Reassembling Coyolxauhqui: a Review of The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader

Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. 376 pp. $84.95 hardback, $23.95 paperback.

Review in Southwestern American Literature 35.2 (Spring 2010): 104-06. [untitled]
By George Hartley, Associate Professor of English, Ohio University. 
Author of The Curandera of Conquest: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonizing Consciousness (in progress).

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Gloria Anzaldúa, in her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), described the border dividing Mexico from the United States as una herida abierta, an open wound “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country–a border culture.”
In many ways, she devoted her career as a writer, teacher, and activist to the identification of the sources of this wound as well as the radical sources of its potential healing, as seen early on in works such as her collection co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), a turning point in the collective understanding of feminists of color in the United States. The end result of Anzaldúa’s healing process is what she called the new mestiza—one who, produced by the violence of the border, with her tolerance for ambiguity and her genesis out of contradiction can offer a healing imaginative consciousness for those in the borderlands and beyond. The selections included in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader document the development of this new mestiza and, consequently, the gesture towards healing the wound of the multiple borders that divide people from one another as well as within themselves.

Compiled and edited by AnaLouise Keating, Anzaldúa’s long-time co-editor on decolonizing book projects such as this bridge we call home (2002), The Anzaldúa Reader provides an in-depth view of the wide scope of Anzaldúa’s interests and the developing nature of key concepts throughout her writing career. And it is this developing life project of Anzaldúa the queer mestiza writer-poet-healer-activist that provides the narrative structure for the Reader. While including important works already in print, Keating also provides us with many key works that were previously unpublished, such as “The New Mestiza Nation: A Multicultural Movement” and the poem “La vulva es un herida abierta / The Vulva is an Open Wound.” Keating explains in her invaluable introduction (as well as in her helpful contextualizing notes to each work in the volume) that she divides the book into four sections: early writings (1974-1983), middle writings (1985-1993), images, and later writings (1996-2003). She sees behind these three chronological periods Anzaldúa’s move from inclusiveness (early) to racialized opposition (middle) to radical inclusiveness (later).

The collection of early writings includes the famous autobiographical essay—or, as Anzaldúa calls it, her autohistoria—“La Prieta” (1981), in which she began to articulate several of the themes that would be predominant in Borderlands/La Frontera. These themes include Chicana indigeneity (“la prieta” means dark female, one who looks more “Indian” than her peers, a slur coming out of an internalized Mexican racism), queerness, identity construction, and the social reproduction and policing of woman. The middle writings, the years of Borderlands/La Frontera, focus in part on the role of shamanic artistic processes in the Coatlicue transformation from wounded split being to reassembled new mestiza consciousness. This grouping includes works such as “Metaphors in the Tradition of the Shaman” (1990), “Haciendo caras, una entrada” (1990), “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana” (1991), and “Border Arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera” (1993). The later writings, as assembled by Keating, represent Anzaldúa’s emphasis on a radical inclusiveness as a precondition for her project of spiritual activism. The title of one such work, an interview regarding perceived conflicts between Chicanas and American Indian women, suggests this moment: “Speaking Across the Divide” (2002). This section concludes with the essay written in response to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, “Let us be the healing of the wound: The Coyolxauhqui Imperative—la sombra y el sueño” (2002).

Coyolxauhqui, the daughter of earth mother Coatlicue, was dismembered and scattered by her sungod/wargod brother Huitzilopochtli. The Coyolxauhqui Imperative, then—which could be said to characterize Anzaldúa’s ultimate gesture—involves the reclamation of a loving, peace-making, bridging mandate as the cure for patriarchal destruction—the open wound. One limb left in phantom state in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader is Anzaldúa’s crucial essay, “now let us shift . . . the path of conocimiento . . . inner work, public acts” (2002). But given that Anzaldúa and Keating included this lengthy work in this bridge we call home (the 2002 follow-up companion to This Bridge Called My Back), and given the separate existence of Borderlands/La Frontera, this absence can stand in as a material sign for the healing work yet to be done in putting Coyolxauhqui back together.