This week's texts made me think about how in many ways, the border creates an identity that can be described with several adjectives starting with the prefix "bi": bilingual; bicultural; in some cases, biracial. Even the bisexual affairs of Hungry Woman's Medea seemed like a testament to this duality. This brought me back to the idea of a border culture, which then reminded me of the photo essay "The Line," which we looked at during the first week.
As I continue to think about the border culture as portrayed in "The Line" and this week's readings, I wonder how to characterize and describe this culture. Is it both Mexican and American? Neither? Something more than a blend of the two? While all of these sources portray a borderland with its own unique character different from that of Mexico or the U.S., I saw more of the "neither" in "The Line" and more of the "both" in readings like "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." "The Line" depicts a barren land full of people waiting to cross over to the other side or to send people back to where they started. It is an in-between place, but more of a transitory area than a unique cultural space. In the other readings, the border seems more metaphorical, a mental state that one carries even when one is not physically and literally at the border. The descriptions and portrayals of Chicano culture showed an identity that stems from both countries and incorporates both cultures, creating a unique one as it mixes the two. Anzaldua's list of languages and dialects she speaks expanded my view of Mexican-American culture, allowing it to see it not only as "bi," but "multi," a multifaceted set of traditions, customs, and languages that varies based on each person's background and experiences. So, I suppose the overarching question that I am grappling with this week is how best to describe, portray, and understand Mexican American/Chicano/border culture with so much ambiguity and controversy surrounding the subject.