Border Thinking, Minoritized Studies, and Realist Interpellations: The Coloniality of Power from Gloria Anzaldúa to Arundhati Roy

Abstract

This essay has a somewhat sweeping character. It is a preliminary attempt to link pensamiento fronterizo (border thinking) in Chicano/a Studies and realist interpellations of the subject and the politics of reclaiming identity of this volume. Border thinking emerges from the critical reflections of (undocumented) immigrants, migrants, bracero/a workers, refugees, campesinos, women, and children on the major structures of dominance and subordination of our times. Thus envisaged, border thinking is the name for a new geopolitically located thinking or epistemology from both the internal and external borders of the modern (colonial) world-system.’ Border thinking is a necessary tool for thinking what the Peruvian historical social scientist Anibal Quijano calls the “coloniality of power” and identity at the intersections (los intersticios) of our local histories and global designs.2