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You stop in the middle of the field and, under your breath, ask the spirits— animals, plants, y tus muertos—to help you string together a bridge of words. gloria anzaldúa, “now let us shift” I asked Gloria Anzaldúa to help me write this essay. It wasn’t the first time I’d called on her to inspire me, but it was the first as mis muertos. No difference, really. She always seemed to me to be someone not of this world, even as she rested her tiny frame in a chair in our class circle, as real as each of us fervent graduate students. She asked us to introduce ourselves: “Tell me your purpose—not your major or where you’re from—but what your life means.” Motivated by the need to understand, you crave to be what and who you are (540).1 As we revealed ourselves, it became clear that although each of us participated in a world of individual struggle, we also shared a need to connect, to give back, to be with each other, to make the world better. Our inner worlds collided when we dared to share our desires and visions. Gloria Anzaldúa wrote what she lived and lived what she wrote. Change requires more than words on a page—it takes perseverance, creative ingenuity, and acts of love (574). She offered us her words, her presence, her acts; all were gifts to help strengthen our interconnectedness. To me, her work was about extending consciousness, strengthening the foundations of inner, personal awareness and the knowledge and potential of nos/otras, our oneness with others. I have stopped in the middle of a field, a picture in my mind, in yoga class last Monday during shavasana (calm, relief, after paying attention CHAPTER 27 Shifting kelli zaytoun Shifting 205 to movement, balance, the body). Shavasana, corpse pose. Muerta a muerta. This thought enters my mind: Isn’t it uncannily prescient that one of Gloria’s last published pieces was titled “now let us shift”? With her death came a shift in responsibility, a call to us younger-generation writers, activists, and cultural theorists, las nepantleras jóvenes. As Gloria Anzaldúa stood for the final time on the edge of this life, she offered us one last glimpse into the way of knowing that brought us Borderlands and other gems. “now let us shift” showcases her work on conocimiento, or “that aspect of consciousness urging you to act on the knowledge gained” (577). The path of conocimiento is a bridge between personal and collective consciousness, desire and action, destruction and growth, of our selves and of the world. Part of Anzaldúa’s legacy is an understanding of and calling to this path: step through the doorways between worlds / leaving huellas for others to follow (576). She forged the path, and now the work shifts to us; those following in Gloria’s footsteps are left to envision and enact the possibilities of conocimiento. I heard Gloria Anzaldúa speak early in my career as a graduate student as I was floundering to find a way to link my (what seemed very disjointed) interests in developmental psychology, memoir, and feminist theory. I was one of a couple hundred students and faculty who had gathered one night to listen to Anzaldúa present her concept of conocimiento. I watched as she drew a chalked line from the left corner of the board upward to the right. Along the line were small, square breaks, or what she called “way stations,” stops along the path, the journey toward consciousness . I scribbled notes on the back of my program. Drawing pathways was not uncommon for me as a student of cognitive development theory, the study of changes in mental abilities across one’s lifespan. I had grown skeptical of most approaches for their grounding in western assumptions and one-size-fits-all prescriptions about what constitutes a well-developed decision maker and knower—a distinctive self in relation to others. I had read criticisms by feminists of traditional theories for their overvaluing of self-sufficiency and independence and their lack of emphases on relational capacities, like empathy and decision making based on how others are affected. With the emergence of postmodern and postcolonial theorizing, feminist developmentalists also had called for more approaches that reflect how a sense of self and meaning change across social contexts. I, too, was curious about how personal identity develops in cultures...

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