-
Chapter 6 “Yemaya Blew That Wire Fence Down”
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter 6 “Yemaya Blew That Wire Fence Down” Invoking African Spiritualities in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and the Mural Art of Juana Alicia Micaela Díaz-Sánchez 1,950 mile-long open wound dividing a pueblo, a culture, running down the length of my body, staking fence rods in my flesh, splits me splits me me raja me raja This is my home this thin edge of barbwire. But the skin of the earth is seamless. The sea cannot be fenced, el mar does not stop at borders. To show the white man what she thought of his arrogance, Yemaya blew that wire fence down. This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is. And will be again. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza1 153 154 Micaela Díaz-Sánchez Yemoja, the wind that whirls with force into the land. Yemoja, angered water that smashes down the metal bridge. —Yoruba praise song2 As Gloria Anzaldúa interrogates Chicana/o sociopolitical histories in the essays and poems that constitute her foundational work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she makes explicit references to West African diasporic spirit-practices.3 In the above excerpt, she invokes the Yoruba female orisha of the salt waters, Yemayá, as the resistant elemental force who transcends the violent imposition of borders between Mexico and the United States. Yemayá is the riverain deity of fresh water in West Africa who became the “goddess of the sea” during the genocide of the Middle Passage. When African slaves threw themselves overboard in the Atlantic Ocean, their lives became offerings to this underwater force as they leapt into the arms of Yemayá rather than live as captives in the Americas. Contemporary practitioners of Santería continue to honor this diasporic spiritual figure as the mother of the Yoruba pantheon, and she is consistently reimagined in representations by feminist cultural producers across disciplines.3 Employing Anzaldúa’s passage as a discursive springboard, this chapter also interrogates a set of images by internationally renowned Chicana visual artist Juana Alicia who not only incorporates African and African American diasporic spiritual iconography in her work, but also vigorously contextualizes her work as rooted in multiple ethnic and racial communities, predominately immigrant Latina/o, Chicana/o and African American. In particular, I focus on Alicia’s portrayal of Yemayá in the monumental “Maestrapeace” mural on the Women’s Building in San Francisco’s Mission District; her mosaic ceramic mural “SANARTE: Diversity’s Pathway” at the Ambulatory Care Clinic of University of California, San Francisco’s Medical Center; and another Mission Districtbased mural entitled “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters.” The invocation of African diasporic images and spiritualities in the provocatively groundbreaking writing of Gloria Anzaldúa and the immense visual renderings of Juana Alicia complicate the indigenous-centric discourses in Chicana cultural production and criticism. Specifically, I am interested in how Anzaldúa and Alicia construct diaspora through these divergent representations and how these notions of diasporic consciousness work to reconfigure “border discourse” prominent in scholarship about Chicana aesthetic practices. Working in different genres, these artists position their work as imperative assertions that render historically [54.226.25.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:36 GMT) 155 “Yemaya Blew That Wire Fence Down” silenced communities visible. In their aesthetic manifestations of subaltern subjectivities (feminist, queer, working-class, immigrant, differentlyabled , etc.), spirituality functions as an epistemic framework facilitating ways in which subjects employ, M. Jacqui Alexander, “spirit knowledge/ knowing as the medium.”4 In their work, Anzaldúa and Alicia position the sacred as a praxis of resistance and methodology: not a grand mythical or disembodied notion of transcendence. Mobilizing these epistemic notions of spiritual representations, these artists create spaces in which they negotiate racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized subjectivities. This work is driven by the critical need for an interrogation of African diasporic representations and histories—corporeal and iconographic/ material and spiritual—in this multidisciplinary body of work.5 “Re-imagining the Borderlands”: Trans-Atlantic Crossings and Hemispheric Meditations Since its publication in 1987, Anzaldúa’s multi-genre formulation of “mestiza consciousness” in Borderlands has been enthusiastically venerated and incisively critiqued, becoming not only a canonical Chicana/o text but also a major source traveling in a myriad of disciplinary fields.6 Influential Chicana/o academicians have engaged with Borderlands through extensive articulations of Anzaldúa’s border consciousness such as Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s interrogation of the narrative’s “serpentine...