Spirit Matters: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Cosmic Becoming across Human/Nonhuman Borderlands

Abstract

In this article I situate Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing within feminist “new” materialism and posthumanism. In dialogue with the spiritual in Chicanx/Latinx decolonial writing, I turn to the poetic interruptions in Borderlands/La Frontera, as well as research of Anzaldúa’s unpublished archival materials, to open up the queer moments where Anzaldúa radically embodies and enters into spirited matter, or the communality with (not commonality, but communing with, becoming other with) the spirit worlds in all things, animals, forces (such as wind), and the land. In addition, I question the persistence of scientific rationality in feminist new materialist scholarship that cannot attend to what I call Anzaldúa’s “cosmic spirit-mattering,” a Native-based scientific practice and philosophy that bridges indigenous cosmologies with a dazzling range of disciplines and knowledges that span alchemy, shamanism, psychology, Western and Native folklore, and science and technology studies. One of the ironies, then, of the emergence of new materialism is that it stems from the forgetting of the colonial histories that relegated indigenous peoples and their spiritual cosmologies to primitivity, backwardness, and as not-yet-human status for their failure to properly segregate human-animal-objects-nature into hierarchies of agency/passivity, object/subject, and nature/culture.