Messy Archives and Materials That Matter: Making Knowledge with the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers

Abstract

When Gloria Anzaldúa died in 2004, she gave birth to an enormous archive; indeed, she let far more unpublished writings than works published in her lifetime. What's more, Anzaldúa was a compulsive reviser, and her archive includes ten to twenty unique drats of some works, along with doodles, ticket stubs, and other ephemera. his collection of material decenters what we previously thought constituted her literary corpus, knocking the presumed author of Borderlands / La Frontera of her axis. he process of siting through these materials changed my thinking about authority, textuality, identity, and many other things. My obsession with this archive has led me to reexamine the ways in which we produce, reproduce, and coproduce knowledge in archival work. In this essay, I show how recognizing the multiple material actants at work in this archive transforms conventional thought about archives, in general, and Anzaldúan studies, in particular.