HeLix - Dossiers zur romanischen Literaturwissenschaft

Nepantlera, Amidst the Cracks. Shifting Concepts in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Border/Body Thinking and Their Potential for Comics Studies

2025-07-18T11:33:20+02:00

The article proposes a recontextualization of Anzaldúa’s conceptual framework of border and body discourses. The first part focuses on “La Prieta”, one of Anzaldúa’s early texts, and her seminal work Borderlands (1987), wherein Anzaldúa exposes the racist, sexist, and queerphobic mechanisms of exclusion and repression that single out bodies as foreign and deviant, reinventing them as sources of productive potential. The second section turns to Light in the Dark to explore why Anzaldúa replaced some of her pivotal concepts and figures with others, in particular nepantla and the Mexica moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui. Drawing on illustrations Anzaldúa herself created in lectures and workshops, the third section looks at how her border/body thinking – deeply grounded as it is in mental images and visual poetry – might be applied to comics studies. A concluding analysis puts these reflections into dialogue with Latinx comics artist Breena Nuñez’s work.

“Entre dos cuerpos de agua” . La poesía decolonial de Gloria Anzaldúa y Natalie Díaz

2025-07-18T14:27:30+02:00

This contribution offers a parallel reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Natalie Díaz’ Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), putting their work in a dialogue with the decolonialist María Lugones and the philosopher Hélène Cixous. With her demand for an ‘écriture féminine’ Cixous questioned the separation of body and mind and its implications for the performance of gender. With their specific decolonial ‘écriture féminine’, as well as their queer and indigenous writings, Anzaldúa and Díaz go even further and establish an intersectional understanding of the human being as a body of water between two bodies of water, as Anzaldúa translates her concept of Nepantla. All three authors are interested not in a state of but in a process of being, not in immobile dogmata but in concepts of fluidity. This article therefore argues that a consequent feminism would always have to be decolonial, and real decolonialism would always already be antipatriarchal.

Gloria Anzaldúa y los estudios sobre las fronteras

2025-07-18T15:04:03+02:00

In this article we examine the way in which borderlands have been conceptualized from the West, as a place for the production of meaning. Further on, we analyze it based on Anzaldúa's approaches and integrate three variables to the discussion: violence and peace, power, and identity. We discuss these variables using the proposals of authors such as Johan Galtung, John Paul Lederach, and Gayatri Spivak, which allows us to focus on those who inhabit these spaces, the power relations that are woven, the possibilities for peacebuilding and the question of identity. Finally, we propose some conclusions to continue the debate on critical border studies in the 21st century.

Entre Borderlands/La Frontera y Huaco retrato. Ejercicios decoloniales pendulares en Gloria Anzaldúa y Gabriela Wiener

2025-07-19T13:57:22+02:00

Gloria Anzaldúa and Gabriela Wiener are both dissident racialized women to the heteronormativity whose instrument of life, identity and activism is the word. Their work is essential for understanding basic aspects that make up today's global society, marked by postcolonial power relations and gender inequality. If Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) is considered a founding work of Chicano studies, giving entity and visibility to this culture and to intersectional feminism, Wiener's Huaco retrato (2021) has recently burst into the contemporary literary scene, removing the European foundations built on colonialism, an origin of social class inequality. In this essay, we analyze in depth the issues they address, as well as their innovative yet divergent proposals –specifically their discursive strategies – whose trajectories sometimes meet, intersect, or run parallel to each other.

Textual Palimpsests. Unfolding Becoming in Más antes en los ranchos

2025-07-19T14:29:56+02:00

This article’s subject is the chapter Más antes en los ranchos in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Moving closely along with the lyrical speaker, this article first delivers a close analysis of the five texts of this chapter, focusing on the literary and poetic expression of the lives en los ranchos (the small villages). The reoccurring images of animals, manhood and womanhood are subsequently put into context with Deleuze & Guattari’s key concept of devenir (becoming), especially devenir-animal (becoming-animal). Finally, this close analysis shows how Más antes en los ranchos delivers a textual palimpsest in which different layers of past and present tense, but also key ideas of class, gender and race shine through.

The New Mestizas. Activist Consciousness Against Femi(ni)cide in Diasporic Collectives Formations During Mexico’s #8 and #9M 2020

2025-07-19T14:43:24+02:00

A mass women’s march took place across Mexico’s cities on Sunday 8th March 2020 (#8M), directly followed by Mexico’s first ever nationwide women strike (#9M/ #UnDíaSinNosotras) the next day. Both these events deeply resonated transnationally. Open calls were disseminated through digital networked umbrella platforms appealing to Mexican women around the world to publically demonstrate against gender-based violence and femi(ni)cide impunity. The encounters that resulted from these led to new feminist collective formations hosting a wide range of lived experiences. And those encounters became, in turn, new potential spaces of belonging for activist consciousness to flourish in their diasporic context. This article draws on Gloria E. Anzaldúa's concept of mestiza consciousness to reflect on the formation of two such groups in London and Berlin and on their emerging narratives at the time.

Las comadres de Gloria Anzaldúa. Lecturas queer, comunidad y reescrituras de la mitología

2025-07-27T18:04:51+02:00

The following article investigates Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of (queer) reading from a theoretical and practical perspective. We focus on the communal dimension of her conception of (queer) reading departing from the “To(o) Queer the Writer – Loca, escritora y chicana”, in which we also show how Anzaldúa contributed to Queer Theory and theories of reading, generally connected to authors such as Roland Barthes or Wolfgang Iser. These theoretical reflections are followed by an analysis of Anzaldúa’s own queer readings of Latin American mythology, namely her rewriting of the goddess Coatlicue in Borderlands/La Frontera and the Yoruba deity Yemayá, in a posthumously published poem.

“A Tolerance for Ambiguities”. Writing and Belonging with Gloria Anzaldúa

2025-07-18T15:15:12+02:00