Night Vision by Mariana Alessandri

Author:Mariana Alessandri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

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Gloria Anzaldúa was a zurda who suffered from what today would likely be diagnosed as clinical depression. She lived in a world where depressed people were expected to “think positive” just as surely as gay people were expected to “act straight.” Like my left-handed students, Anzaldúa was raised in a world that did not fit her. As a child growing up in the 1950s in the South Texas borderlands, she was a dark horse emotionally, physically, and otherwise. Her voracious reading habit upset her mother, who knew only how to love a good little Mexican girl who dusted lamps and mopped floor tiles; she was perplexed by this untraditional little tomboy who preferred to paint and read instead. Even as a young girl, Anzaldúa knew she would never iron clothes for a husband or braid the hair of a squirming daughter. She was going to spend her life reading, writing, and painting. She would give birth to ideas.

In her elementary school backpack, Anzaldúa kept books written by Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Even at so young an age, she knew that prietas like her did not read authors like these.10 Her prized books were not written with a Spanglish-speaking Mexican field worker like her in mind, any more than student desks were designed with lefties in mind. Still, her intellectual appetite was insatiable. “I was that kind of kid,” she remembers.11

At twenty-one, Anzaldúa enrolled in Texas Women’s University, leaving her family for the first time to devote herself to the hundreds of dead poets, writers, and painters who had become her life. None of the artists looked, spoke, or wrote like her, so she started thinking of herself as different, a little off. She got on a bus headed north, hoping to find el mundo zurdo, the world made for left-handed folks like her. She had to come home after a year when she could no longer afford tuition, but by continuing to work in the fields and saving money, she was able to attend and graduate from Pan American College. It’s the legacy institution of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), where I now teach. If I had been teaching in 1967, Anzaldúa would have been my student. (Of course, there were no Latinas teaching philosophy at my university in 1967.)

The worlds that Anzaldúa encountered “out there” did not fit her any better than the one she left. None of the cities she lived in would ever smell as good or be as warm to the touch as a homemade tortilla, the kind she dreamed of while living in Vermont and planning her first book.12 Living the life of a queer and homesick writer, she was the gay person among straights in North and South Texas, the Tejana in San Francisco, the dark-skinned farmworker among white academics in Vermont, and the short Mexican with the strange accent in Indiana and Brooklyn. She eventually made a home for herself in Santa Cruz, California, “the dyke capital

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