La Frontera By Gloria Anzaldúa Analysis

The identity of the Hispanic woman has been molded by social standards, in the United States and in Latin America, to fit an image of a small, indigenous woman hustling to provide for her family inside and outside this economically poor household. These images and symbols that the Latina woman has had to deal with have been transferred into the social and educational sphere, limiting her opportunities. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza she discusses the various elements of her life up to adulthood and the adversities she had to overcome because of being an educated, gay Latina. Her journey is highlighted through the historical and the mythical in ways that the Hispanic culture has identified themselves with for many generations. Within the Hispanic culture, there are hundreds of different ethnicities that speak the Spanish tongue but are separated through practice of discreet customs that a specific culture identifies themselves with. They are dispersed through this idea that
Anzaldua’s text embraces and validates experiences of people from various cultures, races, and classes that fuse what happened in the past, what is going on in the present, and what will happen in the future. The combination of metaphors and archetypes from the mestizo culture within Anzaldúa’s work allow her to transcend the idea of how the conceptual boundaries created around her forced her to become an outcast. The poem To live in the Borderlands Means You by Anzaldúa highlights how these boundaries that separate one identity from the other is take very seriously. It traces the history of people that branched out and began to identify themselves as another culture but still tried to connect back to where it