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Part 2, Section 2: La pérdida
Themes
and Colors
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
This section’s epigraph, from Chilean singer Isabel Parra’s “En la frontera,” describes being stuck between a river and a sea, but unable to cross either.
The poems in this section focus on encounters with the borders of human life—death, love, violence, motherhood, cannibalism, and in the last poem (“Interface”), arguably all of these at once.
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Poets have strange eating habits. On a moonless night, the narrator leads a wounded mare “to the edge” and considers letting herself fall “down the steps of the temple.” The mare tumbles off the side of the cliff into the cold wind—which stops the narrator’s tears—and the abyss below (“el abismo”). The narrator feeds herself to the hungry mare “till it’s pregnant with me,” because “wounding is a deeper healing.” She flies through the sky like an “eagle fetus” or a feathered serpent, dives into the emptiness of her own self, and finally hits the ground. Then she “peer[s] over the edge” and does it all again, for “jumping off cliffs [is] an addiction.” She enters the dark night sky’s jaws and lets it swallow her.
As with most of Anzaldúa’s work, there are many valid ways to interpret this poem, which centers on the salient image of the mare—a foil for the narrator’s femininity—tumbling off the cliff into an abyss. The “steps of the temple” imagery recalls the place of human sacrifice in Mexica-Azteca culture, which used it to regulate the relationship between the physical and supernatural worlds. The images of the feathered serpent (a prominent Mesoamerican deity) and “eagle fetus” associate the narrator with Indigenous mythology and Mexican national identity. Still, this poem is primarily about an encounter with death, solitude, and meaninglessness. It suggests that giving oneself up to the abyss (or resigning oneself to powerlessness in the face of life’s challenges) is sometimes a necessary first step towards healing.
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Yo no fui, fue Teté (I Didn’t Go, It Was Teté). In this Spanish-language poem, a Chicano man who works as a sex worker goes out at night, and a group of Chicano men pick him up and take him to the scrapyard. They attack him “piel a piel [skin to skin],” spit in his face, and insult him, calling gay men “locas.” He feels ashamed that they’re of “mi misma raza” (the same race). They leave him on the pavement, soiled and feeling alone “como huérfano” (like an orphan), and he rushes back home.
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The Cannibal’s Canción. The poet calls eating someone’s “taboo flesh” a customary part of love, then explains how they will make their lover’s bones and hair into jewelry. “Sundays there’s Mass and communion,” the poem concludes, “and I’ll put your relics to rest.”
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En mi corazón se incuba. The narrator of this Spanish-language poem explains that she has felt a profound loneliness since the day her love ended. Her life is agonizing; she buries her grief deep—and, with it, an unspoken dream. Something that has been loved in secret (“Algo secretamente amado”) is now hidden in her, and an otherworldly love (“un amor que no es de este mundo”) is growing in her heart.
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Corner of 50th St. and Fifth Av. Walking in New York City, this poem’s narrator witnesses the police brutalizing a young queer Puerto Rican man in front of a rowdy crowd. The police pull down the man’s pants, hit him over and over again on the buttocks, and then get bored and let him put his pants back on. The narrator remarks that this is the closest the policemen “let themselves get” to sex with other men.
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Compañera, cuando amábamos. In this poem in Spanish, a woman asks her compañera (woman partner or companion) if they will ever love each other like they used to on autumn afternoons, when they would gaze at each other and walk through town holding hands, attracting subtle looks of recognition from passers-by. They would discover each other’s tongues and flesh in their embraces, walk on the beach and give themselves up to the waves, lay in the park and gaze at the river. They would stay out all afternoon, until nightfall. But, the narrator asks, will those afternoons ever return?
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Interface. When the narrator of "Interface" looks closely at an empty room in her house, she can feel that a woman is inside—and has always been there. One day, the narrator accidentally walked through this woman and felt the warmth of her body. Afterwards, the woman said she “wanted to be flesh” but the narrator wanted to join the woman in the “noumenal” (spirit) world. Lying in bed, the narrator sends the woman her thoughts and receives the woman’s in return.
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The narrator of "Interface" names the spirit Leyla. After some time, Leyla starts glowing faintly and becoming more perceptible; meanwhile, the narrator starts trying to become immaterial. One day, they start touching each other. Leyla feels like fog. Leyla enters the narrator’s body and emerges, with fragile, transparent skin. She’s hungry, so the narrator feeds Leyla milk and baby food. Increasingly worried, the narrator’s roommate confronts the narrator, then leaves town.
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The narrator of "Interface" teaches Leyla to clean herself, to imitate people outside, to say “I love you.” But their lovemaking isn’t as satisfying as it was before, when Leyla was just a spirit. When the narrator says she prefers winter, Leyla turns the temperature down; when the narrator can’t reach something on a high shelf, Leyla can. Leyla’s species evolves faster, through thought alone. Leyla follows the narrator on the subway, on a plane to Los Angeles, and back home, where the narrator’s brother asks if Leyla is a lesbian and the narrator says, “No, just an alien.”
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