The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers and Radical Research Practices: A Collage

Loosen the dead hand of traditional disciplines and habits in order to allow a new way of doing things to emerge.

—Gloria Anzaldúa, writing notas¹

The question then becomes not so much what is a queer orientation, but how are we orientated toward queer moments when objects slip. Do we retain our hold of these objects by bringing them back "in line"? Or do we let them go, allowing them to acquire new shapes and directions?

—Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (2006)²

The work of GLORIA ANZALDÚA taught me that sometimes rules must be broken, tired ways of thinking pulled out by the roots. I anticipate that most of my readers already know something about the ways in which ANZALDÚA broke rules governing language, identity, and genre, but some of her lesser-known works challenge ideas more fundamental than these. Her never-defended doctoral dissertation, which was published in 2015 as Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro, challenges the belief in one empirical reality: "Spirit and mind, soul and body, are one, and together they perceive a reality greater than the vision experienced in the ordinary world."³ ANZALDÚA was a shapeshifter, a seer, a believer in afterlives. This expansive otherworldly epistemology is particularly palpable in the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, the massive archive left by ANZALDÚA when she died in 2004. In this unruly collection of objects—drawings, artifacts, magazine clippings, and multiple versions of written documents—the author "loosen[s] the dead hand" of academic orientations, defying empirical archival research. My question, then, is how this looseness should alter the ways in which we read and write about ANZALDÚA'S work. How should we process such archival cacophony? What sort of claims can we make about ideas that transcend what we perceive in "the ordinary world"?

In this collaged essay, I develop and practice a radical research method, one that gets at the root of what we do with "data" and expands beyond the assumed parameters of scholarly labor. In order to highlight the material processes of archival research, I focus on nonliterary objects, things that are opaque and confusing. I won't say they aren't texts, because we can "read" them in many ways, but we can't look through them to get to the layer of content. In my many visits to the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, I have turned and returned my attention to these objects, but they never resolve into any single thesis. With them, I reflect on the various ways (and ethics) of making meaning, focusing in particular on my capacities and responsibilities as a scholar.

A few critical works have been particularly important in motivating this project.⁴ In Queer Phenomenology (2006), Sara Ahmed ascribes meaning-making capacities to the objects, like tables, that orient our lives and give shape to our movements. She invites us to re-encounter and reorient ourselves to these objects:

To re-encounter objects as strange things is … not to lose sight of their history but to refuse to make them history by losing sight. Such wonder directed at the objects that we face, as well as those that are behind us, does not involve bracketing out the familiar but rather allows the familiar to dance again with life.⁵

Engaging the archive as a living, fluid entity keeps it in "sight" rather than on the dusty shelves of history. And honoring the objects we face with wonder, rather than pinning them down as already known, allows them to "dance again with life" that might exceed our comprehension. Can we replicate this aliveness in the static form of print and paper? Most scholarly arguments implicitly shut down the vital possibilities of an object by establishing one avenue for experiencing it.

In Ordinary Affects (2007), Kathleen Stewart's explicit intent is to honor the fluid capacity of things we encounter. She arranges verbal clusters (prefiguring the one-hundred-word units she and Lauren Berlant later used in The Hundreds [2019]) not to tell a story...