Moving toward a disability-centric model of body politics in borderlands theory and fiction

Abstract

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands has been celebrated across several fields, and yet little attention has been given to her engagement with disability. This article expands considerations of geographical and social mobility, so that they also take into account physical (im)mobility. Anzaldua’s meditations on movement highlight a gap in borderlands literature to which a disability studies perspective has much to add: questions of mobility at the border raise awareness of the bodily violations that occur there among subjects with disabilities. I point toward alternative modes of mobility that surface in borderlands literature, ranging from spiritual movement in Anzaldua’s Borderlands to rhythmic stasis in Gomez-Pena’s “Border Brujo” to creative and linguistic motion in Islas’s The Rain God. These forms pinpoint ways in which disabled Chicanas/os and Latinas/os can rerepresent their bodies as mobile.