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Chicano men.15 Once again, Anzaldúa uses her identification with La
Malinche and turns it back against that discourse through her denounce-
ment of homophobia:  Not me sold out my people but they me.
Anzaldúa s discourse on the Indian woman is actually a form of what
we can term inversionismo. Invertir is to turn upside down, or to turn
inside out. Either one of these meanings, or both of them simultaneously,
can be applied to the process by which Borderlands constructs a new script
for the Indian woman, as well as for the  New Mestiza. The text inverts
the figure of the Indian woman personified in La Malinche and reveals
what is hidden below. Anzaldúa also pulls herself inside out, so to speak, in
revealing the Indian woman within herself and tracing and naming her
presence on her very skin.
The term inversionismo is also resonant in Anzaldúa s discourse on
sexuality, since invertida is a slang term for lesbian.16 The term invert to
describe a homosexual, male or female, came from pseudoscientific writing
in the late nineteenth century. This medical discourse, which pathologized
homosexuality, was also linked to racial discourses of the time.17 As Judith
Raiskin summarizes,  categories of sexual behavior and identity created
by nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexologists were also influenced by
the classification systems of race, whereby people of color, particularly
 mixed race people, and homosexuals were conflated through the ideas of
evolution and degeneration prevalent in the late nineteenth century
(Raiskin 157). Anzaldúa s inversionismo works this discourse of racial and
sexual degeneracy and turns it back on itself so that the mestiza (half-
breed) and the lesbian (invert) become privileged sites. Thus, through
inversionismo, Anzaldúa turns the discourse used against her upside down
Spic Spanglish? 75
and inside out while engaging in discursive self-formation and transfor-
mation. That is invirtiendo, or investing in a future return or growth.
Although Borderlands is unmistakably grounded in a specific histori-
cal, cultural, and geographic location, as its languages make clear, particular
reading strategies are still capable of wrenching it from its context and
universalizing its content. Such readings necessitate the suppression of the
text s discursive practices, since these cannot be universalized. Read in iso-
lation from the other texts with which Borderlands is in dialogue, as well
as the unwritten cultural and historical iconographies that the text sub-
verts, it is almost inevitable that terms such as border and mestiza be read
as abstractions and therefore easily grafted onto the reader s own experi-
ential and critical framework. Elizabeth Spelman has coined this as  boo-
merang perception whereby  I look at you and come back to myself
(Spelman 12).
As Yarbro-Bejarano states, regarding this type of misreading:  If every
reader who identifies with the border-crossing experience described by
Anzaldúa s text sees her/himself as a  New mestiza, what is lost in terms
of the erasure of difference and specificity? (Yarbro-Bejarano 8). Engag-
ing in this type of appropriation neutralizes the text and carries the added
benefit, or liability (depending on how we interpret it), of providing an
illusion of having included a deferentially positioned perspective. It is a
form of what Caren Kaplan has termed  academic tourism, and what
Yarbro-Bejarano has renamed, in relation to Borderlands, as becoming
 boarders at the border (Yarbro-Bejarano 22).
Various critics have pointed out that discussions of  difference with-
out any real recognition or articulation of difference, and more impor-
tantly without the responsibility of re-evaluating or reconfiguring models
based on knowledge or insight gained, is tantamount to superficial incor-
poration and recolonization. Anzaldúa s language requires that the reader
constantly face and engage with difference. It refuses to translate and in-
stead demands  to be met halfway (Anzaldúa, preface). Readings that
erase or neutralize difference require a form of amnesia, since the text
must be reconstructed as monolingual, its discursive practices forgotten,
before the reader can appropriate it as her/his own.
Readings of Borderlands that ignore its languages facilitate interpreta-
tions that decontextualize, essentialize, exceptionalize, and/or universal-
ize. To perform such readings we must assume that the reader skips over
those portions of the text he/she does not recognize. This practice implies a
belief, on some level, that these portions are somehow irrelevant, or at
76 Latino American Literature in the Classroom
least nonessential to the text as a whole. This practice is a reflection of the
marginal status of Spanish and Spanglish in U.S. culture. It is on the one
hand a form of academic arrogance that can justify a partial reading of a
text, even when training in literary studies emphasizes close readings.
On the other hand, it can also be interpreted as a reflection of the mut-
ing of Spanish and Spanglish and by extension the invisibility of the
Spanish- or Spanglish-speaking subject itself a form of denial employed
in maintaining U.S. metaphorical and linguistic borders. In either case,
readings of Borderlands that do not engage with its languages prevent the
possibility of transformational readings that can effect changes in indi-
vidual reading practices as well as institutional changes that may allow for
real inclusion and diversity in scholarship and the curriculum.
Borderlands/La Frontera has reached a broad readership in the aca-
demic marketplace, albeit not as extensive as we might wish. It has been
included in primarily graduate but also a few undergraduate courses
within Chicano Studies and Women s Studies, and in courses in English as
well as Spanish departments. The book has been taught at a full range of
institutions, from the elite such as Stanford, Yale, Brown, and Cornell, to
state universities such as Ohio State and the University of Arizona, as well [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]