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In ancient times the Mexican Indians made mirrors of volcanic glass known as obsidian. Seers would gaze into a mirror until they fell into a trance. Within the black, glossy surface, they saw clouds of smoke which would part to reveal a vision concerning the future of the tribe and the will of the gods. gloria anzaldúa, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA Night-Reading in Cambridge, November 1990 I first came across Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in the fall of 1990, my fourth year in graduate school at Harvard University. The book was Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, edited by Anzaldúa. Published in 1990, it contained pieces by Latina, Asian American, African American, and Native American women. Anzaldúa had written the introduction and included her essay “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness” from the earlier Borderlands/La Frontera. November 3, 1990, was the exact date I finished reading Haciendo Caras. I have a habit of penciling these kinds of markers, cryptic signs to myself of letters and numbers, to be interpreted later on. What did it mean that I read this and other Anzaldúa work then? More than sixteen years later, the place where the book was purchased—New Words, a premier feminist bookstore founded in 1974 in the Cambridge/Boston/Somerville area—has closed as a bookstore. Unlike many other feminist bookstores, it has reinvented itself as the Center for New Words, running literacy, reading, and writing programs for women, producing and selling written materials (a new bookstore), CHAPTER 28 “Darkness, My Night”: The Philosophical Challenge of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Aesthetics of the Shadow maría deguzmán “Darkness, My Night” 211 and promoting civic exchange. And I? I became a Latina/o Studies scholar and teacher even though Harvard had no Latina/o Studies program . What I learned I had to teach myself, inspired by texts such as Haciendo Caras and Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa’s writings communicated permission to synthesize analysis and creativity, vision and action , scholarship and political activism. This is not to say that I had not encountered such permission elsewhere as a young graduate student. After all, it was to be found in feminism and womanism, lesbian and gay studies (Queer Studies was still coming into its own), Chicana/o scholarship and activism, ethnic studies more generally, and the intersection of all of these. However, Anzaldúa’s prose and poetry were especially powerful—particularly her ability to illustrate her ideas, commitments, in a gut-haunting, mind-bending form. With regard to Queer Theory, though too rarely credited, Anzaldúa should be claimed as a founding figure based on her model of “tolerance for ambiguity” (Borderlands/ La Frontera 100), her confrontations with shame and abjection, and her call for Chicanos to listen to “their queer,” their jotería (107). I remember sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my then-partner’s apartment on Cambridge Street.1 She either found Borderlands with or for me. Yes, “identity is a relational process” (Interviews/Entrevistas 239). I would absorb myself in Anzaldúa’s prose and poetry. Accompanied or alone, my skin tingled as I read and night fell beyond the windows , parabolas of lamplight brooding on the apartment’s white walls. Immersed in those pages, I was so far from South Texas and yet so close to the Southwest’s conflicts as I sat in the Northeast, in a town and beside an institution that saw itself, despite its complex ethnoracial history, in the mirror of its British and Puritan legacies. What burned before me were the images, “faces of feelings” (Borderlands/La Frontera 60), and ideas from Anzaldúa’s words and the fiery colors—blue, mauve, purple, orange, turquoise, yellow, white, and amber brown—of Judy Baca’s “Triumph of the Heart” image from her participatory mural project The World Wall: A Vision of the Future without Fear, an image that appeared on Haciendo Caras’s cover.2 This image of four women—three of them holding candles with which to illuminate the darkness, tears coursing down their cheeks, one with a large turquoise eye and another with a blue eye aimed directly at the viewer—transfixed me there in the Cambridge night. As I write from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, six years into the new thousand years (2006), Anzaldúa’s images and Chicana muralist Judy Baca’s public artwork of four Llorona visionaries transport...

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