Globalization and the Decolonial Option by Walter D. Mignolo & Arturo Escobar

Author:Walter D. Mignolo & Arturo Escobar [Mignolo, Walter D. & Escobar, Arturo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317966708
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-10-17T18:30:00+00:00

My point is that Anzaldúa, like Du Bois, sees her braided Chicana consciousness as a fractured, cracked, and braided construction, an effort to merge new cultural formations and ethnoracial subjectivities. Like Du Bois, she, too, highlights the inherent US linguistic wars both inside the body of the nation and in the body of her soul, for like the US-Mexico border itself, it is ‘an open wound, dividing a pueblo, a culture,/running down the length of my body,/[it] splits me, splits me/me raja, me raja’ (1987, p. 24). Both Du Bois and Anzaldúa call for new ethnic, linguistic, and cultural exchanges between the South and the North. If, for Du Bois at the beginning of the twentieth century blackness and whiteness were inextricably woven together, then, for Anzaldúa at the century's end Chicana, Latina, African American, and Euro-American vernacular English and Spanish have been knitted together into what Du Bois called ‘the very warp and woof of this nation’. This ‘colonial difference’ is crucial to emphasize for those of us tracking Chicano/a studies' shifting and shifty cross-genealogy from the matrix of globalization's coloniality.

In arguing for the centrality of human language rights in Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, I mean to support Mignolo's critical, subaltern, US Latino/a, postcolonial evaluations of Anzaldúa's ‘border gnosis’ without losing sight of the importance of the author's multiple renaming processes and her radical recodifications of womanhood. As Chicana feminist scholars such as Norma Alarcón, Chela Sandoval, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and Paula Moya have all rigorously and gracefully argued, Borderlands/La Frontera is fundamentally a Chicana feminist text; a first-rate historia of post-Jim Crow South Texas; a jolting new positioning of the native woman in Chicana Studies; a terrific study in comparative whiteness and brownness; and post-postivist realist call for identity and social justice.15 Yet what is perhaps an equally powerful feature of Anzaldúa's text has also been one of its least analyzed — Anzaldúa's discussion of nepantilism as a braided, US Latino/a linguistic consciousness. La conciencia de la nueva mestiza, for Anzaldúa, is ‘neither español ni inglés, but both’. It is a consciousness of nepantla, a Mexica term, signifying in betweeness, and which is ‘capable of communicating the real values’ of the US-Mexico borderlands to others (1987, p. 77).

In arguing for the centrality of her ‘forked’, ‘wild’, and active feminist tongues, Anzaldúa emphasizes that these tongues are informed with other, border-crossing tongues: ‘los recién llegados, Mexican immigrants, north from Mexico’, and the older tongues of the ‘braceros’ (p. 78). And to these vernacular tongues, she merges her Tex-Mex dialects that she uses with her brothers and sisters and the ‘secret language of pachuco, a language of rebellion’ (p. 78) in order to create a foundational consciousness of the new mestiza.

Read against recent legal attempts in California and Florida (states with large US Latino/a populations) to force an English-only linguistic absolutism, Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera offers readers a dialect centered anti-absolutism, for there ‘is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience’(1987, p. 80). In

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