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This e-mail interview between the editors and Professor Lunsford took place in early 2008. How did Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s work affect you and your work? When I wrote to Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa in early 1996 to ask if I might talk with her about the relationship between her work and the disciplines of rhetoric and writing studies and postcolonial studies, she didn’t say “No” right away, but she wasn’t very enthusiastic, either. After all, rhetoric and writing studies have a long reputation of being deeply complicit with colonizing practices of reading and writing (and speaking , too, for that matter): you must read this, not that; you must write this way, not that way. “Especially in composition,” Anzaldúa pointed out, “rules are very strict: creating a thesis sentence, having some kind of argument, having a logical step-by-step progression, [this] goes all the way back to Aristotle and Cicero” (“Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric” 6). She was equally chary of postcolonial studies, saying she had grown impatient with trying to understand Homi Bhabha or Gayatri Spivak and just didn’t have time to decipher the codes they and others seemed to depend on and demand that their readers acquire. I persisted in my request, however, and eventually was fortunate enough to spend a day in face-to-face conversation and engage in many phone calls and back-and-forths as I transcribed and edited an interview that eventually appeared in a special issue of JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory called Exploring Borderlands: Postcolonial and Composition Studies. CHAPTER 24 Embracing Borderlands: Gloria Anzaldúa and Writing Studies andrea a. lunsford Embracing Borderlands 183 My path toward that remarkable interview was a long one, beginning in the mid-1980s when I first came across This Bridge Called My Back and, later, Borderlands/La Frontera. I knew instinctively—viscerally —that I had encountered a voice that would be very important to me and to my field of study, and as I read and reread Anzaldúa’s work, I began to understand the depth of that instinctive recognition. As a child in the rural hills of Tennessee, I grew up speaking a mountain dialect that I later learned was “incorrect,” the language of hillbillies or “ridge runners,” as the hill folk were often called. To be sure, I was speaking a form of so-called “standard” English that for the most part followed the “rules” but that bent them through the use of regionalisms and the kind of colorful metaphors and similes that characterized my grandmother’s speech (to her, the kitchen cabinets would always be the “upper division ” and prices were resolutely “high as a cat’s back”). When I got to graduate school, I brought with me a strong southern accent and remnants of my Tennessee dialect, and in my second term a fellow student said, “My goodness, I need to apologize to you. I thought you were not very smart at all—well, you know, because of your accent.” So while I certainly never experienced the kind of linguistic terrorism Anzaldúa describes in her work, I resonated strongly with her description of it. In addition, I was drawn, from the moment I first read her, to her voice and to the gorgeous way she worked with words, weaving them into strands that seemed like a lifeline of hope and resilience, of strength and clear-sightedness, of wit and wisdom. From Anzaldúa I learned most directly that all people have a chance to create and re-create themselves and that they can do so best through and with collaborations, those deep interactions with others through which we shape ourselves and our worlds. In 1988, when I had an opportunity as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication to address members of the central professional organization in rhetoric and writing studies, I drew on what I’d learned from Anzaldúa for the title and substance of my speech, “Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing.” I carry many enduring memories from the days I spent with Anzaldúa in 1996 but none with more staying power than this: late in the afternoon , over tea, Anzaldúa turned the tables on me. I’d been asking her questions all day; now she had some for me. Leaning forward, she looked steadily at me in that direct way of hers and said, “So who is the Andrea you want to...

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