39 pages • 1 hour read
Gloria E. AnzalduaA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“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).
Anzaldúa arranges her poems to echo the structure of Part 1, the prose portion of her book. Delving into her personal history and experiences working the land, Anzaldúa paints a picture of life on the borderland in the first chapter of poems, “Mas antes en los ranchos,” or “earlier in the ranches.” Moving between narrators in the different poems, Anzaldúa provides a multifaceted perspective on agriculture, labor, cooking, and social life as a Chicano. Animals—and violence against animals—feature particularly prominently in these poems, suggesting the interrelationship between the Chicano people and the natural world, which have both been brutalized by colonialist violence, thus recalling Anzaldúa’s opening image of a body bisected by barbed wire.
The second chapter of poems, “La Pérdida” (“The Loss”), delves deeper into the harsh realities of border life. Pulling from her family’s experiences, Anzaldúa approaches these challenges from all angles, using brutal and sometimes crass language to illustrate the dehumanization of the Chicano people. “We Call Them Greasers” is especially subversive, as Anzaldúa’s narrator is a white man who recalls raping a woman, ending the poem with a call to lynch the woman’s husband. Anzaldúa employs these images of violence to make a political point about the subjugation of day-laboring Chicano people by an exploitative Anglo American culture.
Chapter 3, “Crossers,” expands the “otherness” of the Chicano to include queer people, with depictions of queer Chicanos and Chicanas that are both violent and tender. In some cases, the two depictions overlap, as when queer love is symbolized as an act of consumption, both literally and figuratively in terms of Catholic Communion—a tension that underscores the work’s broader ambiguities and ruptures.
These poems also defy genres at times; “Interface” tells a tale of science fiction, with two women falling in love across phenomenological space-time. Boundaries between languages are similarly porous. Many of Anzaldúa’s poems are written in Spanish without translations, privileging the Spanish speaker, but almost all of her poems move between Spanish and English, often using Tex-Mex slang. In this way, she not only writes Chicana poetry for the Chicano reader but also continues to develop her intersecting claims about Contradiction as Mestiza Consciousness and Language as Identity and Performance: Anzaldúa’s style is as shifting and ambiguous as the consciousness she espouses.
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