Gloria E. Anzaldua's Decolonizing Ritual de Conocimiento (Estudios y Confluencias‪)‬

Gloria E. Anzaldua's work makes up one of the many Chican@ works that contribute another history, a history repressed by the national discourses on both sides of the border. Influenced by antecedents of U.S. Hispanic Literature who superposed "official" history with another history, Chicano activists had already enacted a retrieval of pre-conquest histories to revive their people's historical consciousness. As Saldivar-Hull states in "Mestiza Consciousness and Politics: Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La frontera," the publication of Borderlands/La Frontera distinguished itself from the Chicano movement's as it unveiled the curtain that hid the Aztec goddesses and kept aspects of pre-conquest history behind a cloud of blood sacrifices and military power (60). In the continuum of the foundational period to today's transnational era of the Chican@ movement, Anzaldua's reflections on sexuality and race stand in the latter part of the continuum. The transnational period opens a global dialogue, unfolding the Chicano Civil Right's movement's constricting walls of protest, and advocates another solidarity. In her borderland, Gloria questioned even the margins' borders. (1) Although Anzaldua fervently rejected labels, her most recognized work Borderlands/ La Frontera defines a lesbian activist's intellectual position. She contests the Chicano historiography with a historical and political knowledge fed by pre-Conquest indigenous female deities' and ancestors' ways of knowing. She anchors herself in the woman of color or Third World Feminist movement as she revises patriarchal appropriations of indigenous icons (Coatlicue, la Virgen de Guadalupe), and puts subaltern women and mythical representations at the center of history. In my work on gender and women of color, her tracing the evolution of feminine deities' representation, the historical "taming" (2) of sensual feminine religious images, and the demonizing of other female deities has helped me analyze woman of color's repressed sexuality, as she noted that, in turn, this impacted the sexuality of Chicanas and women of color. (3) She claims her objective as a mestiza intellectual: "[The mestiza] puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of." (Anzaldua qtd. in Saldivar-Hull 63) (4) With an important contribution to gender studies, her autohistoria-teoria infused with spirituality and corporeality at its core articulated a woman-of-color consciousness shared by African American, Latin(a) American, and women of color at large. (5)