Gloria Anzaldúa

Gloria Anzaldúa was born and raised in the Borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley, where her family roots went back six generations. Her parents were farmworkers, and she also worked in the fields from a young age to help make ends meet, particularly after her father died when she was just 14. She went on to study literature and education, ultimately completing her MA in 1972. She then started a PhD and taught in varied settings, ranging from a bilingual preschool to several universities. She left Texas permanently in 1977 and spent the second half of her life living primarily in Santa Cruz, California (but also lived at different times in Arkansas, Indiana, Vermont, and New York City, among other places). Aware of how both academia and the Chicano activist movement excluded women and queer people’s voices, she teamed up with fellow Chicana lesbian scholar Cherríe Moraga to put together the landmark anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 1981. Six years later, she published Borderlands / La Frontera, which is still by far her best-known work and now widely considered a foundational text in Chicana literature and cultural studies. She also edited two more anthologies of writing by women of color and wrote three children’s books as well as dozens of poems, articles, and short stories. She died of diabetes complications in 2004, leaving her PhD dissertation barely unfinished. After her death, her estate published this dissertation as the book Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015), and the University of California Santa Cruz awarded her an honorary doctorate.