Gloria Anzaldúa’s New Mestiza Consciousness Through Kristevan Female Writing and the Re-Shaping of Divine Maternal Archetypes

Abstract

Faced with the hegemony of racial superiority, the oppression of gender dominance, and the demands of religious homogeneity, Mexican American Gloria E. Anzaldúa proposes a New Mestiza Consciousness that seeks to achieve a multifaceted transcendence of La Frontera (Borderlands). Using Krsiteva’s semiotics and mythology-based feminism as a theoretical guide, this paper will analyze the cultural, gender, ethnic, and religious manifestations of New Mestiza Consciousness and the logic behind this consciousness in terms of women’s writing in the Chicana women’s literary community and the re-shaping of the maternal mythological archetype in indigenous culture.

1. Introduction

In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Mexican American writer Gloria E. Anzaldúa uses her own painful memories of being marginalized as a Chicana homosexual immigrant to construct a community’s shared new voice—New Mestiza Consciousness. It is both a recollection of her voyage of self-discovery and a voice of protest for the minorities. In Borderlands, Anzaldúa neither complains nor tries to reverse the power structure. What she does is create a completely new consciousness, space, writing mode, and discourse to lead the readers to a new field in which the dichotomy is dissolved where there is no difference between this shore and that shore, this side and that side. She combines female writing and the language of the Borderlands and finds the enormous, untapped potential of indigenous goddesses. Through the re-interpretations of Aztec maternal archetypes, Anzaldúa provides New Mestiza Consciousness with mythological foundation, cultural legitimacy, and inherent persuasiveness.

Anzaldúa, together with Borderlands, has influenced faculties and departments in the U.S., including Women’s and Gender Studies, American Studies, Cultural Studies, English Studies, and Chicano/a Studies. It has also played a great role in encouraging the Chicana feminist movement and other social movements by people of color. The influence can be kept and raised because Anzaldúa has put efforts into both theory construction and social practices. During her year teaching at high school, she encouraged students, especially immigrants, to write down their life stories and let their memories be seen. She also collaborated with other Chicana theorists, thinkers, and activists. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (first published in 1981) edited by Moraga and Anzaldúa attracted much more attention to minority groups from a wider audience.

As mestiza, a gender minority, and feminist, Anzaldúa feels that she is not accepted by her country or nation because she was spiritually expelled; is not embraced by her race and ethnicity because her choice makes her a weirdo; has no cultural root or homeland because she rejects the patriarchal Aztec ethos and long-established white-male-dominated cultural conventions simultaneously. (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 102) Nevertheless, when things are at their worst, they begin to mend. That is why Anzaldúa finds that she belongs to all countries, races and ethnicities, cultural communities because she can support women from all over the world, and her heart is tied to queer women no matter where they are from. Although she seems rootless, she has the best opportunity to create a new feminine vision, full of new symbols and metaphors, new ideas and worlds.

1.1. Escape Based on Personal and National Identities

What can be seen in the text is the importance of a departure that Anzaldúa feels and is aware of: “We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks. Today we are witnessing la migración de los pueblos mexicanos (the migration of the Mexicans), the return odyssey to the historical/mythological Aztlán.” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 33) She had to leave her mother as well as her “mother land” to leave behind her personal qualities decorated and controlled by the accumulated social customs and to see the real longings hidden. This meaning of leaving “home” is like a girl who has made a vow to go far away, becoming more and more determined and tough on the way, yet clutching in her hand the memories of home, or like a stubborn turtle, trying to crawl forward, yet with the shell called “home” on her back: “This weight on her back—which is the baggage from the Indian mother, which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the baggage from the Anglo?” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 104). Carrying both the sweet and painful burden from their hometown, the norms and habits of their mother culture, vagrant women step into the strangers’ place, from infinity to infinity, from uncertainty to uncertainty.

1.2. The New Concept of “Hieros Gamos” to Relieve the Pain of “Mita y Mita”

Anzaldúa tells a story in Borderlands, though it is real and thus much bitterer and heavier than a story should be; in Mexican traditional cultural practices, when a woman is born, her umbilical cord is burned under the roof. Therefore, she cannot leave the house. Women can only hold on to the family tree, shouldering the heterosexual responsibility. This does not only mean the disappearance of the freedom of traveling but something worse; women’s freedom to think about things spiritual, such as soul and existence, is forbidden because it is considered dangerous. How Anzaldúa depicts women’s condition in patriarchal norms is not a unique instance but has its counterpart. In The Color Purple (Walker 2019), while portraying the African American woman Celie’s life, Alice Walker also describes how women were treated in the African patriarchal structure. Celie is forbidden to think about the nature of God and to build any spiritual connection with things out of the family house. However, only when she finally finds and understands God is without a specific race or gender, and ties herself to the vivid and lovely plants and animals in the big world, does she reach the place for her own soul; take charge of her own life; and grow up into an independent and mature woman.

Before elaborating on the concept of the integration of genders, Anzaldúa proposes a seemingly strange concept—“mita y mita” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 41). In the context of Hispanic culture, it means half, plus half. This concerns a legendary mode of six months of existence as a male with a penis and six months as a female with a vagina. In folk culture, the existence of this form is a perverted shape, a total inversion of gender. It is a state of discrimination and abusive shame. This idea has been also expressed in theory by the sexual psychologist Havelock Ellis and has been depicted by Radclyffe Hall in The Well of Loneliness (Hall 2012). People in this state of gender “dysphoria” are left begging for approval, pity, and care from so-called normal people.

Anzaldúa tries to break the dichotomy by constructing the cultural concept of “hieros gamos” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 41). What is truly toxic is not the formation of gender perversion but the absolute division of the gender concept. For queer women of color, they are, on multiple levels, simultaneously stuck in the borders and gaps where different worlds meet. In their vulnerable adolescent formative years, they feel the pain of not being accepted or identified with their mother culture; in their psychological maturity, they feel a strong sense of spiritual alienation from being classified outside of the dominant culture’s protections.

1.3. New Consciousness and New Paths Towards a Literary and Cultural World Without Borders

The geographical border between Mexico and the United States, according to Anzaldúa, is something more than the physical being and the spatial formation “lugar (place)” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 6) but is cultural and psychological; it is “una herida abierta (an open wound)” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 3). She explains that when two lands, two cultures, two sides collide head-on, it bleeds heavily. Like a scab after bleeding, the third field, the third “country”, the third culture are constructed after the crash; the Borderlands are there. Anzaldúa was raised in the Rio Grande Valley, solely 25 miles away from the U.S.–Mexico border. This provides her with the best position and perspective to see, feel, and think about the border itself and its meanings. Most people see the Borderlands as a meaningful and even interesting mix of diverse cultures, symbols, and social values. However, as a person really from the Borderlands, Anzaldúa knows that there is nothing entertaining; they are sidelined and exploited by both American and Mexican mainstream societies and shared opinions. Being a Chicano/a is feeling like an outsider from the inner side.

“To Survive the Borderlands, you must live sin fronteras (without borders).” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 127) Anzaldúa finds that the marginalized are stuck at the borderlands of liminal space, where multiple cultures, religions, races and ethnicities, sexual orientations collide again and again. From the life experience of racial discrimination, racial blindness, and devaluation of women, she is clearly aware of the difficult situation of living on the margins. For homosexual women of Mexican descent like her, they endure double, or even triple marginalization. Anzaldúa proposes New Mestiza Consciousness as a way to help them out of complex dilemmas, offering them a new space featuring transcendence and tolerance. The hybridization of languages and genres in her writing, the space for female writing and voices, and the re-evaluations of Aztec goddesses in ancient mythology work together toward her goal of new cultural awareness.

2. Literature Review

Research on Anzaldúa-based theories has focused on two concepts—hybridity and feminism. These studies have analyzed the embodiment of the theme of hybridity and its value from different perspectives. From a temporal point of view, this hybridity is a tracing of the concept of “mestiza” and “nepantlera” in ancient national cultures. From a spatial point of view, the origin of this reflection on hybridity is the transcendence of the geographical border between Mexico and the U.S. Mahraj analyzes and affirms, from a practical perspective, the value of Anzaldúa’s dynamic and inclusive hybrid state of being in an undefined state to guide the Chicana women’s search for themselves (Mahraj 2010, p. 16). Keating analyzes the existence of a multi-textual, multi-elemental, multi-layered boundary or wall embedded in Anzaldúa’s perspective, which de-constructs the singularity of pre-existing social practices and allows the complex feature to be presented (Keating 2012, p. 61). Koegeler-Abdi explores the distinction and connection between the consciousness of “mestiza” and “nepantlera” subjectivities in Anzaldúa’s theory: The former is a hybrid consciousness of pluralism; the latter is a “borderless” consciousness that dissolves borders (Koegeler-Abdi 2013, p. 72). Ortiz focuses on how Anzaldúa uses the geographic border between the U.S. and Mexico as a starting point for her research, examining the spiritual and cultural violence suffered by marginalized Mexican American women through the lens of ambivalence. The study recognizes Anzaldúa’s academic and practical value for building a community of Chicana women to achieve a more comprehensive concern for the livelihood and well-being of women in the world (Ortiz 2016, p. 206). The above studies point to the significance of the role of hybridity in subverting the strict order, and sole norm, of the patriarchal framework. Under this challenge, the entangled, complex, and diverse nature of the world is revealed, providing the conditions for the development of multiculturalism and the manifestation of feminine spaces. Another trend shown by the research lies in the analysis of the feminine and maternal community in the theory. Hartley analyzes the feminism in Anzaldúa’s writing through the lens of motherhood. As Mexican American women, their wombs are stigmatized by the dominant white culture. However, in the constructed female community, this stigma and humiliation become the weapon and means to fight back against the patriarchal culture, and thus a new power is reborn (Hartley 2010, p. 56). Selecting the geographical and cultural connotations of New York City, Alvarado explores how Anzaldúa connects gender and spirituality to create an inner connection and queer intimacy based on the femininity of a minority gender group from the perspective of poetic textual analysis (Alvarado 2019, p. 84). Garcia analyzes Anzaldúa’s process of completing the self-healing of marginalized female groups through the redefinition and clarification of gender roles within a culturally constructed Mexican American female community (Garcia 2021, p. 116). These studies identify with the feminist characteristics of Anzaldúa’s theory and the care for the survival of marginalized women. In a Mexican American female community forced to form by the spiritual violence of race and gender, a concept of female community is derived, which can be applied to a wider context.

Existing studies have analyzed the hybrid state in Anzaldúa’s theory, showing its challenge and resistance to the monolithic and hegemonic nature of the patriarchal system through the dissolution and crossing of boundaries. Some studies have also explored feminism in the theory, showing the redemption of the female spirit, and the possibilities for women to re-find their voice and maintain the freedom to write down their memories and life stories. The existing literature has well-recognized the tolerance beyond limitations and the support for female solidarity in Anzaldúa’s consciousness constructions. But there is still limited research looking into the connections between Anzaldúa’s formation of hybridity and her vision for the female community. Corbatta, in a short article, once mentioned that there could be a fictional dialogue and interaction between Anzaldúa and Kristeva. The two share the similarity in the escape of the marginalized, and the concepts beyond boundaries (Corbatta 2014, p. 362). The feminist theory by Kristeva provides a suitable starting point and theoretical support for discovering and analyzing the logical construction in Anzaldúa’s theory. It not only offers a framework that better guides the research but shares the internalized commonality with Anzaldúan ideas. Kristeva’s feminist theory differs from the previous focus limited to women’s rights but spans the fields of semiotics, culture, literature, and psychoanalysis. This boundary-spanning and integration make it an appropriate choice to support the understanding of Anzaldúa’s theory, as the two can achieve subtle intertextuality and mirroring in terms of logical framework. It can be found that Anzaldúa’s New Mestiza Consciousness is essentially a rejection of strict control as well as clear boundaries on issues of gender and race. Therefore, she justifies the consciousness in a reductio ad absurdum way in two aspects.

On the one hand, she portrays female writing as a mode far beyond the rigid structure, allowing for a mixture of languages from different countries as well as combinations of standard languages and dialects, simultaneously. She also builds a writing style that allows for the fusion of memoir, autobiography, historical narrative, and poetry. On the other hand, she returns to and re-embraces the Chicana culture, which was rejected and despised by the American mainstream society for the very first time, in search of the divine archetypes of motherhood in its cultural roots—the images of goddesses that have been distorted to intimidate women in Mexican culture because of patriarchal domination. Anzaldúa re-shapes and redefines these maternal archetypes, highlighting their inclusiveness covering light and darkness, life and death, countless countries, and varied languages. At the same time, this inclusiveness does not refer to the overgeneralization without any core or superficiality by taking in all. Instead, it represents a highly tolerant and comprehensive field based on maternal energy.

3. Maternal Perspective into the Pursuit and Exploration of Feminist Space

Kristeva builds the discursive space that sustains women’s writing in which the established patterns cannot interfere randomly. To begin with, she, taking an outsider’s perspective, questions Lacan’s conventions and laws of patriarchy to transcend multiple dichotomies and to form a discursive voice of the immigrant-marginalized woman that confronts logocentrism and white male discourse. Based upon the reproduction of signifiers, the symbolic border is crossed; the semiotic “chora” is realized; the other side of the social frontier is reached (Kristeva 1984, p. 79). Also, the female discourse system she creates is theatrical, literary, imaginary, and symbolic. On this system of symbols, women’s discourse is able to break away from previous limitations and achieve diversity and arbitrariness of signification (Kristeva 1984, p. 67). What needs to be subverted is the sole set of ethics, of logic, previously defined by patriarchy. What is about to be pursued is not “the one” but the countless “others”. Anzaldúa’s New Mestiza Consciousness, and the theory of women’s writing, which is to support and validate this consciousness, precisely challenge and rebel against the inflexibility of the distribution of powers under patriarchal structures by crossing boundaries and dissolving them. Within women’s writing, the use of signs, metaphors, and symbols, as well as the multiple transformations of genre and language, are used to subvert the fixed patterns of the patriarchal literary framework.

Moreover, this female discourse bitterly opposes the oppression and shackling of the masculine system but does not deny the legitimacy of the existence of male language and is, therefore, an attitude supporting co-existence; at the same time, this female discourse identifies with the unity of the female body and the female literary spirit as well. In addition, Kristeva, in the third wave of feminism, corrects the bias of the second wave of feminism that ignored the differences within the female camp, focusing on both the commonality of women as a whole and the diversity within women’s communities. More innovatively, she focuses on a particular point—the maternal culture and language. Clément and Kristeva further expand this cultural and linguistic manifestation of motherhood into a maternal force with divine tendencies that can influence and unify the feminine spiritual psyche, turning to the sacred roots and foundations of femininity (Clément and Kristeva 2001, p. 24). Accordingly, Anzaldúa’s writing is guided by the notion of border dissolution and crossing, within which social factors including gender are the subject. Thus, she opposes the threat and humiliation of “sexual inversion” towards sexual minorities caused by a strict division and binary of gender. Therefore, she seeks to remove the absolute opposition in gender through women’s writing yet not to eliminate the presence of male writing. Furthermore, as it is elaborated in Kristeva’s theory, Anzaldúa incorporates a maternal perspective into her pursuit and exploration of feminist space. This integration allows the maternal archetype in Chicana culture to furnish feminist analysis with inherited validity by offering adequate metaphors and symbols in historical narratives. In an interview, Kristeva notes that the maternal sense and characteristics of women can be spiritual, which means that maternal features do not necessarily come from being a mother biologically (Midttun 2006, p. 171). Also, the existing maternal imagination of women, according to Kristeva, is totally idealized in society; it is away from the root of the ancient foundation of holy maternal existence (Söderbäck 2011, p. 75). This view coincides with Anzaldúa’s choice of setting the maternal perspective as a starting point, generally, to re-interpret Aztec goddesses.

4. New Mestiza Consciousness: Multiple Transcendences of the Borderlands

“To this day I’m not sure where I found the strength to leave the source, the mother, disengage from my family, mi tierra, mi gente, and all that picture stood for. I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.”

(Anzaldúa 2012, p. 38)

Kristeva once mentioned that the relocation and the loss of belongingness are the inspirations for writing because the process of traveling is another hometown (Midttun 2006, p. 165). A striking similarity can be seen in Anzaldúa’s ideas; Anzaldúa talks about distancing herself from her source, her mother, her tierra (land), her gente (people). Running away from home, though solitary, becomes her only way to re-find real self-identities. By writing the above paragraph, Anzaldúa re-affirms that for a Mexican lesbian like her, she has to run away from her hometown and everything familiar to intrude on the private grief; achieve spiritual harmony; and then embrace inner cognition hidden under the mask of self-protection. This self-consciousness of the importance of leaving home works as a starting point for crossing boundaries well over the given limit. A tolerance for ambiguity and contradictions and a refusal of standard practices as well as rigid boundaries are well-explained, as it is said, “rigidity means death” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 101). Anzaldúa wants to achieve “una cultura mestiza”, a mixed community of Azteca–Mexican, Indian, and Anglo-Saxon cultures (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 101). Anzaldúa’s New Mestiza Consciousness can be seen as a further development based on Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of cultural hybridity and José Vasconcelos’ theory of la raza cósmica (the cosmic race). Vasconcelos has constructed a fifth universal race concept that embraces the mestizaje ideology and tried to prove that racial mixing is progressive when they were actually disparaged broadly. Vasconcelos already gives a brave idea that being racially mixed can be of virtue, which tears apart the illusionary and unequal superiority. Furthermore, Anzaldúa extends the operations into cultural, gender, linguistic, religious fields.

The core of her expression is the crossing of La Frontera (the Borderlands). Just as sea creatures are free to move across the vast ocean, Anzaldúa believes that she should not be forced to choose between Mexican and American, between “Mexicaness and Angloness” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 85), between Spanish and English, and between dialect and standard language because she should be free to move across both ends of the border. She uses mythology to validate the characteristics of this crossing, namely, the Mexican maternal archetype that combines the serpent and the eagle in one. Anzaldúa also borrows the “othering” part of Said’s theory, insinuating that the dichotomy of consciousness in mainstream Western culture is an artificial fragmentation and a deliberate outward transference of distasteful traits (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 108). It is later argued that, in fact, such an approach is useless and meaningless. For American culture, through the lens of New Mestiza Consciousness, the culture they do not want to accept is a shadow from which they can never completely escape, a conjoined twin of their destiny. To subvert the former practices, one needs to do more than just fight and shout in this “river bank”, cross over to the other side, or make oneself the oppressor (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 100). What is needed is not to perpetuate the unequal relationship paradigm but to fundamentally de-construct it to achieve a dual state of being simultaneously on this shore and on the other. La Mestiza is both in the darkness and in the light; at the same time, Anzaldúa questions the validity and correctness of the existence of both darkness and light. This hypothesis is inclusive of all things and, at the same time, reasonably critical of all things.

“So, don’t give me your tenets and your laws. Don’t give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.”

(Anzaldúa 2012, p. 44)

By saying this, Anzaldúa gives a clear explanation of una cultura mestiza (mestiza culture and consciousness). New Mestiza Consciousness refuses long-standing conventions and laws and repels the former interpretations of and regulations on religions. It rejects the clear distinction among different cultures; inversely, it tries to combine white culture with Mexican culture. By claiming the idea of una cultura mestiza, Anzaldúa is eager to re-interpret the indigenous goddesses and to create an updated identity, face, and image. She tries to build a feminist architecture based upon her own discourse and bricks and then to construct a new space embracing a new culture. This space, though far away from the hometown, welcomes her as an insider, instead of driving her away.

5. Marginalized Women’s Writing as Voices: Combining the Language of the Borderlands and Keeping the Tongue Wild

“The female, by virtue of creating entities of flesh and blood in her stomach (she bleeds every month but does not die), by virtue of being in tune with nature’s cycles, is feared. Because, according to Christianity and most other major religions, woman is carnal, animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected. Protected from herself. Woman is the stranger, the other. She is man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of anger and fear.”

(Anzaldúa 2012, p. 39)

According to the above, Anzaldúa notices that in the long history of many cultures and religions, women’s bodies and blood are stigmatized to be something scary and notorious. Women’s images and voices are forced to be deeply connected with negative emotions such as fear and anger. This view is also re-announced by Anzaldúa in the latter part of the work, explaining how Aztec goddesses have been shaped and distorted by the mainstream to present a cruel face. Therefore, Anzaldúa decides to create a female writing mode, which is unique and impressive enough to let women be heard instead of being fabricated. The purpose of women’s writing is to create their own space under the well-developed framework built and dominated by male writing to overturn the original habitus and traditions. The pursuit of the rights of the female voice; “secret” language; lexical selection; and the construction of maternal archetypes together help Anzaldúa achieve her goal. The metaphor of taming the wild tongue is used to refer to a dominant culture’s exploitation of the voice of marginalized minorities. Also, forcing people to become quiet and denying them the freedom to speak out is a form of violence and cultural hegemony. By the same token, using the metaphor of the tongue to symbolize women’s voices, women’s writing can be seen in Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack (Barnes 1992). When everything is burned by fire, what remains after the fire is the tongue, which symbolizes a struggle to explore the space for women’s writing and to raise their voices for freedom under heavy oppression and restrictions.

A prominent feature of women’s writing is the awareness that previous patterns of writing and language are the result of a masculine discursive structure. For Anzaldúa, following Latin American feminism’s extensive renovations in languages and words, continuing to choose “nosotras”1 instead of “nosotros” to describe a group of people or mixed company, is an attempt to break out of the domination of masculine discourse. The expanded use of feminine pronouns stands for the language of the Borderlands by letting the underrepresented feminine word wield linguistic clout, and the mixture of different languages together has also become the blocks of the language of the Borderlands by challenging the recognized territory swayed over by one specific language. As it is said in the following:

“Cuando vives en la frontera

People walk through you, the wind steals your voice,

You’re a burra, buey, scapegoat,

Forerunner of a new race,

Half and half—both woman and man, neither–

A new gender.”

(Anzaldúa 2012, p. 216)

If the right to speak is a source of water, then language is a channel, and different channels lead to different zones; they are the tools and ways in which the voices of women can truly be presented to the public. To fulfill the need to subvert the dominant framework of writing, Anzaldúa uses multiple languages in her writing: Pachuco2, Chicano Spanish (“Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have regional variations.”) (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 77), working-class English, Tex–Mex, Spanglish, Mexican Spanish, and North Mexican dialect (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 20).

6. Re-Interpretation of Goddesses of Dualities to Dissolve Dichotomies

“The male-dominated Azteca-Mexica culture drove the powerful female deities underground by giving them monstrous attributes and by substituting male deities in their place, thus splitting the female Self and the female deities. They divided her who had been complete, who possessed both upper (light) and underworld (dark) aspects. Coatlicue, the Serpent goddess, and her more sinister aspects, Tlazolteotl and Cibuacoatl, were ‘darkened’ and disempowered much in the same manner as the Indian Kali.”

(Anzaldúa 2012, p. 49)

According to Anzaldúa, the male-dominated Azteca–Mexica culture has twisted the image of goddesses, shaping them into something monstrous as well as dehumanizing them. Anzaldúa believes that Coatlicue used to be complete because she combines lightness and darkness, paradise and the underworld. However, the patriarchal and mainstream framework splits, darkens, and disempowers her into solely one piece. Therefore, Anzaldúa sees the re-interpretation and re-shaping of these goddesses who should contain the spirit of powerful integration as the source of new feminine voices and rights. Through these efforts, Anzaldúa wants to encourage the Chicano/a people to sincerely understand, accept, and appreciate the “true colors” of the indigenous goddesses. Because by identifying with their origin of mythology, they will better overcome self-hatred and self-denigration. The logic of resistance accomplished by Anzaldúa can be clearly seen: Realizing the still marginalized condition of Chicana/o people and languages, Anzaldúa expresses her personal and national resistance by thoroughly mixing Spanish, Old Spanish, dialects, and standard English. Secondly, people of Mexican descent are discriminated against and looked down upon because Mexicans believe in their own unique gods. Therefore, Anzaldúa re-imagines and re-interprets the goddesses of indigenous culture and uses their spiritual core to convey her struggle against the discrimination of beliefs and the degradation of women. It can be said that Anzaldúa expresses her views through the subversion and re-interpretation of the classical maternal goddesses of Aztec culture or the symbol of the divine mother used by the Church to control people, including the “Malinche”, which makes people feel humiliated by their background under patriarchal traditions; “La Llorona”, being used to make people willing to suffer; the “Guadalupe”, which makes people tame and obedient (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 53). “Antigua, mi Diosa, the divine within, Coatlicue—Cihuacoatl—Tlazolteotl—Tonantzin—Coatlalopeuh—Guadalupe—they are one.” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 72).

Among the above, Anzaldúa’s re-shaping of Guadalupe and Coatlicue is undoubtedly the most complete and robust and the most emblematic of her pursuit of an inclusive and transcendent cultural concept: travesía3. “Allí hacía promesas a la Virgen de Guadalupe.” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 49). The Indian name of Guadalupe is Coatlalopeuh (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 49). The re-shaping of Guadalupe is a unique, personalized path that Anzaldúa has created for the sake of spiritual rebellion, for the sake of interpreting the “fusion” and “transitivity” of her diversity. Guadalupe is not the oppressed; she walks with fortitude and stoicism, but she is certainly not the oppressor. She is a hybrid of the oppressor and the oppressed, or rather, she is the product of the de-construction and dissolution of the act of oppression itself. This is also true in the sense of culture, race, and gender. She does not belong to a particular category but is a reproduction of all the existing categories. On the one hand, Guadalupe embodies a superb inclusiveness. She embraces and identifies with people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. On the other hand, Guadalupe has a role in uniting and facilitating communications among people of different religions, languages, places, and diverse personalities. Being re-imagined and re-interpreted, Coatlicue brings together in one place all the metaphors, symbols, and contradictions of Aztec civilization; she is the embodiment of the merger of the eagle and the serpent (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 69). She is the intersection of all the dichotomies: heaven and infierno; life and death; flow and stagnation; beauty and ugliness; good and evil. When she merges two extreme states, extreme substances, into one, she undoubtedly becomes the best verifier and incarnation of a brand-new theory that crosses boundaries.

“Guadalupe unites people of different races, religions, languages: Chicano protestants, American Indians and whites. ‘Nuestra abogada siempre serás/Our mediatrix you will always be.’ She mediates between the Spanish and the Indian cultures (or three cultures as in the case of mexicanos of African or other ancestry) and between Chicanos and the white world. She mediates between humans and the divine, between this reality and the reality of spirit entities. La Virgen de Guadalupe is the symbol of ethnic identity and of the tolerance for ambiguity that Chicanos-mexicanos, people of mixed race, people who have Indian blood, people who cross cultures, by necessity possess.”

(Anzaldúa 2012, p. 52)

Within the re-shaping and new interpretations by Anzaldúa, Guadalupe represents a tolerant integration that helps mix people from different countries, religions, cultures, and races. Guadalupe shows an amazing power in mediating between the human world and the supernatural spirit. Also, the reconstruction of Guadalupe empowers Anzaldúa’s belief in ambiguity; this state crossing the boundaries and dissolving the limitations creates a new space for the marginalized, beyond the discriminations, conventions, and norms.

7. Conclusions

As Kristeva chooses to extend feminist practice beyond the struggle for economic and political rights to multiple aspects of imagery, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and parody, Anzaldúa proposes New Mestiza Consciousness in American social contexts, spanning culture, race, gender, and religion. The Chicana women’s literary community validates the call of New Mestiza Consciousness for the requirement of crossing borders by advancing women’s writing in the linguistic and stylistic hybridity, which Anzaldúa uses to de-construct the restrictions and cultural hegemony of patriarchal and white dominant culture in a literary sense. The re-interpretation of maternal cultural archetypes in Chicana cultural history gives New Mestiza Consciousness important historical theoretical support and re-affirms the fundamental qualities of New Mestiza Consciousness with the unity of life and death, light and darkness that characterize the goddesses.

Kristeva and Anzaldúa share the same idea in recognizing the necessity of fleeing—away from the constructed frameworks and concepts; from the mainstream discourse and society; and from the familiar people and environment. It is because of fleeing that there is a future, a hope of creating a new language, a new image, a new space. The fleeing provides the possibility of transcending confirmed boundaries and limitations. Anzaldúa then mixes different languages, different genres in her writings, practicing New Mestiza Consciousness firstly at the literary level. Then, as Kristeva, Anzaldúa also realizes the importance of creating a unique mode of feminist writing and languages—which is different and fresh enough to jump out of white, patriarchal settings. Furthermore, she completes the process by inventing and adding special symbols and metaphors, as well as re-interpreting indigenous goddesses such as Guadalupe. Aztec goddesses had been distorted and stigmatized as cruel and monstrous creatures. However, they are actually powerful and strong enough to mix totally different conditions. By re-shaping the image of Guadalupe, Anzaldúa brings mythological energy into the development of feminist voices and writings.