Written by:
Julia Bloch
Photographer:
Margaret Randall
On May 15, 2004, the lesbian community mourned the loss of renowned activist, theorist and writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who died at age 61 from diabetes-related complications.
Anzaldúa is well-known to women’s-studies students everywhere for the beloved anthology she co-edited in 1981 with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which remains an unparalleled landmark in feminist articulations on race and class. Anzaldúa’s other anthologies include Making Faces, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (1990) and This Bridge We Call Home (2002). Her 1987 book of poetry, theory and memoir, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, explored life in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico, and delineated what has become a cornerstone of cultural studies: the border as not only a geographic marker but also a space where new cultures and identities — political, spiritual, physical, lingual, sexual — take shape and evolve. As Anzaldúa wrote in the book’s preface, the crux of border identity is language:
“The switching of ‘codes’ in this book from English to Castillian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl to a mixture of all of these, reflects my language, a new language — the language of the Borderlands. There, at the juncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized; they die and are born.”
Anzaldúa’s many awards and honors include a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, an NEA Fiction Award, the Lesbian Rights Award, and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award. She was born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, earned her B.A. from Pan American University and her M.A. from University of Texas, Austin, and was completing her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was within weeks of completing her dissertation at the time of her death.
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