Editor’s Introduction: Crossing Borders and Genres

Abstract

In her foundational work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa provocatively describes the US-Mexico border as an open wound, “ una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.” Anzaldúa emphasizes the ways in which borders clearly divide and separate, “defin[ing] the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them ,” but also how a borderland exists more tenuously as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.” Here reside the “prohibited and forbidden[,] . . . the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (25). Anzaldúa’s description of the US-Mexico borderlands emphasizes the varieties of identities and experiences in border cultures, which, as Claudia Sadowski-Smith states, shape perceptions of such cultures: “[T]he specific cultural beliefs, histories, and material circumstances of individuals and communities . . . produce diverse conceptions of border spaces” (3).