Who Is Anzaldua's Experience In The Borderlands?

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In the poem Borderlands, the poet Anzaldua describes her experience in the Borderlands. In the Borderlands, she does not belong anywhere, she is between five distinct cultures. As a result, Anzaldua struggles borders along with her identity. Towards the end of the poem, Anzaldua discovers the secret to finding herself among the chaos in the Borderlands. Anzaldua syncretizes the different cultures, and by doing so she becomes a crossroad which helps reconcile her identity. Other similar authors examine identity, borders, and crossroads in their writings. In their writings they emphasize the importance of acceptance, and the issue in agency and being unable to understand each other. Acceptance, symbolized through meals in stories, acts as one …show more content…
In one case, such as the film Arranged by Crespo and Scrader, Nasira and Rachel are expected by their families to marry a man, but it must be a man with a good background and the same religion. Yet having these rules set on them, Nasira and Rachel accept these expectations, and do wind up marrying a man that fits into their family’s expectations. This satisfies their families and themselves, thus brings harmony to the family, and tying their bonds tighter. A story that relates to Arranged would be Kincaid’s poem, Girl. The poem, Girl, revolves around a daughter and her controlling mother where she sets strict expectations upon her daughter like “don’t sing benna in Sunday school” and “you musn’t speak to wharf-rat boys”. The girl responds to her mother by questioning her words, but is silenced and reluctantly accept her mother’s guidelines. The authors, Kincaid, and Marquez make their protagonist have no agency to highlight the dilemma in one’s identity when they have no power. Paralleling the previous stories mentioned, in the short story Lipstick which takes place during the Cultural Revolution, the narrator, Seaweed is pressured to fit into her society’s gender role for females due to lacking agency against the mass of people. Feeling as if she possesses no control, Seaweed is compelled to shape herself into her community’s standards of women; to be slender, pale, wide-eyed, and have short charcoal black hair like her younger sister, Sea Cloud. This influences her to be jealous of Sea Cloud, and perceive herself negatively. Seaweed sees herself as a “small-eyed devil”. As Kincaid, Ping, Crespo, and Schrader state the issue between agency and identity, they clarify that although when lacking in agency, one can still have a minimal amount of agency to control their own identity. It depends on how one
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