Chicanx scholar and writer Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942-2004) grew up feeling different in Hidalgo County, TX, near the border with Mexico. She was of small stature due to a childhood condition, had mixed Mexican-American and likely Indigenous ancestry, had Spanish and English fluency, identified as gay, and watched her grandmother lose the family farm. Her experiences with social and cultural marginalization started early and lasted much of her life. Peers and editors say that background and her refusal to be ignored, led to her deep scholarship in Chicanx cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. In 1968, she received a B.A. in English, art, and secondary education from Pan American University (now part of UT Rio Grande Valley). She taught public school near home and started summer classes at UT Austin, earning an M.A. in English in 1972. While at UT, she was first exposed to Chicanx and feminist activism through a cadre of politically active poets and radical dramatists such as Ricardo Sanchez and Hedwig Gorski. She interrupted work on a doctorate in comparative literature in 1977 to move to California to devote herself to writing.
As a MacDowell Fellow in 1982, Anzaldúa edited the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with Cherríe L. Moraga and likely worked on poems for her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which was loosely based on her life. In its poems and essays she outlined her well-respected theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that form along borders. Published in 1987, Borderlands uses a unique blend of eight languages: two variations of English and six of Spanish, challenging the reader as she was during a childhood where she learned Spanish at home and was punished for speaking anything but English in grade school. The book established the Mexican-American border as a metaphor for racial, sexual, social, and cultural transgressions. Her scholarship is evident in nine books, published and unpublished essays, poems, and fiction. According to shift7, her articulation of intersectional realities would break paradigms for more than 30 years
At the time of Anzaldúa’s death from complications due to diabetes, she was a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which posthumously awarded her a Ph.D. in literature. She has long been recognized for contributions in several academic fields, including American studies, ethnic studies, feminist theory, literary studies, queer studies, women’s studies, and social justice movements, and has received numerous awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award, the Lambda Lesbian Small Press Book Award, the Lesbian Rights Award, and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Every 18 months, a community of students and scholars gather to discuss Anzaldúa’s work and legacy at a conference hosted by the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, an organization founded in 2007. Her papers are archived at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin.
