“Mas antes en los ranchos” is a series of poems describing the early days of Anzaldúa’s life on the ranch. “White-Wing Season” creates an image of white men with guns filling the silence of the sky with buckshot as they hunt. The Chicana woman hears this from her outpost near the washtub. In “Cervicide,” a young girl is forced to kill a fawn with a hammer to save her father from the game warden. “Horse” describes some white teenagers cutting up a horse and getting away with it, while the Mexicans who live nearby must keep quiet; if “you’re Mexican / you’re born old” (129). In “Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella,” Anzaldúa describes her grandmother, a proud and dignified woman who was scarred by a fire and lived through drought. Anzaldúa once asked her: “Have you ever had an orgasm?” (132). “Nopalitos” centers around cooking cactus—both the arduous process and Anzaldúa’s eventual departure from this tradition.

“La Pérdida” presents a brutal depiction of life in the borderlands. “In sus plumas el viento,” Anzaldúa describes the work of her mother and the challenging conditions of her life: “White heat no water no place to pee / the men staring at her ass” (139). In “Cultures,” Anzaldúa recalls digging in the ground for trash, finding “cans of Spam with twisted umbilicals” (142). “Sobre piedras con lagartijos” describes the somatic experience of border crossing and being forced to return. “El sonavabitche” describes the cruel boss of a group of day-laboring Chicano people in Indiana—“The sonavabitche works them from sunup to dark” (147). “A Sea of Cabbages (for those who have worked in the fields)” envisions a green ocean in the fields, making reference to the image of Jesus with fish. “We Call Them Greasers” speaks from the position of a white man raping a Chicana woman—“lynch him [her partner], I told the boys” (157). “Matriz sin tumba o” is a gruesome description of a womb without a grave, a body decaying.

“Crossers,” focuses on queerness, the act of writing, and anti-LGBTQ bias in the Chicano community. “Poets have strange eating habits” describes a kind of suicide to evade writer’s block, imagining the late-night writing experience as “a border between dusk and dawn” (162). “Yo no fui, fui Teté” is written entirely in Spanish and from the perspective of the victim of anti-gay violence: A gay man’s Chicano brothers beat him.

“The Cannibal’s Canción” describes love as the desire to consume the other person, linking queer love with Catholic ritual. “En mi corazón se incuba” links the challenge of integrating queerness and mysticism into a hetero-patriarchal world order. “Corner of 50th Str. and Fifth Av.” similarly links disparate realities, imbuing a scene of police frisking a Puerto Rican man with erotic tension. “Compañera, cuando amábamos” celebrates love between two women, presenting a portrayal of queer intimacy. “Interface” imagines a spirit woman who obsesses the poet and whom she names Leyla—“she wanted to be flesh” (171). Anzaldúa describes a vivid sexual encounter between human and spirit, revealing the false distinction between unreal and unreal: “Humans only saw what they were told to see” (174).