On Borderlands/La Frontera: Gloria Anzaldúa and Twenty-Five Years of Research on Gender in the Borderlands

In 1987, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera offered a radical reimagining of the borderlands as a physical and metaphorical space, forcing scholars inside and outside of the academy to consider how sex and gender structured power relations and historically shaped struggles for dignity and survival. Inspired by Anzaldúa’s path breaking analysis, a generation of students in Chicana/o studies pushed borderlands research in new directions, putting women’s bodies at the forefront. This brief article examines how scholars studying the Chicana/o experience have pioneered work that explores sexuality, colonization, marriage, labor, and transnational communities. This scholarship has invigorated borderlands studies to reveal the deep structures of conquest and social power in the region, and illuminates the wide range of experiences of borderlands residents in all of their humanity.