Week 5

Reading the works of the Anzaldua and Moraga for this week brought up significant questions of identity. Anzaldua narrates the struggle of Chicano/as in finding a voice (and a language) to call their own. She expresses the hardships of speaking a "bastard language," the "linguistic terrorism" that separates and judges, pulling apart groups and picking them to pieces. Wild tongues resisting taming. Moraga further questions identity- what it means to be Chicana, a lesbian, a mother? At what point are we defined by our race, our sexuality, our gender? I was reminded of one of our first readings, the first chapter by Anzaldua where she brings up the issues of culture. Those conceptions of culture and of ancestry really stuck with me and I kept thinking of them as I read for this week. Her exploration of the borderlands, a race of people displaced and uprooted, unclaimed and yet separated. A land split in parts, an earth divided. In the same way, the two readings for this week explore these divisions. Perhaps not in such a literal, barbed-wire-fence sort of way but they are borders all the same. Identities are not only chosen, they are often imposed. Anzaldua's first chapter deals with a physical boundary and the separations created between two cultures- an American side and a Mexican side. Her fifth chapter is more intimate, a more personal exploration of identity. Of how language is power, how words can cut in the same way barbed wire does. Similary, Moraga's piece is a personal one. The story of a modern Medea.