Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldua on Composition and Postcoloniality.

Abstract

Gloria Anzaldiiahas not had an easy time of having what she calls her own voice. Born (1942) and raised in the border country of south Texas (in Jesus Maria of the Valley), Anzaldualearnedearly that she was different, an alien from another planet who quite fit with the norms and expectations of her family and community, didn't like anice little Chicanitais supposed act (LaPrieta, 199,201). Describing some of her early experiences in LaPrieta (from the landmark 1981 collection TfrisBridgeCalledMy Back Writings by Radical WomenofColor) y Anzaldiiarejectsongoingeffortstolabelher differences in various ways?as lesbian, as feminist, as marxist, as mystic, as other: Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me, she says (205). In this early essay, Anzaldiia announces the multiplicity of her self and her voice: she is a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds; she is Shiva, a many-armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man's world, the woman's, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds. A sort of spider hanging by one thin strand of web (204). And indeed, much of Anzaldiia's work has been devoted making a space where such multiplicity could beenacted. This Bridge CalledMy Back (19Sl;2nded. 1983), edited with CherieMoraga, grew out of an experience at a 1979 women's retreat during which Anzaldiia was made (once again) feel she was being labeled?tokenized as a third-world woman and as an outsider, an exoticized other the white feminists there. Characteristically, Anzaldiia turned that experience into ameans of affirming her commitment women of color by providing a forum in which their multiple voices?and her own?could beheard. In 1987came her &oundbredkm%BorckrUnds/La!rontera,^^ she has most thoroughly rendered and theorized the borderland space that is home her multiple identities and voices. And then in 1990?after years of waiting for someone to compile a book that would continue where This Bridge Called My

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