Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Feminist Analysis

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa is a notable Chicana feminist, cultural theorist, and activist because of her many contributions to social movements regarding minority women. Not only did she impact this “renaissance” for Chicana literature through her own writings, but she also encouraged other aspiring minority artists and writers to help expose the diversity that was rapidly growing in the United States.
Personally, Anzaldúa interested me because of her efforts in promoting feminism, so I wanted to analyze a document that portrayed her presence and contributions within Chicana feminism. I decided to analyze a letter she had written to the Simon & Schuster publishing company in which she wrote a brief overview of her work, because I was interested in her accomplishments and various projects.
This particular document was in good condition, in comparison to other documents found in her files. Many of the papers found in her collection were handwritten pieces, however the header at the top of the page indicated that it had been printed from Anzaldúa’s writing laptop. Due to the file information included in this header, it can be inferred that it was printed after her passing.
Because there were a couple of incomplete paragraphs, as well as repeated ones, it can be assumed that this was a draft of a letter she was preparing to submit for the publication of her editorial, An Evolving Chicana Feminist Literary Theory.
With this biographical information, I discovered a well in-depth description of her work as well as a glimpse of the passion that she had for her work.
Especially since there was a notable change from first to third person point of view about three quarters into the document, which indicated that she was preparing this as a biography about herself. What makes this unique is that the information about her work is actually given to us first hand, but we can witness her enthusiasm for her work and even catch glimpse of how she viewed her own accomplishments. Although when, and if, this was finally published, readers would see this information written differently. These readers would most likely be people who happened to come across her editorial and wanted to learn more about Anzaldúa and her
work.
One particular quote that stood out to me was: “Demographics show that whites are no longer the majority, and therefore no longer the majority of the audience.” This was important to me because of how this class focuses on the presence of Mexican American Literature, which according to Anzaldúa, was rare to come across in mainstream media. By encouraging more minorities to publish their work, she fought to have more diverse representation in literature and the arts. By observing this document, I was able to see how she contributed to this movement by producing literature that was beneficial to several different disciplines, and how her work was already being used in university course work for philosophy, anthropology, ethnic studies, political science, women’s studies, and many other subjects. This is an interesting fact, because her work continues to be influential twenty-two years later and is archived in a rare documents collection.