Holy Communion and Holy Relics

Abstract

In this essay, I show how Gloria Anzaldúa transforms the Roman Catholic concepts of Holy Communion and the veneration of relics as part of the Chicana lesbian aesthetic that characterizes her decolonial project. Reading two poems from her watershed 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, (hereafter Borderlands) “The Cannibal’s Canción” and “Holy Relics,” along with an extended metaphorical conceit about corn within the book’s final prose chapter, “La conciencia de la mestiza/ Towards a New Consciousness,” I show how Anzaldúa critiques the colonial logic of gendered exploitation by repurposing Roman Catholic concepts into stylistic devices that imagine a queer Chicana erotic of mutual consumption. Specifically, this paper considers the way Anzaldúa engages with Catholic rituals that rely on dismemberment, redistribution, and consumption of human bodies for worship and veneration to reexamine Anzaldúa’s transformation of Catholicism through her poetics. By incorporating some context about how she understands the moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui, I show how Anzaldúa understands dismemberment and reconstitution as a healing, reparative project, and I then connect this notion of dismemberment with the Catholic rituals of Holy Communion and veneration of relics to suggest that Anzaldúa was able to find continuity within as well as more obvious points of departure from Catholic ritual.