Una vela por Gloria (A Candle for Gloria)

The shock of Gloria Anzaldúa's untimely death was felt immediately by the thousands who knew her like una vela de inspiración (a candle of inspiration), whether through her writings alone or through the privilege of knowing her personally como familia, amiga, colega, o maestra (as family, friend, colleague, or teacher). Her friend and collaborator, Cherrie Moraga, asked that we pay our respects, each in our own way, by building "an altar for Gloria... to honor her and help her make this passage." This tribute to una hermana pobladora feminista (a sister feminist pioneer) on behalf of the Frontiers Editorial Collective, readers, and contributors adds another stream of recognition to the vast outpouring that appeared on the Internet, in print, and in conversation the moment the sad news was first made public.

Born September26, 1942, to Urbano and Amalia Anzaldúa in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa died on May15, 2004, at age sixty-one from problems associated with diabetes. She was the firstborn child of a seventh-generation family who lived in the farming community known as Jesus Maria of the Valley, near Edinburg, Texas. She earned a bachelor's degree from Pan American University in Edinburg and her master's from the University of Texas at Austin. Her untimely death occurred as the celebrated writer was nearing completion of her dissertation, and she expected to receive her PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz in June of 2004. Final arrangements were made by members of her family who returned her to her birth home for a memorial rosary in Edinburg and a funeral mass in Hargill, Texas, at St. Frances Church.

These simple, poignant bits of information veil a much vaster truth about a native Tejana mestiza whose accomplishments and remarkable influence extended her landscape far beyond the Rio Grande Valley and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that produced her. Her work both as an individual writer and as a collaborator expanded her range to amazing international and transnational borders of consciousness that she herself helped define. It is especially fitting that this renowned Chicana lesbian-feminist activist, writer-memoirist, and cultural theorist be honored by Frontiers in the twenty-first century, for in 1980 Frontiers was the first feminist publication to publish an explicitly Chicana issue (volume5, number 2). Coedited by Cordelia Candelaria, Kathi George, and the Frontiers Editorial Collective, the issue featured contributions by or about Estela Portillo Trambley, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Rosaura Sánchez, Maxine Baca Zinn, Margarita Melville, Marta P. Cotera, Linda Williams, Inés Hernández Tovar, Margarita Cota Cárdenas, Catherine Loeb, Sylvia Gonzáles, the film Salt of the Earth (1953), the book La Chicana: The Mexican-American Woman (1979), and other now established figures and titles in Chicana and Chicano studies. The path-breaking 1980 Frontiers Chicana volume also included lesbian testimonios excerpted from Las Mujeres: Conversations from a Hispanic Community, at that time a yet unpublished manuscript edited by Nan Elsasser, Kyle MacKenzie, and Yvonne Tixier y Vigil, which was released in 1981, the same year that saw publication of the now classic collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color coedited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back became a landmark in the progressive feminist and women of color agenda and is recognized worldwide for its importance in giving voice to the lives and literatures of U.S. American women of color and immigrant peoples.

From these intellectual and ideological sources combined with her south Texas life experience and unique vision, Anzaldúa wrote Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), the work that established her as a major figure on the world stage. Borderlands/La Frontera represents her distinctive border-crossing worldview as a Chicana lesbian-feminist, poet, and cultural thinker through a multi-genre, multilingual amalgam of Spanish, English, cálo, and other slang poetry, historiography, autobiography, and philosophy. It offers a provocative vision of mestizaje, or indigenous American/European cultural hybridity, that promotes understanding of the conflicting and sometimes...