Gender on the Borderlands: The Frontiers Reader

Gender on the Borderlands captures the intense, complex, and gendered experience of those living along the barbwire borderlands of Mexico and the United States. Through scholarship, testimonials, oral histories, songs, poetry, and art, the contributors reclaim the borderlands from the distortions and violence of “official” history and continue the recovery of a gendered Chicana/Chicano history begun by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera more than twenty years ago. Both noted and new scholars reweave the fabric of collective, family, and individual history with a legacy of agency and activism in the borderlands in these twenty-one original selections. Contributors explore themes of homeland, sexuality, language, violence, colonialism, and political resistance within the most recent frameworks of Chicana/Chicano inquiry. Art as social critique, culture as a human right, labor activism, racial plurality, Indigenous knowledge, and strategies of decolonization all vitalize these selections edited by one of the country’s most respected historians of the borderlands, Antonia Castañeda. From Aztec cosmology to globalization, Gender on the Borderlands unites the past with the present and the future to reclaim and transform the gendered, transnational domain along the Mexico-U.S. border.