Gloria Anzaldúa: March Portrait of the Month

Gloria Anzaldúa, 1988

Scholar of Chicana (Mexican-American) cultural, feminist, and queer theory, Gloria E. Anzaldúa was born in 1942 in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas to a family of Mexican-American ranchers. Despite discrimination and hardship during her childhood, she managed to obtain a college education, and in 1968, she earned a B.A. in English, Art, and Secondary Education from Pan American University, and an M.A. in English and Education in 1972 from the University of Texas at Austin. While in Austin, she joined politically active cultural poets and dramatists, such as Ricardo Sanchez and Hedwig Gorski.

In 1977, she relocated to California, where she supported herself through her writing, lectures, and occasional teaching positions, focusing on feminism, Chicano studies, and creative writing at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, among other universities.

Anzaldúa’s works incorporate her lifelong feelings of social and cultural marginalization, often weaving English and Spanish together as if one language, an idea stemming from her theory of “borderlands” identity. Language, one of the borders Anzaldúa addressed, is a central element of her writing. She is perhaps most celebrated for co-editing the feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) with Cherríe Moraga, which included Anzaldúa’s autobiographical essay, “La Prieta.” Her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), is loosely based on Anzaldúa’s life growing up on the Mexican-Texas border. She edited Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color in 1990 and co-edited This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002). She has also written fiction, children’s books, and poetry over her illustrious career.

Awards include the National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award (1991), Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award (1991), and the Bode-Pearson Prize, American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2001). Anzaldúa died in 2004 from complications due to diabetes. Working on her dissertation before her death, she was posthumously awarded a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005.