Introduction

Abstract

With Borderlands/Ea Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzald?a burst onto the feminist conceptual scene offering new ways of exploring relationships of power and domination, resistance and agency, among women and men hitherto cast as marginalized others. Anzald?a acknowledges the pain and anguish of otherness and seeks to reclaim its latent power by exploring how disempowered subjects labeled as express their identities and resistance. She coins the term mestiza consciousness to reflect border subjects' expressions of agency that incorporate spiritual transformations and psychic processes of exclusion and identification?of feeling cultures, languages, or places. Anzald?a also delves into the origins and conditions that construct and reinforce otherness. Her theoretical formulation of expounds on the dynamics within material and discursive spaces that transcend geopolitical border areas, where women, men, and youth, straight and queer, adapt, resist, and develop new strate gies to negotiate social inequalities. Anzald?a's creative reflections about fluid borders and borderlands have influ enced many fields. Until recently these concepts, borders and borderlands, have not been problematized or operationalized in sociological research (Martinez 2002). All too often is used as a catchall that signifies, among other things, uncharted territory or subjects whose identities are outside the mainstream. This uncritical use of borderlands as a proxy for analyses of complex relation ships between structure and agency that are not situated regionally or historically is problematic. Understanding the intersections of historically specific regional dynamics, institutional configurations, and cultural expressions would generate exciting theoretical and empirical work on gender and borderlands. There are