanted to write on, broadly speaking, the cringe embarrassment, American literature, but I didn't want to write about, frankly, the stuff I haven't read, like Moby Dick. Hadn't read and still have not read, wearing it proud. 

Gillian Roberts: Me either. Steph, you, have you read Moby Dick?

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Me, no. Have to be honest about this.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh yeah, we’ve got three for three, folks, three for three! Okay.

Gillian Roberts: This is a room that is cancelled Moby Dick and the word seminal. And I feel like those things might be connected, but I digress.

Zalfa Feghali: I couldn't possibly comment. But as part of that reading, I'm sure my supervisor at the time, or the woman who would be my supervisor, Dr. Sirène Harb, if you are listening, you are amazing, said, why don't you read this book by this woman called Gloria Anzaldúa? And I read it, and that was it. I had the click. I knew that I wanted to write about this. As I recall, my PhD application was all about the US-Mexico border and Anzaldúa and queer consciousness. So it very much transformed the way I was thinking about my own sort of academic journey. And if you've listened to episodes in the past, and we've talked about with our various guests, the different borders that I've encountered, I very much identified with a physical border space in which you were one thing on one side and one thing on the other side, but actually nothing, to either side. And so you have to cultivate this different part of you and this sense of identity where that Steph has just been referring to. So it was very much, I read the book, It Changed My Life. And I say that to students. So I run a module, a final-year module here [University of Leicester] called Blood, Borders, and Belonging. I haven't taught it in a while. And the first thing I do is I hold up the book. This is the copy of the book I'm holding up right now for folks who can't see, because obviously you're listening. This is my MA copy. So it's sun-bleached. It is a copy that I will never let go of. And I also refuse to buy another copy, which is differently ridiculous, but it is the book that changed my life. So a long, emotive and emotional response to your question. Thank you, G.

Gillian Roberts: That's a pretty amazing answer. Steph, the scholar of the hour: tell us about your first encounter with Anzaldúa.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Well, I feel like I've had a really long relationship with Anzaldúa without almost realizing I have, I think. I did mention that during my MA, I did my dissertation on Aztlán, reconfigurations of Aztlán, so I had to engage with Anzaldúa, she was such a part of that, trying to understand, you know, particularly her critique of the essentialist masculinist dynamics of the Chicano movement and what was coming through not just Anglo-America, but also through Mexico, you know, this idea of having multiple identities at the border. So she was really very much there. And then I think she dropped out of view until I started teaching at Nottingham, and I made sure she was on the curriculum. You know, I wanted to make sure she was embedded in the undergraduate teaching, so I actually named my first module La Frontera. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, did you? That's amazing. 

Stephanie Lewthwaite: And it's not running, it has run in a different way, you know, past few years. But I think I arrived at Nottingham at that time, in 2004, when Anzaldúa passed away. And there was Shelley Fisher Fishkin's American Studies Association presidential address. 

Zalfa Feghali: That was an amazing address. 

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Yeah, which was her dedication to Anzaldúa, who she said, you know, this is my friend, I've lost her. And that was a real moment for me, realizing because, you know, every time I'd done anything about the border or Mexican Americans or Chicanos or Chicanxs, it was seen as peripheral. For me, that was a moment where I thought, oh, here I am. I've moved really in a way from history to American Studies or North American Studies, you know, American and Canadian Studies. And Anzaldúa's right here, you know, not just becomingmainstream. And I just felt that sort of wave. I thought, oh, this is, this is really good. So I embedded her in not just my teaching about Latinx history and culture, but also my module on immigration and ethnicity. I also did a finalist module called Identifiably American, which was about, you know, bringing in different voices. So Anzaldúa was there as well. And I think she was part of that attempt about the transnational turn, you know, to use her as a really good example. So she really became, I think, embedded in my teaching. I have to put my hands up and say that I only think I've really, really recently got to grips with Anzaldúa and Borderlands. And I've done it really as I've moved into visual culture. I've gone back to sort of looking at that border and I've begun really to think about not just the crossing of the physical border, but other types of borders, whether it's the, what I'm really interested in is the human and the more than human world, you know, transgressing those kinds of boundaries. So I actually only think that it's really recently that I've read Anzaldúa properly, all the way through, rather than in bits and pieces. And I'm beginning to understand her nuances and just the sheer timeliness. You know, her book will never, you know, disappear in terms of its relevance. That's how I feel. And I think Anzaldúa's work is in even the work that I'm doing on New York. I've moved away from the physical borderlands now, although I'm still there in other projects, particularly the work on Chicana photography. But I thought to myself, why am I moving away from the US-Mexico border where I've just sort of got comfortable, I think I know it. Somehow I ended up going to work on New York City and Caribbean Latinx artists there. And I realized, I thought, oh my God, Anzaldúa is here with me. Because actually, as Melissa Castillo Planas has written in her book, she says that New York is a new North Atlantic borderlands. You know, and you can see water. It's not just that terrestrial border, it's the watery borders, as one Dominican American artist calls it, the liquid frontier, you know, that's also really important. So it's this portability as well. So I have to say, I feel that it's only really recently that I'm beginning to understand Anzaldúa. Really, it's taken me years. And it's because I think I'm properly sitting down with her and listening and trying to understand all the different binaries that she's been crossing. My engagement with work about memory and trauma, which I just think is very much embedded in Borderlands/ La Frontera. And I hadn't spotted all these things before. I missed it all.

Gillian Roberts: Well, I mean, I don't think this is a deficit model, though. I think this is a testament to all of the things that her work does. And I think especially for scholars who are not from that space, you know, I've got here a copy of the 25th anniversary, fourth edition where there's a lot of other scholars, you know, included in the appendices talking about just how important this book was to them. And for those scholars who are from that place, it was like instant recognition, you know, the way they talk about it. And we don't have that experience. So I think all the complexities that she brings to her, you know, her philosophy, to her poetry, to all of her writing, I think it demands a lifelong relationship, really. 

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I think of this book and all of her work, which I was lucky enough to go and spend some time with her papers at UT Austin at the Benson Library. And all of her work needs to be read, I think, as, to use words that I think you've written about in the past, Steph. Like it's a companion book. It's a companion set of works. It is there with us to think through in different sort of scholarly moments. And that works. You know, she says it herself, the borderlands are everywhere. And you just think, okay, well, are they? Yes. Yes, actually. Yes. And that's why we keep returning to it. It's not because it's just the S word. But it's because she matters, and she was so ahead of her time. And you will know that from the papers, she was writing things that were dismissed partially because she was a woman, partially because she was a Chicanx woman, partially because of various other kind of intersecting areas where she was completely gaslit. And she just stuck with it and was frankly a pioneer. And the fact that we are continuing to see her in that way and continuing to learn from her just is, as you say, Gillian, just testament to what the book is.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Yeah.

Gillian Roberts: Can you say more, Steph, about how your work on visual culture has really benefited from this companion journey with Anzaldúa?

Stephanie Lewthwaite: One thing that I've only recently discovered is that Anzaldúa wasn't just a writer. She actually was an artist as well. And I haven't been to the Benson Library so far.

Zalfa Feghali: I've got some photos of her artwork that I can share with you if you'd like.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: I'd absolutely love to see it, because I have only come across them in Light in the Dark, which is the, you know, the sort of unpublished, because as you said, you know, she wasn't, there's this lack of recognition in writing, you know, her PhD, but of course it didn't, you know, get published or, you know, or has in sort of certain ways through AnaLouise Keating's work. And I did spot some of what some people might call, you know, just doodlings, but they are drawings, and they are amazing. They actually, talk about Anzaldúa as a completely different entity. And quite a bit of my work at the moment, I've got very interested in different binaries. So I think Anzaldúa was absolutely vital for me understanding histories of mestizaje in the physical borderlands. So these encounters between Indigenous peoples, African peoples, European peoples. And so much of the work that I think I've done on visual culture has been about that history and about how artists like Delilah Montoya and others have recuperated some of those lost histories or things that haven't been spoken about, particularly Indigeneity. Delilah Montoya, for example, has, you know, documented her own Indigenous heritage and the conversations that she had with her mother, who's from New Mexico, who said, well, we're Spanish, you know, I don't know anything about Indigenous roots. So I can see how so many of the artists that I've worked with because they have a lived reality of that living in the border and experiencing this, they are articulating Anzaldúa in theory, because it is lived reality for them. So I think so much of what she writes about is in their work. You know, they might not be sort of thinking directly, but I know Montoya, for example, will obviously, you know, does know about Anzaldúa. So I think there's that direct historical narrative that's in Anzaldúa that comes out in a lot of the artwork. I'm also interested in Anzaldúa as an artist and this sort of process of writing, also through images as well, which I've only really discovered recently. And I'm beginning to get interested now in not just those cross-cultural ethnic encounters, but also the borderlands ecology, you know, the borderlands as an ecosystem. And this idea that you said, Zalfa, that Anzaldúa is way ahead of her time. And I think, you know, this idea that she talks about planetary citizenship, that she is beginning to talk about binaries that really should not exist between the human world, the spirit world, and the animal and the plant world. And wow is she, you know, when I reread her again, and she talks about shamanism and the narwhal and becoming an animal spirit, I just thought, this is amazing. How did I not spot this years ago? So her work, her sort of ecological consciousness, I think, and you know, she spoke about the South Texas borderlands where she grew up and her sharecropping father and how he died before his time and the difficulty of working that land but being so close to it because you actually physically work at this botanical knowledge. So much of that I'm trying to take now into understanding artists who are writing about borderlands and the ecology and that there should not be this separation between the human world and whatever you want to call it, the more than human world or the natural world. And if we're to try and sort out justice in the borderlands, social justice and justice rights for undocumented migrants, we also have to think about the borderlands as this larger ecosystem. And how, you know, the damage of the war, for example, is part and parcel of this bigger debate. And I look at Anzaldúa and I think she was talking about this. You know, she might not have been speaking about Trump's wall or how that was damaging the ecosystem or border crossing species, but she somehow was in this other world and how transformative that was and that kind of consciousness, about that we are not alone on this planet, but we have to think about every single thing, and she talks about this sort of interwoven nature of everything, this kinship of everything. For me, that's absolutely fundamental in what I'm doing now and the work that I want to work with. And artists like Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, who, you know, have that. And it isn't theory: it's lived reality.

Zalfa Feghali: It's a situated knowledge that Anzaldúa has that is then anticipating future and futural situated knowledges. It's fantastic.

Gillian Roberts: We should just pause to mention that Steph writes about this in her essay, “Relational Ecologies in Contemporary Chicana Border Art,” forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands, edited by one Zalfa Feghali and Deborah Toner. So we all look forward to that coming out.

Zalfa Feghali: This is soon, fast becoming a Routledge Companion tribute podcast. 

Gillian Roberts: Product placement. 

Zalfa Feghali: We talk about other things, I promise. We will, eventually.

Gillian Roberts: So Steph, I mean, you said, oh, you felt like you'd abandoned the border for New York City. But this puts me in mind of this ad for salsa. When I was a kid watching in Canada, I'm sure it was an American ad. And, you know, whatever company it is, their salsa is made in San Antonio. And then they have this rival product and they say, well, “This stuff’s made it New York City!" And all the men in the saloon go, “New York City!” So yeah, I'm having faint echoes of that. But you definitely haven't left behind the border at the same time, because of this work that you are doing on relational ecology in the borderlands and the ways in which the visual artists that you attend to bring out those Anzaldúan ideas. I would like to hear from both of you a little bit more about these images that Anzaldúa produced that I haven't seen. So, Steph, you've seen some published; Zalfa, you've seen some in the archive. What are these images? What kinds of things did she draw?

Stephanie Lewthwaite: I can bring it in front of me here. I have this book, Light in the Dark, Luz and Oscuro. And this amazing image. I think it's almost like a self-portrait of Anzaldúa. And she calls it “Naguala, Inner Dweller,” and I think she's here at the top of the, I would love to describe it to everybody, so she's got a naguala, inner dweller, reader, imagining body watcher, and at the top I think she's imagining herself as a serpent, because that's what she talks about in Borderlands as well, you know, becoming the serpent, she gets bitten by the rattlesnake. But actually, she takes on the powers of the serpent, you know, and that also takes her back to recuperating that Indigenous heritage, Coatlicue, and serpent-headed deity. But it isn't just that she's half serpent, half human. She's also straddling a four-legged creature as well. So it's animal, animal and human, human, a human animal. And for me, I just think, oh, wow. You know, this series of interrelationships. She also discusses about becoming a tree, a jaguar, as well as a serpent, and talks about going beyond the human. So these images are just, that's the one that I really focused on, and I think she's trying to sort of refer to shamanism there. I might be wrong, Zalfa, you know more than me on these.

Zalfa Feghali: That's how I've always read it. I didn't spend a lot of time with, I mean, they are, I think, casually described as Anzaldúa's doodles, but that is really, I think, an understatement of what they are and what they're doing. And perhaps it did come quite easily to her. I don't know, but they seem very in the moment and very connected to what she is writing about and thinking about at that time. Suzanne Bost has done a lot of work on those doodles, and she also has an essay in that book that we said we wouldn't mention again. 

Stephanie Lewthwaite: I can't wait to read this.

Zalfa Feghali: It showcases this other string to her bow that she isn't just a theorist or just a practitioner or just in anything, but she's an artist in all the meanings of the word. She spends a lot of time cultivating these different elements of her own expertise and her own ways of expression, even when she's towards the end of her life, perhaps ill or quite tired or fed up. And she goes through deep periods of what she describes as kind of just difficulty or darkness. And we know that about her. But through all that, she is still producing. Because we put so much importance, we place so much importance on the written word that we still do call them doodles. I think that's a real shame because she is still producing a lot of work even while she isn't finishing the PhD or finishing the book or doing whatever it is that her publishers demanded of her. So yeah, I think it's quite difficult. I need to work harder on talking about visual artifacts without being able to share the visual artifact.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, it's really hard. Very tricky. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about the text of La Frontera, because it's such a remarkable text, unlike anything else I've ever seen in my life. And you know, I've read some experimental poetry in my time.

Zalfa Feghali: Listeners, she has.

Gillian Roberts: But this book never fails to surprise. So can we talk about the way this book is put together and how it really blows our minds in relation to what we think of as knowledge, what we think of as scholarship. Steph?

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Well, I have reread it for this podcast. And I mean, again, it's these things that you don't spot. I feel like you could read Anzaldúa a million times, and there's always something new that comes out of her work. But I think it's this journey that she goes on, and how it's not just psychic. You know, she talks about the inner transformation. She talks about the mestiza consciousness and that, you know, the work takes place underground. But I think, and I'm actually just thinking back to those drawings where she's drawing her body and how her body mutates, her body transforms into something. I think it was bodily as well, actually. I think, you know, you read almost La Frontera as her going on a journey. And of course it's not linear, because she keeps flashing back, there's her childhood, she goes back obviously to talk about Aztlán, and she mixes up, you know, there's a really different, there isn't a sort of linear historical trajectory here. But I think it's this idea that actually this process is physical as well. And it makes me come back to this point you were saying, Zalfa, about her health, about her illness and, you know, the struggles that she had with, you know, diabetes. And I also think, you know, speaking as a person of a certain age, midlife, you know, these things that we're... And I actually feel that her text has really spoken to me on that level, actually, recently, that I hadn't really, you know, when I read it maybe, you know, years ago, I hadn't really thought about this. But this is a book where she is, she's documenting her trauma in a way. And it's coming out in different ways, whether it's the poetry, whether it's her references to music, corridos, other people's poetry, references to films, or archeology, history, her own testimony, her own family, family story. So for me, I just, I think it's this multifaceted nature of it. And as you said, Gillian, it's so experimental. I don't think I'd picked up on this and how beautifully, actually, she is able to weave the personal and the collective. I hadn't realized how beautifully she does that. And, you know, she's shifting gears, but actually you don't sometimes realize it because it's just so beautifully woven together. But yeah, I think this visceral nature of it, this psychic but also bodily transformation that she becomes this serpent, you know, she has this, and the pain of it, the pain of it all, actually, I think that's really come out, I think, for me, reading it again. I think I found that really powerful very, very recently.

Gillian Roberts: Zalfa, how about you? What do you make of the way this book is put together and all the multitudes that it contains?

Zalfa Feghali: I always struggled, and I think depending on how I needed it, I would describe it in terms of genre differently. So is it autobiographical? Because that's one really easy, I think, and probably superficial way of thinking about it. For a long time, I settled on hybrid text, I think, which just was strangely noncommittal because it doesn't actually say anything about what the text is doing and doesn't take into account the bits that aren't text. Also, all of this simultaneously, I don't think I had ever read the, I guess, integrated prose bits, the bits that are divided into chapters immediately afterwards, then reading the poetry that's in the second half of the book. It's been difficult to categorize what I need this book for. And in an important way, I always have needed it as an academic, but I've always divided up in a way that becomes then very much more recognizable as academics, as scholars, as maybe even a literary cultural studies scholar that I am, I would read the first seven chapters, and then I would stop, and then I'd read the poems that I would need, and then I would stop there. And it was very difficult to read them all in one go, because that would entail a shift of my brain that wasn't always easy to generate. So hybrid text there. I think it is a form of, then I would describe it as a theoretical text, which it is, of course, but it isn't just a theoretical text and only bits and pieces are theoretical. And yet still other pieces, I think the difficulty that I have in terms of thinking through the prose part is that I always struggle to read chapter three because I don't like snakes. And entering into the serpent was obviously not about literal, not always about literal snakes, but it was just, it was a part for me that had embodied consequences that was very bodily as you were saying, Steph. And so I've never, that's the bit if I have to read, I'll read it quick. In that sense, it's generically so diverse that it led to me spending a month or so, while I was doing my PhD, reading about genre, just to try and work out what this was. And in the end, I think it stands alone in its hybridity, again, I'm using that non-committal word, but in its own mestizaje. It models what it's trying to put forward. It's textually modelling that. It's also theoretically modelling the situated knowledge that it is delivering to us. It is hugely fascinating in that way. And it becomes difficult to talk about it because then you're talking about talking about talking about it.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. I think It's a text that is both compartmentalized and by virtue of it all being part of the same text, integrated, and we can read this text very pragmatically. And I've done the same. But that, I think, points out our own. 

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. 

Gillian Roberts: I said we wouldn’t talk about a deficit model, but I feel like my deficit model is there. It's because my brain can't handle all of that at once. And in a way, because there's lots of different sections, even within the poetic section, which is the bit that I reread most recently, you know, even that is broken up into divisions, which is very, like, digestible. But it's only because, you know, we only read it that way, I think, because we can't read the whole, like, what is it to take in everything? One of the things I'm really interested in is language. And obviously there's a lot of Spanish and movement between English and Spanish in this, and different kinds of Spanish as well, and different dialects, and specific to the borderlands, etc. But the choices of translation are totally inconsistent. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, it's great. 

Gillian Roberts: It's amazing. Like, even within a single poem, not all of the Spanish will be translated. And I have very rudimentary Spanish. So, you know, sometimes I know what a particular line will be saying, sometimes I can have a guess, and sometimes I'm clueless. Or there'll be whole poems in Spanish. Some of them will be translated on the next page in English and some of them won't be. So this is a book that makes us work really hard, those of us on the outside. And I think that's brilliant. And I think it will take a lifetime and beyond to be, in a way, worthy of this book, you know. It's our lifelong lesson, as it were. And what you said, Steph, about midlife and how recognizing things to do with the body, you know, we couldn't have got that in our 20s. There's no way. So I think we're just so fortunate to have this book to take us through the rest of our lives and the rest of the development of our thinking. And not just thinking, but also being in the world.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: I mean, I think the relationality, I think you're right, Gillian, it is, you know, and Zalfa, you’ve said, it's this painful book to read. Because of our, you know, where we are situated as well. But what we get out of it, you know, and I think this time I really got when Anzaldúa was talking about the difficulty growing up and how she was told to do certain things and not do other things and the shame and the repression and how somehow she's bursting forth as this new, you know, serpent woman. But the journey to get there is so long. And do you actually ever get there? And then if you do get there, does anybody actually take any notice of you? Which, you know, for Anzaldúa’s lifetime, it was really, really difficult. So I think it's that pain that really comes out. But also, and I don't want to sound too overly optimistic in the world that we are living in, but that sense of, despite all this, survival and hope and keeping on going, and being able, that thing that she sort of says in the final chapter, about managing to be on both sides at once, to look to the person who may have maligned you somehow to bring them in. And her, I think that model, which we all talk about intersectionality and, you know, as you said, Anzaldúa is way ahead of her time. But that relationality, that possibility for imagining new solidarities and coalitions, I find that really, really powerful and uplifting. And we are, you know, we're not anywhere where we want to be. But to be able to get, I think, that balance. I mean, Anzaldúa is being criticized for, you know, being utopian. I don't think, you know, she is, I think that that materiality, that violence, that pain is there all the time. But to balance that without ever losing that sense of how do you move forward, I think is pretty amazing. To look past difference. Coalitional thinking is what we really need.

Zalfa Feghali: I do think that her agency comes out in this book in ways that we tend to overlook because we're trying to put a pin in other things, or we're busy like I was when I was a doctoral student trying to categorize. And it's a thing that we do in Western knowledge, right? We want to know what sort of knowledge this is, where actually there is knowledge in other languages that we sometimes not only don't have access to, but don't get to have access to. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, and rightly so. 

Zalfa Feghali: Exactly, and rightly so. And there is no taking for granted or entitlement to all sorts of knowledge just for the sake of knowledge. I think a lot of what is going on with the translation or lack of translation is just sort of nudges in that direction. You can know this, but you can't ever know this. And that you have to be okay with that from the position from, you know, we all have situated knowledges, and they all take place at different borders. And Anzaldúa’s is what it is in this book. We can't ever access anything beyond that. Even if you go to the archives, it's made static. And I think foregrounding her agency, and I think I'm thinking about agency in part because I'm writing a lot about agency at the moment, foregrounding her agency makes this not just a utopian/dystopian situation, but one that is generative, one that is not just generative, but maybe even iterative. So we try this, and then it leads us to this, and then it leads us to this. So it is constantly a sort of positive and generative cycle. And that's why, that's why I'll probably read her for the rest of my career and continue to learn. And as you said, Gillian, make ourselves worthy of this book.

Gillian Roberts: And we will only make ourselves worthy of this book by continuing to reread it. Steph, we would like to hear about a border that you have known.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Well, this actually relates to the first time. Well, actually, it wasn't the first time that I went to Los Angeles, but I did archival work for my PhD in Los Angeles. I spent a year there. I had a really quick trip prior to that just to find out and talk to people. But I went for a year and it was 2001, a very interesting year for all sorts of different reasons. And I was going downtown. I didn't drive. I should drive now, but I don't. Passed my test, but hate driving.

Gillian Roberts: That's hard in LA.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Yes. Yeah. Oh, the... phew! And I spent lots of time on the buses. I have to say, you know, people say, oh, you don't want to be on the bus, you want to be driving. But actually that was a whole experience in itself. And I met some of the most interesting people on the bus. And my journeys were sometimes quite long. Sometimes there were three buses waiting, knowing when to get off at certain intersections, all that kind of thing. But I'm glad I did it. And there was one time, I don't think I'd been there too long. I was on the bus, I was actually at the back of this bus, and I got sat next to this man, and he was reading, I think it was La Opinion, he was reading a Spanish-language newspaper, and he started talking to me, and we were just chatting away, I said, you know, recently arrived here, staying here for some time, he said, What are you doing here? And I said, well, I'm here to do some archival work. My project is about social reform programmes and how they impacted people of Mexican descent, late 19th, early 20th century. And he said to me, you do know, he said, I want everybody to know, he said, this land is ours. This land is still ours. And I just thought there was nothing more powerful than to hear that, actually. You know, I was writing about the physical border and, you know, engaging with nativism, racialization in the project that I was doing, and loss as well. And I just thought to myself, this is just this chance encounter on the bus. But this person has told me, I didn't need to go. I don't need to go into the archives, actually, to understand

Zalfa Feghali: Totally. 

Stephanie Lewthwaite: the border and to understand the power of 1848, of land loss, the legacy of that and how it lives on. It's this historical memory that is still so powerful. And of course, at that point, I was knowledgeable a bit about Aztlán and how it had been, you know, sort of so important to the Chicano movement and still really important for so many people. And Anzaldúa, her rewriting of it. So I just, that was for me, that was a real moment of thinking, ah, here we are, here's the border. And I know there were so many borders already in Los Angeles. You know, you could see them, you could hear them. You know, whether you were going into downtown LA and you knew where the sort of the demarcation lines were. But this was somebody who was telling me 1848 and beyond. Um, this border is, is actually, it's in my life now and it's not leaving me. So that's my, that's my border anecdote.

Gillian Roberts: What an amazing encounter. Thank you for sharing it with us. 

Zalfa Feghali: Very lucky to meet this person.

Zalfa Feghali: Wow.

Gillian Roberts: Well, thank you, Steph. Thanks for coming to talk to us today.

Stephanie Lewthwaite: Thank you both of you. It's been an absolute privilege. I'm really, really pleased to be part of this project. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.