El Mundo Zurdo 3: Selected Works from the 2012 Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa ed. by Larissa M. Mercado-López, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Antonia Castañeda (review)

In her notes, “Towards a Construction of El Mundo Zurdo,” Gloria Anzaldúa undertakes radical imaginings to engage “the pull between what is and what should be” and to express her commitment to the pursuit of meaningful transformation that for her always requires “a simultaneous recreation of the self and a reconstruction of society.”¹ El Mundo Zurdo 3, edited by Larissa M. Mercado-López, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and Antonia Castañeda, makes manifest this multi-directional/dimensional commitment through contributions that range in focus from the individual to the collective in the pursuit of coalitional change.

The collection is divided into four sections, each of which considers the influence and breadth of Anzaldúa’s work, especially the principles outlined in her mundo zurdo, in order to “re-vision” borderlands literatures, treat art as inquiry and as expressed and experienced knowledge with pedagogical import, consider the theoretical and philosophical implications as well as the mobilizing power of decolonized and decolonizing consciousness and conocimiento, and demonstrate coalitional and radical practice. Anzaldúa’s work is conceived as multimodal in form and global in reach. Contributors draw on her handwritten notes, drawings, visions, poetry, theory, philosophy, methods, and art to consider and apply their transformational insights to expressions of a new coalitional culture. Essays reveal an ongoing understanding that any struggle for justice includes pain, but, as heirs of revolutionary peoples, the editors weave a tapestry of contributions that demonstrate an ongoing and always critically creative commitment to the principles of el mundo zurdo.

In the introductory essay, “Beyond Borderlands: A New Consciousness for Institutional Transformation,” Rusty Barceló reminds readers that to achieve its transformational potential intellectual activism must “bridge the dualities and contradictions” embedded within individual, spiritual, and global identities if it is to meaningfully intervene in ongoing institutional oppressions and exclusions, a concern revisited at the end of the collection. Throughout the first section, “Re-Visioning Literary Archives and Genealogies,” contributors including Beth Hernandez-Jason, Carolina Núñez-Puente, and Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová probe archives and literatures as they deconstruct and reconstruct genealogies and epistemologies and thereby engage the potential of what Betsy Dahms refers to as the “utopic” and the coalitional in Anzaldúa’s mundo zurdo.

Section II, “Activist Politics of Art, Performance, and Pedagogy,” draws on Anzaldúa’s understandings of lived and living theory as expressed by boundary crossing “artivists” at work in and between community and the academy. Creative expression is understood as an intrinsic part of any attempt at social justice and coalitional movements. As a means to freedom, transformation, and empowerment, Brenda M. Romero, an ethnomusicologist, experiences and expresses her music as a bridge between indigenous communities and the university. She conceives of art as able to “shape and transform what we imagine, what we are able to perceive, and what we are able to give material embodiment to” (110). In a related piece, Martha Gonzalez fuses lived histories, experiential knowledges, and artivism with pedagogy and praxis to argue for decolonized consciousness in community building and for music making as transnational borderlands methodology. Essays in this section, including works by Kandace Creel Falcon, Maria del Socorro Gutiérrez Magallanes, Kamala Platt, and students from the University of Texas-Pan American, consider the precariousness of Chican@queer identities especially within university spaces. Following Anzaldúa, the contributions demonstrate the power of reflexive writing practice to make meaning of multiple and global injustices in order to teach and learn about “complicity and responsibility’” as well as to acknowledge “the humanity of the other” as necessary for social transformation (176).

In the third section, “Anzaldúan Theory and Philosophy...