Prietita y el Otro Lado: Gloria Anzaldúa's Literature for Children

Abstract

Gloria Anzaldúa is known as a poet, a postcolonial theoretician, the author of Borderlands / la Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), and the editor or coeditor of important anthologies. She also wrote two books for children, Friends from the Other Side / Amigos del otro lado (1993) and Prietita and the Ghost Woman / Prietita y la Llorona (1995). Here Anzaldúa honed her sense of “conocimientos,” other ways of knowing. She imprinted her heroine, Prietita, as a “bridge”—a way of transforming the world. For Anzaldúa, writing books for children was an important step of activism because children would effect necessary cultural and social transformations.