Gloria Anzaldúa

I think there's a lot of people like this.

And as I was preparing for this conversation, I was really thinking about the Chicana queer scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa.

This whole concept of nepantla, it's such a powerful concept.

This concept of nepantla comes from a queer feminist epistemology that's really trying to name an in-between state where you're neither fully one thing or another, and you're living in between different cultures, languages, paradigms.

Authors that I have read.

Just yesterday I was reading Joy Harjo, and, and I always will be thankful for Gloria Anzaldúa, and bell hooks, and Paulo Freire, and all my spiritual mentors, and some of the mentors I've had through my graduate studies, and yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And now I'm also thinking my mentors, the river, [laughs] maybe the creek outside my house-

So there's a project they've been working on for a long time called Proclaiming Our Roots, and it's digital storytelling of Afro-Indigenous participants.

But it was really kind of built for this idea that similar to how we read maybe like Gloria Anzaldúa from decades ago around, you know, I either have to be woman or I have to be lesbian or I have to be queer.

It was the same thing here.

I have to be Black or I have to be Indigenous.

I don't get to be both.

And so... like how we start asking these questions, again, rooted in theories, like, you know, looking at borderland theories out of Gloria Anzaldúa came on before any of the stuff we were doing in community psychology.

How does that help us think about even what you were talking about before that identity isn't this kind of structured category, but this fluid way that we're co-constructing through a colonial lens to try to create, I don't know, categories of hierarchy and repression.

And what does it mean as we're kind of like moving through it in our, our own ways and our own spaces to, to reclaim like our whole selves.

Like, from the place of pain, you could wanna trash it like anything.

And Gloria Anzaldúa is actually the philosopher I talk about when talking about depression, and I think she would've trashed it if given the choice at all.

Yeah, yeah.

Right? So, so I think hating it is perfectly 100% within your rights, and it's individual, right? There are some people who end up saying, "Oh, well, this actually turned out to be okay for me," whatever.

She had a phrase for that: la trampa de lenguaje, the trap of language.

Now, you may remember a similar concept from Gloria Anzaldúa's episode.

Alejandra won the Guggenheim Award in 1968 and the Fulbright in 1971 while that trap was closing.

The prestige never became permission.