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  • “[A]nother set of teeth”: Nahua Myth and the Authorizing of Writing in Borderlands/La Frontera
  • Leisa Kauffmann (bio)

Atravesando Fronteras/Crossing Borders,” the seven-chapter essay from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), is an autobiographic and auto-ethnographic work in which the issue of writing is a central theme. The capacity to write or speak is linked to a coming to terms with identity that in turn hinges on an encounter with individual sexuality away from patriarchal and European cultural norms. As many critics have already discussed, a key aspect of Anzaldúa’s search for a sovereign sexual self in the narrative—of her re-envisioning of the female sexual symbolic—involves the appropriation of female-identified deities of pre-Hispanic Mexico.1 In her often-quoted discussion of the Virgen de Guadalupe, for example, Anzaldúa invokes a popular tradition that connects the Virgin’s cult to that of a pre-Hispanic deity known as Tonantzin and by extension to other pre-Hispanic goddess figures.2 In making this connection, she attributes to this prominent female icon the range of powers (sexual, creative, and destructive) associated with these deities and liberates her from the confines of her status as a model of chastity and obedience.

It is not, however, the rewriting of Guadalupe, or the invoking of the Nahua goddess figures per se, that forms the basis of the powerful interconnection of sexuality and voice or writing that Anzaldúa’s essay explores. This is accomplished, rather, by introducing the motif of the vagina dentata, or “toothed vagina,” which plays a central role in Mesoamerican and Nahua migration myths and is an important iconographic feature of the group of Nahua fertility deities that the piece invokes. Despite its thematic importance to the essay, however, the image has gone unnoticed. Moreover, as the space in which Anzaldúa locates her interrogation of the relationship between sexual identity and authorization, the vagina dentata motif constitutes a significant but previously unscrutinized aspect of her variously praised and contested appropriation of the ancient Nahua past. In my conclusion, I locate my essay within this important stream of criticism. The essay begins, however, with an overview of the narrative structure of the essay and the role of the vagina dentata motif therein.

One of the key indicators of the motif’s significance is its placement in a scene near the middle of the text, in the fourth of the essay’s seven chapters. This physical location corresponds to its narrative function as the turning point of the essay’s thematic development. While chapters one through three emphasize colonial mechanisms of exclusion and oppression, chapters five through seven highlight modes of emancipation and resistance, specifically concentrating on issues of language, voice, and writing. The scene in which the vagina dentata makes an undercover but symbolically crucial appearance thus catalyzes the shift in the essay’s [End Page 57] perspective; the themes of its second half coalesce in the final chapter, which describes the “New Consciousness” of the mestiza subject (77–91). Moreover, the description uses sexually loaded language to describe a mystical encounter in the tradition of Mesoamerican nahualism3 and thus acts doubly as a narrative climax. A close reading of this scene within the context of Nahua/Mesoamerican mythology demonstrates the logic and beauty of Anzaldúa’s Nahua-inspired poetic imagery.

“Antigua, mi diosa,” or the Earth’s Devouring Mouth

The climactic scene begins with the author-narrator immersed in a state of sensory deprivation in which the controls of rational thought are loosened. In this state, she experiences a transformational moment in which she encounters a part of herself that she calls “Antigua, mi diosa.” She introduces her description of the event by noting that “there is a greater power than the conscious I. That power is my inner self, the entity that is the sum total of all my reincarnations, the godwoman in me I call Antigua, mi diosa, the divine within, Coatlicue-Cihuacoatl-Tlazolteotl-Tonantzin-Coatlalopeuh-Guadalupe—they are one” (50). Although clearly containing unique and innovative elements, the scene portrays an ancient Mesoamerican kind of relationship between the gods (or the divine principle...

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