Reading National Identities: The Radical Disruptions of Borderlands/La Frontera

Abstract

In the wake of September 11, 2001, U.S. anxieties about national identity have surfaced with a vengeance. Despite the prolific “United-We-Stand” rhetoric, racial profiling of people of color in airports and on our streets has escalated, revealing the “we” to be both contestatory and exclusionary. The rhetoric of unification masks the materiality of both national identity and culture as sites of “resistance and struggle, not coherence and consensus” (Saldivar 14). Few texts confront these issues more profoundly than Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldua interrogates dominant conceptions of nation and identity, exploring whether and how it might be possible to develop a sense of national identity that doesn’t exclude and do violence to women and men of color and those who are poor or queer. The text’s experimental form foregrounds the contestatory narratives of national identity, revealing the histories of colonization, exploited labor, and racism that make possible dominant national narratives. In doing so, it invites readers to enact a similar interrogation of national identities and their performances, offering us opportunities to critically locate ourselves in these narratives’ formations and learn less violent ways to to read national contestations.