Latina Lesbian Writers and Artists by Costa Maria Dolores;

Author:Costa, Maria Dolores;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

After such a meaningful, sharp and serious accusation, the academic reader will go directly to note number 33 to find the source of such a clear formulation of the mechanisms of the religious institution. What one will find there, however, is this funny and ironic commentary: “33. I have lost the source of this quote. If anyone knows what it is, please let the publisher know” (95). Having completed my PhD in the United States, I know through personal experience that this note would be unacceptable in a final paper for a graduate course, and would be much more inappropriate in an academic text designed for publication. I would say PhD-granting institutions in the U.S. and academic publications have much to do with the “institution,” its “rituals” and rules of “authorization” that the author is discussing, in both logical and practical ways. Of course, twelve years later (1999), when the second edition of Borderlands was published and an interesting introduction by Sonia Saldivar-Hull was added, nobody had yet found “the source of the quote.”

In all this academic parody there is a subtle element that, in my opinion, extends the criticism much further: we should remember that, by coincidence, the number of the note referring to Catholic dogma, 33, is not only the age at which Catholics believe Christ died, but also a triple allusion to the central truth of the Catholic faith-the mystery of the Trinity. But the possible connotations of this joke go beyond religion itself to question the legitimacy of a male divinity, and maybe even Eurocentric high culture, if one remembers the age of Dante Alighieri’s “autobiographical” character in another of the foundational books of Western culture (yet another male-centered monument).

Besides the wide openness and the genre indeterminacy of Borderlands, the feeling that I experienced most intensively since my first reading was a radical and essential freedom. The strong impression that, at least within the utopian space of the text, equality can be a reality, and it is still possible to cross the border to the space of the cultural otherness even in a mass-mediated world where the market seems to have invaded everything. Then, when it was my turn to speak in the graduate seminar, I made reference to this radical experience of freedom and to the joy of thinking that, if a book such as Borderlands had been written and had crossed las fronteras de la academia, at least potentially, the human world had a chance to be moved to a better place.

In the following section of my study, I will analyze the alternative constructions of history and geopolitics proposed by the book. In the conclusion, I will summarize the mestiza identity of a human Western culture (as if these roles were a destiny and not mere possibilities among others). It is quite obvious that if we could change our colonized perception of reality and replace it with a set of egalitarian principles, reality, and not only perception, would be different. From this perspective “Crossing

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