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I was raised, in part, by my Catholic grandmother, and I grew up caring for her increasingly disabled body.1 She was a paradox: a feminist (at least in my terms) who went to college and worked full time as a nurse; she quit work after marrying at thirty and spent the rest of her life sitting with her rosary in front of the radio (and, later, television), raising her (and, later, her daughter’s) children. She started suffering from rheumatoid arthritis somewhere between the two sets of children, and the disease gradually crippled her. By the time I reached puberty, she was blind from cataracts and crooked, with one leg dead in a brace and the other eight inches shorter with a platform shoe too heavy for her to lift alone. While my parents worked, I sat in Grandma’s room and listened to soap operas, clicking rosary beads, and the sound of my grandmother’s pain emerging in surprised gasps and throaty exhalations. I’m still trying to understand my grandmother, and her faith has always been a stumbling block. She believed in miracles. She believed that the crucifix she gave me when I left for college had been buried in Chicago with my grandfather and miraculously reappeared in time for my move from Albuquerque to Austin. My repulsion from Catholic church politics has secularized my thinking, but I miss (long for) the seemingly anachronistic faith that my grandmother maintained, the miracles, and the jarring sound of rosaries prayed against the backdrop of The Price Is Right and As the World Turns. One of my grandmother’s more remarkable acts of faith intersected with her disability. She offered up each of her pains, individually, for particular causes, like the poor in Ireland, the victims of war, or her granddaughter ’s final exams. Each time she got into or out of her wheelchair, the gasps were articulated into prayers. My initial response was to be CHAPTER 25 Hurting, Believing, and Changing the World: My Faith in Gloria Anzaldúa suzanne bost 192 Todas somos nos/otras suspicious of this Catholic tendency to romanticize suffering, particularly women’s suffering. But lately I’ve been trying to take seriously my grandmother’s faith that her pain was productive. She examined each sensation, created a path for it from her body to some other trouble across the world, and believed in that connection. Here is where the work of Gloria Anzaldúa comes in. I didn’t see it when I first read Borderlands as a student, but later it became increasingly visible to me that pain and faith are both central to Anzaldúa’s mestiza feminist politics. Most critics have avoided these aspects of her work, likely for the same reasons that I looked away when my grandmother was simultaneously suffering and praying: fear of pain, fear of vulnerability, and fear of committing the intellectual sin of belief in the supernatural. My first “serious” encounter with Anzaldúa was in a literary theory course, around 1992, in which “La conciencia de la mestiza” appeared somewhere between Derrida and Butler. I read the essay with the same attention to différence, artifice, and ideology as I had applied to the canon of “high theory,” and I recall discussing her comparison of making tortillas and making identity with the same pose of theoretical rigor that I had been learning to “master” all semester. We didn’t think about the smells, the feelings, or the physical contortions she inscribes within mestiza consciousness. I would have been afraid to acknowledge her personal rituals, her altar to Coatlalopeuh, her belief in magic, and her confessions of shame and vulnerability. I didn’t take these gestures literally because I assumed that to do so would undermine intellectual seriousness (hers? my own?) and discredit Chicana feminism. Was I simply unable to see her statements of faith and feeling, or did I deliberately ignore what I had supposed were flaws? Rereading Anzaldúa’s work years later, with the confidence and security of a tenure-track job and with the altered attentiveness of a teacher called upon to explain her ideas, Anzaldúa’s corporeal and intellectual “transgressions” became more visible to me. I couldn’t sidestep Anzaldúa’s personal confessions after teaching my Women’s Studies students that the personal is political. Discussing these “transgressions” openly in the classroom stirred our passions and imaginations. Listening to students’ responses to Borderlands—both the guarded...

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