Self-Change as Global Change: Spiritual Activism and Its Place in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Legacy

Abstract

This article looks at Gloria Anzaldúa’s under-explored and posthumously published work Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, which marks important developments for Anzaldúa’s legacy and philosophy, and is a culmination of her thoughts concerning identity, spirituality, aesthetics, ethics, ontology, and metaphysics. This work’s cornerstone concept, “spiritual activism,” provides activists with a radical new means of resistance that attempts to dismantle systemic oppressions that enable separatisms such as racism, sexism, classism, speciesism, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, and even environmental degradation. In envisioning these social and ecological injustices as interconnected and intersectional phenomena, spiritual activism amalgamates spiritual technologies with political forms of activism. Spiritual activism views self-change as a means of global change in and of itself, making this connection more robust, visible, and explicit for Anzaldúa’s readership. It formulates a new metaphysics of interconnectedness with others, animals, and the earth itself in new ontological matrices that disrupt the cultural hegemony of Eurocentric, Anglocentric, and western cultures. Anzaldúa’s last work develops new forms of resistance via the critical and constant (re)shaping of our identity formations and ontological categories to make positive social change and global justice its highest priority.