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Part 1, Section 7: La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Borderlands / La Frontera, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Borders, Hybridity, and Identity
History and the U.S.-Mexico Relationship
Chicana Feminism
Language, Storytelling, and Ritual
Summary
Analysis
Six sections of poetry make up the second half of Borderlands / La Frontera. The first of these sections opens with an epigraph from the well-known Mexican song “La Llorona.”
Anzaldúa sought to split her book between complementary nonfiction and poetry sections of roughly equal length. The poems that follow reflect and embody the concepts from her essays, as well as giving readers deeper insight into her life as a working-class Chicana lesbian feminist. This first section focuses on the relationship between humans and the natural world, and particularly how this relationship becomes contested in the Rio Grande Valley as Anglo and Chicano norms come into conflict.
Themes
White-wing Season. White men with guns arrive at a woman’s house while she is washing her bedsheets. They pay her, and she remembers once shooting a dove with her brother’s gun. The men hunt, filling the woman’s land with fallen doves. They take most home but leave her two, which she boils for dinner.
This poem is a metaphor for past and ongoing land dispossession in the Rio Grande Valley. To make a living, the woman in this poem is forced to sacrifice her doves—which, of course, carry their classic symbolism of love, harmony, and innocence.
Themes
Cervicide. A family keeps a fawn as a pet, which is illegal, and the game warden is coming to fine or arrest them. The family’s young dark-skinned daughter, who raised the fawn after a hunter killed its mother, now has to kill it. She bashes its head in with a hammer, then buries it in the yard. The game warden finds nothing and leaves empty-handed.
Themes
horse. Anzaldúa dedicates this poem to the people of her hometown, Hargill, Texas. A horse runs up to kids who are offering it corn but secretly carrying knives. The next day, the townspeople hear that some “gringo” kids have mutilated someone’s horse—but they know the sheriff won’t intervene. The owner shot the horse, putting an end to its misery, and one of the kids’ parents tried to pay him back, “as if green could staunch red.” The gringo kids dream of the horse and scream, but the Mexicans know that “if you’re Mexican / you are born old.”
Themes
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Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella. Anzaldúa describes a visit from her grandmother, who offers Anzaldúa money, then rolls and smokes a cigarette, even though she avoids fires. (She burned herself cooking as a young woman.) Widowed and too old to live alone, Anzaldúa’s grandmother stayed with other family members for a few weeks at a time instead. She never stopped wearing widow’s clothes, and Anzaldúa cherished hearing her old stories.
Themes
But when Anzaldúa asks her grandmother if she has ever had an orgasm, her grandmother describes letting her husband do what he wanted with her while praying for him to finish fast. Women in Anzaldúa’s family avoid talking about sex. Her grandfather eventually left her grandmother for another woman—and took their sons with him. Anzaldúa almost sees the signs of anguish on her grandmother’s face—but her grandmother always maintains her dignity.
Themes
Nopalitos. It’s evening in the Rio Grande Valley. Dogs lay in the yard and a neighbor cooks menudo while Anzaldúa picks a nopalito (cactus pad), slowly removes its spines, and tosses it in a pan. A rooster chases a hen, Anzaldúa’s uncle starts his hose across the street, and the neighbor women chat on their porches up and down the block, laughing. As the only one who left home, Anzaldúa feels she understands her people in a way they cannot.
Themes
