Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa's Life and Work Transformed Our Own

CHAPTER 29. The Simultaneity of Self- and Global Transformations: Bridging with Anzaldúa’s Liberating Vision

I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds. Gloria, the facilitator, Gloria the mediator, straddling the walls between abysses. “Your allegiance is to La Raza, the Chicano movement,” say the members of my race. “Your allegiance is to the Third World,” say my Black and Asian friends. “Your allegiance is to your gender, to women,” say the feminists. Then there’s my allegiance to the Gay movement, to the socialist revolution, to the New Age, to magic and the occult. And there’s my affinity to literature, to the world of the artist. What am I? A third world lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic leanings. They would chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a label. gloria anzaldúa, “la prieta” “Bridging” is different from what Paulo Freire critiqued as the “banking system” of transmitting knowledge (57–74). The “banking system,” in which one person “deposits” information into another person or people , is a one-directional, hierarchical monologue. In contrast, bridging is dialogic and assumes the existence and equal value of “banks” of knowledge on two (or more) sides of a conversation. Bridging is about sharing knowledges that are also independently growing. Bridging involves further dialogue arising from inner conversations. How could one truly appreciate the labors of another if one has not already tasted their liberating effects? Sadly, I did not come to know about Gloria Anzaldúa until she had died, in 2004. I first heard the news of her passing from a colleague and later noted that several conferences or newsletters dedicated special sessions or columns to remembering her legacy. In the course of my own involvement in planning and organizing the third annual meeting CHAPTER 29 The Simultaneity of Self- and Global Transformations: Bridging with Anzaldúa’s Liberating Vision mohammad h. tamdgidi The Simultaneity of Self- and Global Transformations 219 of the Social Theory Forum (STF) at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, I became more acquainted with Anzaldúa’s writings. Reading her work was deeply cathartic, for I found in her—in unimaginably lucid , creative, vivid, caring, and highly refined expressions—what I have discovered in a different way as a sociologist of Middle Eastern, specifically Iranian, descent. The hybrid meetings of the East and the West, of the traditional and the modern, of diverse worldviews, knowledges, and spiritualities, are not uncommon to this other region of the world. Like Anzaldúa, we too have been perpetually bridging, personally and worldhistorically , what appear to be incompatible ways of knowing and making our lives and histories. Borderland consciousness is not regional; it is a global phenomenon that took a most lucid form in Anzaldúa’s writing and life as a mestiza intellectual and spiritual activist. Anzaldúa experienced the violence of dualistic paradigms in deeply personal, sensual, emotional, intellectual, political, and historical ways. I emphasize this point because the significance of her “borderlands” theory cannot be fully appreciated without recognizing its development from her efforts to understand and overcome dualistic modes of knowing and living in the self and in the world. Dualism is the fundamental breeder of alienation, oppression, imperiality, and violence.1 Dualisms have sedimented as habitual formations in the remotest recesses of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. These habits are the enemy within, Anzaldúa tells us: The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. (Borderlands/ La Frontera 101) But how can one become aware of (let alone transform and heal!) these world-historically constituted dualisms, given their deeply embedded structure in our lives? We live these dualisms, day in and day out, in the here and now. Borderlands, as I interpret Anzaldúa, represent those moments where the absurdities of dualistic knowledges and constructions 220 Todas somos nos/otras are not only directly known but also most immediately experienced— for some in a flash of insight...