Gloria Anzaldúa
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14
Average rating: 3.5 of 5
Racist Garbage 1 out of 5 stars.
16 of 55 people found this review helpful.
While most reviewers seem to be bent on lauding Gloria Anzaldúa's "insightful and progressive" writings, I can't help but take a different viewpoint. The vast majority of her essays, while cloaked in a sense of righteous equality, are quite simply racist drivel. She speaks of acceptance and tolerance for foreign cultures in America, and harps on the evils of correcting students when they use improper English, yet instills her writing with a blatant and offensive racism.
I make specific reference to the article "How to Tame A Wild Tongue". In her conclusion, she praises the perseverance and endurance of the mestizo race/culture, making reference to walking by "the crumbling ashes" of American civilization. An eagerness is felt to see the day that "white laws and commerce will rot in the desert". One would be hard pressed to come up with a more hypocritical conclusion. Here is an author preaching tolerance and acceptance of different languages and cultures throughout her entire article. She whines about the troubles she had fitting in with English speaking people. She goes in depth to explain the numerous bastardizations of Spanish that are spoken in various Hispanic cultures and tries to convince us of how each is a viable language, even so-called "Spanglish", just a blend of English and Spanish that you might hear in a high school Spanish I class ("el chairo = chair,la ceilingo = ceiling, etc.) . And after all that talk of acceptance, she ends by completely blasting American culture and expressing her wish to see it crumble to dust, while at the same time presenting the mestizo as the dominant race which will endure this fall. Talk about racist. I understand pride of your country and people, but this goes far beyond simple nationalism, especially in light of the overall message of the article. Tolerance is right out the window here.
Don't be fooled by Anzaldúa's overly wordy diction and pseudo-intellectualism. She is a flat out racist that for some reason is tolerated (forget that, praised to the roof!) in many academic circles. Her educational philosophy is naive, irresponsible, and fundamentally flawed. Hopefully her writings will soon fall out of the limelight.
Editorial Review:
Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remapped our understanding of what a "border" is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This twentieth-anniversary edition features new commentaries from prominent activists, artists, and teachers on the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa's visionary work.
