Building Bridges through Many Forms

In 1981 Persephone Press, a feminist press, published This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. This anthology, co-edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, received near instant acclaim, and since its publication over four decades ago it has been reissued in four additional editions and sold over one hundred thousand copies.1 The collection is widely celebrated for how it brought together women of color from diverse backgrounds to write openly about their identities and life experience—particularly as shaped by the intersection of their race, gender, sexuality, and class. In 2017, Cassius Adair and Lisa Nakamura called This Bridge “a cornerstone of our feminist consciousness,” highlighting its publication history—including its official editions as well as its countless pirated versions—as evidence of its continuing influence.2 The book’s enduring relevance is due both to the variety of authorial perspectives it includes and to the range of forms the contributors used. Authors combined autobiographical, dialogic, poetic, discursive, epistolary, and other textual forms to describe their experiences as women of color. In their introduction to the first edition in 1981, Anzaldúa and Moraga celebrated this constellation of approaches: “The works combined reflect a diversity of perspectives, linguistic styles, and cultural tongues.”3 Pointing to the impact of the anthology’s formal diversity, AnaLouise Keating, who edited The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader in 2009, described This Bridge as “demonstrat[ing] the transformative possibilities that arise when we theorize in multiple genres and modes.”4

In her own work that she published alongside and following This Bridge, Anzaldúa was known for employing a variety of forms in order to theorize and figure out different ways of welcoming folks into thinking alongside her. In This Bridge, Anzaldúa contributed a multifaceted letter to “third world women writers” that incorporated epigraphs of other writers and her own journal entries, highlighting her collaborative mindset. At the outset of her letter, she describes herself and other women of color who “[lament] the lack of time to weave writing into your life” as she describes her choice of the epistolary format, since it allows her to “approximate the intimacy and immediacy [that she] want[ed]” to these women, as neither an essay nor a poem could do.5 Further, Borderlands / La Frontera (1987), her acclaimed critical volume that followed This Bridge, also highlighted her interest in moving beyond traditional textual forms and incorporating multiple textual registers in a single space. In this book, she divided the manuscript in half between prose and poetry (although the actual styles of those forms varied widely, ten women described them as “hybrid, inclusive, many-voiced” in a group introduction to the third edition of the book).6 Anzaldúa’s embrace of a range of forms is evident throughout her published writings, and it is also strongly present in her unpublished work, particularly her drawings. This chapter, which looks specifically at how she deployed her visual creations to welcome others into her thought, underscores the crucial ways that Anzaldúa—like the artists discussed in prior chapters—used images to develop communities around groundbreaking new ideas.

In the previous chapters, I have traced the way that visual culture, particularly in the context of grassroots publishing, has centrally participated in feminist discourse during the 1970s and 1980s. This chapter builds on those discussions, specifically highlighting how visuality played a role in the work of Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldúa. As an influential feminist theorist, Anzaldúa called for a greater engagement with how race, sexuality, and class affected a woman’s life, developing intersectional feminism before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989.7 Her drawings, which were rarely published, were fundamentally intertwined with her theoretical and community-building work. This chapter opens by looking again at Anzaldúa’s well-known editing and how her building of community through this role echoed her little-known visual work and its collective praxis. Both of these forms were central to Anzaldúa’s reshaping of feminism through intersectional thinking in the 1970s and 1980s.

Across her career, Anzaldúa built coalitional networks through editing anthologies, making use of their capacity to contain many forms and voices. In two anthologies that followed This Bridge and Borderlands / La Frontera—Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (1990) and this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation (2002)—Anzaldúa worked to expand the conversation that This Bridge had started, welcoming in people to reflect on their experiences from a diversity of social, economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. As with This Bridge, Anzaldúa saw her editorial work as one of mentorship, dedicating space to cultivate new writers and encouraging all contributors to experiment in order to find the form necessary to convey their experiences.8 Unlike other multiauthored collections of writing where editors may encourage consistency of voices among the various contributors, Anzaldúa saw difference of expression as central to both volumes.

As she organized the pieces into sections, Anzaldúa intentionally juxtaposed and highlighted the multiplicity of forms to spur readers to action: “As the perspective and focus shift, as the topics shift, the listener/reader is forced into participating in the making of meaning—she is forced to connect the dots, to connect the fragments.”9 Just as Anzaldúa mentored each contributor to dig deep and find their own individual voice and form, so also did she mentor the readers into finding the community among all of these voices. With her anthologies, Anzaldúa thereby forges relationships with both her contributors and her readers that prompt them to pay attention to shifting forms in thinking through their own investments and connections with others.

Anzaldúa drew on the dynamic nature of multiple forms to build community when she used her own drawings to illustrate concepts in public lectures she gave. Across her career, she gave hundreds of talks, as she detailed in a 1994 interview: “Since 1981 I’ve been doing gigs. Some years I do twenty. This year I only did thirteen because I’m getting older and I’m diabetic. I can’t do as much.”10 Early in her career, she animated her words and ideas through live drawings on chalkboards. Later on, she projected drawings on transparencies to welcome the audience into her thought and would reanimate the images during the talk by tracing her finger over her drawings and text as she moved through an idea. These images, which she called “glifos,” were integral to her speaking presentation: “The images I place on overhead projectors ‘contain’ or ‘illustrate’ my ideas and theories.”11 No matter the format, Anzaldúa actively used drawings to bring the audience inside her thinking. Her use of these image–text combinations introduced her listeners to her process, since she began conceptualizing her theories through images.12

She filled her calendar with numerous speaking engagements because she saw them as vital community-building actions. Through incorporating drawings into her talks, she encouraged listeners to join her in cocreating their own understanding of her concepts alongside her. That is, the drawings spurred her listeners to action. This work is similar to her work of editorship as she mentored her audience in how to see and theorize on their own. Also like her editorship, her engagement in image making is something that evolved across the course of her career, as can be seen in her drawings from her early teaching and seminar notes in graduate school. Her image making is community-building mentorship in action, and it points to the collective nature of visual culture and the vital role it played in redefining the focus within feminist thought throughout the 1980s.13

A number of scholars have written about Anzaldúa’s training in the visual arts and recognized the importance of her drawings to her written work. However, her visual production has not yet been fully theorized as important in its own right and as a crucial method of community building. In her scholarship, Diana Bowen examines how Anzaldúa would draw at the outset of her writing and then translate these images into words, which explains why her text is so often filled with “vivid imagery.”14 Other scholars have recognized her actual visual output—Keating reproduced some of her transparencies in the vital Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (2009), and Suzanne Bost in a recent PMLA article discussed how doodles were part of Anzaldúa’s writing process.15 However, when these scholars explore the visuality of Anzaldúa’s work, they focus mostly on how she used the visual in service of her writing, often training their attention on how she first created her ideas through drawings. That is, they understand the visual as part of the drafting process, rather than as separate and significant work in its own right. By contrast, this chapter tracks how she created images throughout her career. In particular, it pays attention to how visuals operated at the opposite end of the writing process when she shared her ideas with an audience and how they served her larger project of network building. In her preface to the third edition of This Bridge, Anzaldúa acknowledges the pivotal role of images by centering visual language in her description of her work: “For positive social change to happen we need to envision a different reality, dream new blueprints for it, formulate new strategies for coping in it.”16 This sentiment expresses the need for multiple forms to achieve collective action, and her own work foregrounds how the visual plays a key role in facilitating social change at every stage of her thinking.

Just as the previous chapter showed how Bechdel’s visual work was shaped by grassroots networks, this chapter demonstrates how Anzaldúa shapes networks through her visual production. Inevitably, the relationship between the networks and the artwork is reciprocal. By examining it from both angles, however, it’s possible to see how this visual work is indebted to and linked to these networks. Anzaldúa’s embrace of many forms, including the visual, exists in a rich ecosystem of women of color deploying multiple tactics to welcome more voices to the table and to recognize experiences that heretofore had not been articulated in writing.

The network building that Anzaldúa developed in her visual work overlaps in important ways with how Anzaldúa and Moraga developed feminist communities as editors of This Bridge. The feminist community building they did as editors for the anthology is well documented, and that work fostered further support for women of color through projects associated with the volume. Meredith Benjamin has closely examined the important community development that occurred through written correspondence during the creation of This Bridge, as well as in the public performances that took place around the launch of the book. As she writes, “This Bridge Called My Back is not an isolated intervention confined to one publication but rather a product of movements and networks that would inspire further networks and movements.”17 Anzaldúa and Moraga did all of this work embedded in and alongside This Bridge because they saw the volume as a “revolutionary tool” and “catalyst” that would uplift women of color in the present and the future.18

Because the contributors themselves represented only a small percentage of the women invested in the project of the book, Anzaldúa capitalized on that interest by simultaneously developing the Third World Women Speakers List, gathering the names and credentials of women of color willing to serve as speakers on a number of issues. Anzaldúa worked on this project with Merlin Stone, a white woman who had encouraged Anzaldúa to move forward in creating This Bridge, and together they solicited names from colleagues and people in their networks that they could send to “Women’s Studies Departments at over 300 colleges and universities” in the United States.19 Correspondence in Anzaldúa’s archives includes numerous responses to and excitement about this list, which aimed to push universities to expand the pool of potential speakers invited to present at any given event. Its goal was to “confront the situation of all white or token Third World representation among speakers chosen for Women’s Conferences and individual speaking engagements for Women’s Studies Programs.”20 They hoped this list would counter racial tokenization and ensure that the same small group of women of color wouldn’t be called on repeatedly, and that, ultimately, a greater number of women of color of diverse perspectives would be more consistently asked to contribute to projects and events. Although the list was not published in This Bridge, it extended the anthology’s project by making visible an exponentially larger community of women of color.

As part of the anthology, however, Anzaldúa and Moraga did include another list they compiled—a bibliography of work by and about women of color—which they added as an appendix in This Bridge. This bibliography illuminated the rich critical and fictional writing that had preceded This Bridge and helped circulate awareness of that important work to additional readers who might not know about it.21 The list was broken out into categories that focused on racial groups represented in the anthology—“Afro-American,” “Asian/Pacific American,” “Latina,” and “Native American women”—and included at the end a list of more than thirty small presses that published this kind of work. Both the bibliography that Anzaldúa and Moraga assembled and the list of speakers that Anzaldúa and Stone compiled demonstrated the depth and breadth of the community of women of color involved in social justice, and both lists represent important examples of how Anzaldúa’s network building helped propel feminist discourse in new directions by connecting histories of women of color literary activism and providing the opportunity for new voices to contribute to scholarly discourse.22 Moreover, like the artists in the previous chapters, Anzaldúa and her collaborators mobilized their individual work as a platform in the service of making a larger community visible.

Anzaldúa’s visual praxis, which she developed alongside her better-known editorial and written work, illustrates how Anzaldúa—a key participant in the development of intersectional feminism—sought to welcome people to engage in the lineage of feminist organizing among women of color. As I explain in the chapter, Anzaldúa’s drawings were associated with and transformative of her classroom praxis and published writing. While the drawings she made in classroom notes synthesized specific course material, her drawings created on transparencies for public talks had extended use. She would save these transparencies and repurpose them in future talks across many years. This practice paralleled her writing where her theories would build explicitly on past ideas, so that even older ideas would remain open for discussion. These drawings thus kept her theories in circulation and also opened them up for continual renegotiation. Upon her untimely death in 2004, her personal papers, including her drawings, became part of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, where they are a highlight and focal point of the archives. I center her visual work as a core component of her life as a thinker and a method that she used to connect with her public, much as Bechdel cultivated a national presence through her savvy self-syndication of her comic. Whereas previous chapters have looked across multiple archives, this chapter demonstrates how Anzaldúa’s own archives and the images preserved therein are community-building endeavors, and how her collection exists within an ecosystem of similar collections from other women of color who often felt excluded from such official systems of history and memory.23

This Bridge Called My Archives

While Anzaldúa is a well-known literary figure, her image making is not widely recognized, likely due to the fact that she never published her visual works. However, Anzaldúa’s archived papers neatly demonstrate her long-standing engagement with visual expression, and visual materials that she created are present all across her files. As scholars Keating and Bost have noted, Anzaldúa’s archives contain a wealth of unpublished material and encourage us to reassess her legacy and her contributions to many critical conversations.24 While stored in the archives, her drawings can continue to formulate connections as an “archival genre,” a term that Kate Eichhorn develops to describe forms that mimic the sprawl of archives in “resist[ing] categorization” and thereby “offer a textual and social space where new genres can develop.”25 In this way, the archives not only make Anzaldúa’s images visible, but the images themselves remain actively open for new interpretation and meaning.

Consequently, similar to the way these archives allow us to see and engage Anzaldúa’s visual praxis, so do her images and their community-building work allow us to understand the function of archives anew. Her archives are the space where, ultimately, her many forms all sit together, and Keating has discussed how “she intentionally saved” “everything related to her writing process and career,” “document[ing] her life as she lived (or should I say wrote?) it.”26 Keating even goes so far as to call Anzaldúa an “archival author,” saying that her “papers represent her final, and most complex text.”27 For the purposes of this chapter, I am interested in how she saved her images, and also how these images and her process of building an archives as a whole are both processes deeply invested in cultivating community. Anzaldúa’s embrace of both image-making and archives-building practices allows us to understand her calls to action in a new light. She synthesized some of her advice to women of color in a preface to a 1991 interview: “I use the idea of outlawed knowledge to encourage Chicanas and other women and people of color to produce our own forms, to originate our own theories for how the world works. I think those who produce new conocimientos have to shift the frame of reference, reframe the issue or situation being looked at, connect the disparate parts of information in new ways or from a perspective that’s new.”28 In this quote, Anzaldúa emphasizes how important it is for “Chicanas and other women and people of color” to adopt new practices to articulate what’s been overlooked about their experiences. The evocation of “outlawed knowledge” underlines the stakes of this work, resonating with how Anzaldúa was not allowed to choose Chicano literature as an area of focus when she was pursuing a doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, which ultimately prompted her to leave the program and pursue a literary career in which she centered the voices of women of color, creating space and visibility for their work.29 Her image making was one of a multiplicity of forms that Anzaldúa engaged in order to “produce new conocimientos,” and it was the most public form she used to “reframe the issue or situation being looked at.” In her classroom notes from UT Austin, her drawings allowed her to connect to and find her way into community with the materials themselves. In her public talks, her images did that same work for her audience, “encourag[ing]” them to “originate [their] own theories for how the world works.” The connective quality of the images, themselves an archival genre that allows space “where new genres can develop,” outlines the work of her archives as well and how she consciously built her collection as a space that contained these sets of “outlawed knowledge” and the tools to facilitate further community development.30

In this sense, archives can operate as bridges, to evoke the term that Anzaldúa used in the titles of two of her anthologies and also theorized in her writings as one way that women of color can make their experiences known to a larger community. Anzaldúa acted as a bridge in her own career, and her work continues to operate as a bridge, as she describes: “Being a bridge means being mediator between yourself and your community and white people, lesbians, feminists, white men.”31 In enacting this mediation, the archives and the materials therein function as bridges by speaking through their hybrid forms to encompass the experiences of women of color. In her foreword to the third edition of This Bridge Called My Back, Anzaldúa calls for women of color to do this bridging because “we do not inhabit un mundo but many, and we need to allow these other worlds and people to join in the feminist-of-color dialogue. . . . We must become nepantleras and build bridges between all these worlds as we traffic back and forth between them, detribalizing and retribalizing in different and various communities.”32 At the same time that Anzaldúa articulates how women of color are well positioned to act as bridges and form “communities” that uplift and center “feminist-of-color dialogue,” she acknowledges that bridging can be difficult, thankless, and even painful work. Because Anzaldúa did her bridging through written and visual work, her work holds traces of that bridging and can continue to facilitate community.

Throughout her career, Anzaldúa carefully saved both her own manuscripts and also documents pertaining to her community-building practices, like her drawings, that she used for developing her lectures and writing and for explaining her ideas to others during presentations. She also preserved primary documents from the larger movements of women of color engaged in social justice. Considering how archives can function as bridges uncovers how individual archives can be collective endeavors, both in containing the work of other people and in containing forms that are collective in their composition. In this way, personal archives by women of color can effect this bridging; by acting as an “archival genre”—in Eichhorn’s definition—Anzaldúa’s images are able to facilitate the creation of “new genres” in the minds and hearts of her audience.

Recent scholarship focusing on the recovery of marginalized histories has underlined how grassroots archives provide critical mechanisms for preserving and making accessible works of marginalized populations whose histories would not be saved otherwise.33 Indeed, this whole book relies upon the vital work of these spaces. Women of color incorporated the spirit of collectivity that we celebrate in grassroots archives within their own personal collections, and by doing so, built archives as bridges to preserve the social movements in which they were engaged. They did so because, as María Cotera documents in her scholarship on the creation of the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Project and Archive, women of color couldn’t trust that their materials would be saved otherwise.34

In addition to constructing bridges when creating her own archives, Anzaldúa’s archives also exist in a rich ecosystem of individual collections by other women of color. The Chicana por mi Raza project provides a useful illustration of this point, particularly in relation to Chicana activists and artists. The Chicana por mi Raza digital archives is a project aimed at documenting Chicana history and activism from the 1960s to the 1980s. Cotera, who has been working on the archives since 2009, has built this collection along with a number of collaborators by going into the homes of over eighty women involved in activism and interviewing them about their lives and digitizing materials from their personal collections. Though their materials become part of the digital project, their individual collections remain intact in their homes.35 Cotera has produced a number of articles about the importance of this project, including one that recently appeared in Chicana Movidas (2018), a collection she coedited with Maylei Blackwell and Dionne Espinoza, which strives to recuperate the work of Chicana activists across the last several decades.36 Many of the essays therein are indebted to the work of the Chicana por mi Raza digital archives, and the editors begin their introduction by discussing how “Anzaldúa’s attentiveness to the minor and the provisional, to the small acts of rebeldía that reshape movement discourses from the inside out,” frames their approach to minor histories in the volume.37

Cotera’s own essay in the volume thinks through the collecting processes of the women she has worked with on the project, beginning with her own mother, Martha P. Cotera, a well-known activist in the 1960s and 1970s who penned the influential Diosa y Hembra: The History and Heritage of Chicanas in the U.S. (1976) and The Chicana Feminist (1977), both of which appear in This Bridge’s bibliography. She begins by describing the physical space of her mother’s library and how it is filled with decades of movement materials in various formats that intermix with her own writings. She asserts that this kind of dedicated space for a collection is typical of the women she has worked with for Chicana por mi Raza and then goes on to theorize about the role of these collections in the women’s lives and living spaces:

More than simply archives, these collections suggest modes of critical documentation and memory that bridge multiple polarities. Constituted through both practice and theory, they are intensely personal but also invested in collective transformation. While they carefully document the past, they are also deeply engaged with the present and even the future. And while they represent the traces of a particular intellectual and political development, they are also an active and disruptive space of collective remembrance and identity formation. If my years of labor in the libraries, offices, and garages of Chicana feminists have taught me anything, it is that these practices of collecting and remembrance are a central feature of Chicana feminist thought, and yet they remain largely unexplored in the historiography of the social movement era.38

By highlighting the way collections become “bridge[s]” through the women’s actions, Cotera outlines the “collective” nature of these personal collections, and how the women critically document their work within a larger movement. Even though the bulk of the materials that the women hold in these spaces are often decades old, Cotera posits that such collections are “active and disruptive space[s]” that “are also deeply engaged with the present and even the future.” The movements for social justice that these women were involved in continue to be relevant today. Moreover, there is a power inherent in such spaces that Cotera and her collaborators feel as they process each woman’s materials,39 and which the women themselves access through building, preserving, and actively sitting with their collections.

Such personal collections sustain the women who keep them active in their dwellings, as both scholars and activists involved in these kinds of collections have noted. For example, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, who curated artwork for inclusion in the third edition of This Bridge (2001), wrote about this subject in her essay published in that edition: “Although some of us read the books written by women of color in rooms covered with images produced by women of color, our words and images, have been distanced from each other conceptually and historically.”40 Herrera Rodríguez’s words indicate the need for collaborative archival projects associated with women of color activism that bridge the “distance” and bring the “words and images” back together—projects such as This Bridge. She also acknowledges that such spaces, like archives, that bring these materials together—though rare—are vital to making movement history legible, since they reveal the connective bridges between activists and artworks that may not be visible outside these “rooms.” As Herrera Rodríguez notes of the artworks that she chose to include in the third edition of This Bridge, “the majority of these images cannot be found in art history books, they are absent from the classroom, library, and museum.”41 Similarly, Cotera sees her Chicana por mi Raza project as important given “the relative invisibility of Chicanas in institutional archives.”42 As Cotera notes, the archives needs to be reimagined “not as a static repository but as an active site of knowledge production,” further underlining how archives can serve as bridges wherein the collected materials remain active.43

Anzaldúa’s archives—and her images in particular—depict how collected materials can remain active and act as bridges that will continually facilitate community. Today, as noted above, Anzaldúa’s archives are part of an institutional archives at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. These archives, as a whole, document her commitment to collectivity. Her collaboration with an expansive community of individuals—and how she was influenced by these associations—is evident across her archives in her twenty-six boxes of correspondence, nine boxes of audio recordings of others’ talks and tarot readings, and fifty-plus boxes of clippings that make evident the many fields and women of color who touched her work. Together, these elements focusing on her collaborations and collective work outnumber the seventy-three boxes devoted to Anzaldúa’s own notably voluminous output of writings and published texts, which underscores the centrality and importance of community to her work. Moreover, as mentioned above, most of her writing projects were collaborative endeavors, and she built additional collective projects into their frameworks, as her archives bear out.

Further, Anzaldúa’s drawings illustrate another kind of collectivity in the archives, as they indicate moments where her ideas engaged external publics more directly than in her written texts. Images exist all across Anzaldúa’s papers as they are archived as part of the Benson Collection. There are also parts of the collection where images congregate, like the transparencies, which provide another map into Anzaldúa’s intellectual work as a whole. Over one hundred transparencies are archived across seven folders. Most of these are not linked to any particular event, and video recordings of her talks saved in her archives indicate that she would reuse and rework these transparencies at will, shuffling them into new orders depending on the talk given. Her repeated repurposing of images echoes her visual style based on repetitions of imagery and line, and these modes parallel her connection to her material and to the community hailed by the work. Unlike other materials in her archives, the collective nature of the images is not always immediately apparent.

But tracing the way Anzaldúa evolved her use of images across her career—particularly the way she moved them from private use in early classroom notes to their public use in her talks—helps reveal how these images played a crucial role in her community-building work. In her early classroom notes, she was not only fine-tuning her visual style, but also formulating how images could embody complex concepts and prefiguring her later textual and visual theorizing. One particularly useful example of this is the way she visualizes her concept of mestiza identity. This conceptualization, which she articulated in “La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness” (the final prose chapter of Borderlands / La Frontera), is one of the theories that she is most known for, and the chapter itself “remains to this day her most anthologized and most widely read piece.”44 As Keating succinctly puts it, “For Anzaldúa, ‘new mestizas’ are people who inhabit multiple worlds because of their gender, sexuality, color, class, body, personality, spiritual beliefs, and/or other life experiences.”45 Because Anzaldúa uses this idea in her writing to describe her own and others’ experiences, we can trace how she wielded this concept to connect people together and build coalition, particularly through her visual work.46

Prefiguring the Mestiza in Anzaldúa’s Early Classroom Notes

In 1974, Anzaldúa set herself on her career path when she began her doctoral studies in comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Even though this decision meant she set aside prior training as a visual artist to prioritize her writing,47 that visual way of thinking stuck with her—as Bowen says of her writing process, “One strategy [Anzaldúa] uses is not to think, but to draw. After the work has been created, she analyzes the image and applies terms to these experiences. If the terms do not exist in theoretical language, she adopts new words to help explain these experiences.”48 Her course notes from graduate school encapsulate how images often served as starting or pivot points as she drew images to build bridges from other thinkers to her ideas and to position her perspectives in relationship to theirs.

We see this visual work particularly in notes for two courses she taught and took in the 1976–77 academic year: “La Mujer Chicana,” a course she taught in the Fall 1976 semester, and “Gay Fiction: East and West,” a graduate seminar she took with Roy E. Teele in the Spring 1977 semester. Though visual moments do occupy the marginalia of notes for other courses, they are not as prolific as in these two instances, where the course material so formatively speaks to issues that will later become the core of Anzaldúa’s theorizing. In various interviews over the years, Anzaldúa identified both of these courses as foundational to her development as a thinker: “I was . . . teaching . . . the Mujer Chicana course, and taking some courses. One of which was Homosexuality East and West, and there is where I started including a wide variety of cultures. I started trying to find other women besides Chicanas who were interested in social justice for women and who were articulating points of view that were missing from the movement at the time.”49 In analyzing the visual production from both of these courses, I focus on how Anzaldúa juxtaposes course content with drawings of women. Her drawings of the female form, including explicitly Chicana women, prefigure her later theorizations of mestiza consciousness. These private drawings help her find the space in discourse that she will soon fill with her words inspired by such drawings. These formative early drawings set the stage for her later writing and stylistically echo her public visual praxis connected to that work.

As much as “La Mujer Chicana” and “Gay Fiction: East and West” courses were foundational for Anzaldúa and her later work, long-simmering tensions over her proposed course of study would prompt her to leave the program in the summer of 1977, having just completed these courses and all the requirements aside from her dissertation.50 She wrote about this experience in Borderlands when she outlined her repeated attempts to incorporate Chicano literature into her research and teaching: “In graduate school, while working toward a Ph.D., I had to ‘argue’ with one advisor after the other, semester after semester, before I was allowed to make Chicano literature an area of focus.”51 In various interviews, she was even more candid about the multifaceted nature of the discrimination she faced: “I wanted to make feminism and women’s studies [a] focus for the studies and for my dissertation. I was told no, I could not do that because it wasn’t a legitimate area of study. At the same time, I wanted Chicano literature to be my focus, and I got the same thing, that it wasn’t a legitimate literature. The third focus was Spanish literature and they okayed that.”52 In both of these anecdotes, Anzaldúa articulates how these continuing refusals took a toll through invalidating both her course of study as well as her own experiences.

While the two courses represented an outlet where Anzaldúa could examine some of these dismissed literatures and identities, they remained fraught, limited in their immediate impact since she was unable to further pursue these lines of inquiry in her dissertation research to complete her degree at the institution. In fact, UT Austin eventually removed “La Mujer Chicana” from the curriculum, an unrelated decision that further reinforced the unwelcome environment.53 Still, looking back at these two courses and the visual work that Anzaldúa creates in them demonstrates their importance to her developing line of written thought and visual theorizing.

When Anzaldúa taught “La Mujer Chicana” in 1976, it linked her to other Chicana scholars and activists and deepened her understanding of her own work and identity. She was not the first person to teach the course, having taken it in a prior semester from Inés Hernández-Tovar (now Hernández-Ávila), a fellow scholar completing her PhD at the University of Houston, who served as a “mentor but also [a] colleague because we were helping each other.”54 In her iteration of the course, Anzaldúa brought in guest speakers from the feminist community, including Martha Cotera, and revised the syllabus to include homosexuality as a topic, facilitating the study of Chicana lesbians like herself.55 Anzaldúa has called teaching this class “a turning point, because it connected [her] to [her] culture and to being queer, to the writing, and to the feminism.”56

Her lecture notes that she kept and that are now preserved in the archives reflect this sense of purpose. Drawings are prominent throughout her notes, trading off with blocks of text in their placement across the center of the page. That is, these images are not marginal afterthoughts, but share space and pair with the text in communicating course content. Some of these sketches operate as visual schemata to explain individual concepts and could be replicated by Anzaldúa on a classroom chalkboard. Other, more detailed drawings synthesize course material and convey in their expressive renderings the subject matter’s stakes.

In one of these images from her September 16, 1976, class session early in the semester, Anzaldúa anticipates mestiza consciousness in her drawing of a Chicana woman that occupies over half of the page (Figure 4.1).57 This simply sketched woman tilts her head upward, her eyes shut tight as her open mouth expresses an emotional response, echoed by the gesture of her hands clasped to her heart. This drawing, which Anzaldúa captions, “Xicana Grito after Munch’s ‘The Scream’ 9-16-1976,” acts as a visual culmination of the sentiments that she’s written in textual notes above the screaming figure. All of these notes, text and image alike, are done in neon pink pen, adding another layer of intensity, especially given that her notes for this class and others were most often in blue or black ink. Within a block of notes titled “Regeneración,” Anzaldúa writes, “Woman has to liberate herself can’t blame outside force anymore. Can’t be secure, play passive role anymore.” Both of these fragmentary statements end with the temporal marker “anymore,” implying a coming change that’s long overdue, underlined by the repetition of “anymore.” At the boiling point of “anymore,” the only possible response is a big one, letting loose a visceral scream that’s been building inside. The sheer size of the drawing, which abuts and eclipses the text, makes this point especially well.

The deliberate caption adds another layer of meaning to the drawing, particularly given that she doesn’t often caption her drawings. Her title suggests a way to read the image, as inspired by and paying homage to Edvard Munch’s iconic and ceaselessly parodied painting The Scream (1893). Like Munch’s painting, this woman is stylistically simple yet terrifically expressive, but she departs from Munch’s figure in her posture, with hands clasped to the breast rather than to the sides of one’s face, suggesting that the pain expressed emanates from the core of one’s being. In identifying her drawing as a Chicana woman, Anzaldúa particularizes her, insisting on the importance of her individual experience through linking her to this universally known piece of art.

Moreover, the fact that Anzaldúa dated her drawing identifies it as a moment of catharsis happening right then on the page and in the classroom. The course provided the space for this emotional release. We can imagine how for Anzaldúa, in addition to the general conditions that provoked this outcry, her own experiences and frustrations with her doctoral program animated this Xicana. While she and her students could spend this semester studying Chicana experiences together, she was not allowed to pursue this line of research further at the university. The fact that she was compelled to make this drawing, and to preserve it in her notes, points to the way her drawings took on an important role in the development of her thought, and how visual work like this, which is strongly represented in her archives, would continue to underpin the theoretical explorations in her research and community development work for years to come. Just as the drawing refuses to remain silent and yells out from the space of the page about her life as a Chicana woman, so, too, would Anzaldúa carve out the space for herself and other women of color to relate their experiences in This Bridge and later theorize mestiza consciousness in Borderlands / La Frontera, her landmark monograph.

Another important early example of the way Anzaldúa used visual material as a central tool for expanding her ideas that would lead to future groundbreaking collaborative work are the drawings she created as she worked through the “Gay Fiction: East and West” graduate seminar. She had begun reading about lesbianism prior to graduate school in the writings of white feminists, but this course allowed her to expand the scope of this study and importantly build on the research she had done the semester prior in examining homosexuality in her “La Mujer Chicana” course with her students.58 During this class she made a number of drawings in her notes, but many of her drawings respond to the course material less directly. Like her drawings in her lecture notes for “La Mujer Chicana,” they remain central on the page, proving that they are not marginal embellishments but occupy the same plane as the course content. Many of these images are geometric and non-figural with a heavy use of spirals and parallel, radiating lines. These detailed images make clear that Anzaldúa spent a lot of time with each drawing, embedding her reaction to the course content in the time that she took to render each image during the seminar alongside the textual notes she took. When her drawings do take bodily form, they’re overwhelmingly women, such that she’s simultaneously investigating herself and the object of her desire in this context. Though she does not mark these drawings explicitly as Chicana, her aesthetic approach echoes that of “La Mujer Chicana” drawings and foreshadows how she will represent the bodily entanglements of mestiza identity in her future drawings for a public audience.

During that semester, for example, Anzaldúa made a drawing on a page of her class notes that would forecast the bodily actions and engagements she will later theorize as part of mestiza consciousness. On this page of notes from late February 1977, her drawing takes up nearly the whole page, aside from a single line of notes: “Movement statement:—Last wk. March Morgan—Rich” (Figure 4.2).59 What we see here instead of a movement statement is a movement image: a mostly full-length, fantastical female figure, rendered in Anzaldúa’s expressive streamlined hand. Three upward-tilted lines convey the expression of the face as a closed-eye smile. This simply rendered visage is accompanied by a bodily outline drawn in an almost unbroken line, with breasts and vulva marked out on the nude form. This woman, with radiating, halo-connoting lines for hair, takes action, dropping stars into a pail on a table with her right hand while her left hand is raised in blissful solidarity. This latter gesture evokes the feminist fist, which was emblazoned on the cover of Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), Robin Morgan’s feminist anthology, and is often associated with this earlier moment of women’s liberation. Adrienne Rich, a celebrated poet, also represented the then-present of the feminist movement as she began to produce and publish explicitly feminist work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including in pieces reprinted in the 1979 On Lies, Secrets, and Silence collection of essays.60 Thus “Morgan—Rich” identifies an era of feminist organizing through the work of two white women, disregarding the vital work of many women of color in the same period.

This enigmatic woman responds by engaging in transcendent, mystical action. She takes up most of the page to make visible her body and her new action. This embodied response anticipates how Anzaldúa will later delineate in text and image that mestizas negotiate their positioning in multiple cultures through their bodies. Moreover, the spiritual feeling of the drawing underlines how Anzaldúa embraced mysticism as a vital facet of mestiza consciousness that played a role in social justice activism.61 In drawing this movement image that juxtaposes with the white 1970s feminism that Anzaldúa engages in this course, she visualizes a new path forward that she will soon manifest with her efforts to amplify the voices of women of color in feminist discourses across the 1980s.

A few weeks later, in early March, Anzaldúa turned her attention to visualizing the psyche, another important component to her later theorizing of mestiza consciousness. In a sketch for a class session focused on consciousness, mental labor, and ideology, Anzaldúa focuses in on women’s consciousness and visually interprets the subject matter by drawing a woman’s head staked on top of a box and surrounded by parallel, swirling, geometric lines (Figure 4.3).62 This closed-eye woman’s head is a sparsely brutal figure, even in the absence of any accompanying gore. The multiplicity of lines surrounding this form do not simply radiate out from her but take on and embed spirals and other shapes. All these lines and the amount of space the resulting drawing occupies on the page emphasize the importance and the long reach of the psyche and anticipate later mestiza drawings by Anzaldúa where she overemphasizes the size of the head to show how many cultural positions and identities fill the mestiza’s thoughts and form. Again, as with her other drawing for this course, the text surrounding this composition is minimal, suggesting that much of the session’s content captured on this page has been encoded in this image. These radiating lines make visible how much is carried along with the psyche that remains invisible in real space.

These early experiences at the University of Texas at Austin set the stage for Anzaldúa’s career, as the roadblocks she encountered there reshaped her work and career trajectory. After her departure from UT Austin in the summer of 1977, Anzaldúa pursued the kind of critical work that she was not allowed to research in her studies, including creating space for more women of color to write about their experiences. Following a writing workshop in February 1979 in which she was the only woman of color, Anzaldúa decided to put together a collection of new writings by women of color and invited Cherríe Moraga to collaborate with her. They sent out the initial call for what would become This Bridge in late April 1979. As alluded to above, the immediate success of This Bridge upon its publication in 1981 laid the foundation for Anzaldúa’s future work, including her monograph Borderlands / La Frontera, which was also widely celebrated upon its release in 1987 and remains a critical touchstone she would return to as she continued to develop her theories over the course of her career. It is important to underline here how she intentionally completed this work outside the academic structures that had spurned her along with this subject matter. It would not be until after these two publications and a full decade following her departure from UT Austin that she would resume graduate studies at another institution, when she began study in the literature program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1988.

Still, we can see in her evolving visual praxis how these early courses where she did encounter support shaped her career. She began to develop her theories in relationship to the writing of others in these classes and to sketch out visualizations for theories she would later articulate in her own writing. She was able to start to visualize who the mestiza was, what her experiences were, and how she related to the world around her. In both style and substance, these early drawings anticipate her later drawings that she used in public talks to visualize her own concepts. As much as her early drawings allowed her the space to be in conversation with other thinkers, her later drawings facilitate that relationship for her audience.

In a way, her drawing practice embodies her idea of la facultad that she outlined in Borderlands / La Frontera: “La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. It is an instant ‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide. The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world.”63 As a whole, this definition echoes how her drawings respond to and synthesize course content to pierce through “surface phenomena” and grasp at larger questions. As Anzaldúa delineates, la facultad can manifest in many ways, but her early drawings epitomize how one of the ways “that [it] communicates [is] in images and symbols.” A couple of paragraphs later, Anzaldúa posits that la facultad is “a kind of survival tactic that people, caught between the worlds, unknowingly cultivate,” which marks this ability as one that mestizas wield to navigate the world and a tactic that can then be used to understand their experience.64 These drawings and others provide Anzaldúa access to this “deeper” knowledge and ultimately act as a starting point for her own theorizations, as Bowen notes in her description of Anzaldúa’s writing process that begins this section.

Due to this deep and integral relationship to images as an access point to la facultad, it makes sense that Anzaldúa would employ drawings to communicate her own ideas to public audiences and encourage them to develop their own relationship to la facultad and their own internal visualizations. In the following section, I discuss how Anzaldúa used a wealth of drawings in public talks to visualize the different components of mestiza consciousness for her audience, linking her drawings back to her textual theorizations in Borderlands / La Frontera. In this way, these undated drawings also reveal how she continued to evolve ideas about mestiza identity and develop related concepts across the course of her career.

Making the Mestiza Transparencies for Public Talks

The previous chapters of this book showed the crucial ways that women artists produced visual material within grassroots communities that anticipated and shaped the future direction of feminist discourse in the final decades of the twentieth century. Anzaldúa’s use of visual materials in her public talks provide another important example of this, as they were part of her career-long commitment to build new networks and forms for women of color, the impact of which has been acknowledged in the proliferation of scholarship assessing Anzaldúa’s theoretical importance to feminist theory and other discourses. The archives make plain Anzaldúa’s commitment through the documentation of her frequent public speaking, which shows up all over her papers. She kept extensive documentation and notes relating to her “gigs,” as she called them, including a number of video recordings of some of her talks. Most valuable, perhaps, is that she kept the drawings that she did for her talks from the mid-1990s forward. More than anything written, these drawings provided the backbone for her speaking engagements. These works, created with multicolored dry-erase markers on transparencies, could be erased by a mere spritz of cleaning solution. The preservation of such ephemeral materials is made even more striking by the fact that Anzaldúa created and kept over one hundred of these drawings, which are stacked, one on top of the other, across seven folders in her archives. With every folder you open, you peer through an entire stack of drawings, gazing through coalesced constellations of concepts. The drawings show how she evolved her foundational and famous ideas, like mestiza consciousness, from their early articulations to connect with new ideas that she developed in the following decades. Her meticulous documentation demonstrates how central her talks were to her career—providing both financial and intellectual support for Anzaldúa, who developed her thinking in, with, and through dialogue with public audiences.

A photo of Anzaldúa in front of a chalkboard filled with her drawings depicts how she would use a profusion of images to illustrate her concepts (Figure 4.4).65 Through a series of juxtaposed, diagrammatic images, we can see Anzaldúa depicting various types of struggles that people of color endure. Behind Anzaldúa on the board, we see shapes contrasting the roles of subject and object, people of color enclosed within the white frame of reference that contains mis/disinformation, and an outline of a body laid out and bisected, as if for study. This photograph, which is filed amid Anzaldúa’s correspondence with the reputed lesbian feminist journal Sinister Wisdom, was published in Sinister Wisdom #56 (1995) in an issue focused on language. Lesbian photographer Cathy Cade, who took the photo, composed a caption and paragraph to appear with the photograph in print. Her caption identifies the presentation as one that Anzaldúa gave about Borderlands / La Frontera at the Montréal Feminist Book Fair in 1988. Cade’s paragraph under the caption reflects on the power of Anzaldúa’s multimodal way of presenting: “Writers who read their work aloud know the issue of translating the written word into the spoken word. To get a book of photographs published, I must translate the photographs into words so word-people feel comfortable. Imagine my great pleasure experiencing Gloria Anzaldúa presenting her book Borderlands—in which the issue of multiple languages is central—by talking, reading and drawing about the concepts in her book. With great energy, Gloria treated the audience to spoken words, printed page, and images as a continuous revelation.”66 Cade’s reflection on how Anzaldúa presented her work through both verbal and visual language connects this practice to her own as a photographer who created books like A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists (1987) where text appeared alongside photos and provided an overarching narrative frame for the images. Cade sees this multipronged approach as echoing the hybrid nature of Borderlands / La Frontera itself and describes this experience delivered “with great energy” by Anzaldúa “as a continuous revelation,” underlining this dynamic presentation as an active transmission from Anzaldúa to the audience.

As much as these images speak to concerns present in Borderlands / La Frontera, they more directly illustrate the ideas in an essay Anzaldúa published in Sinister Wisdom #33 (1987) around the same time the photo was taken, which was later reprinted in her anthology Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras.67 In the middle of the piece, in a section titled “Breaking Out of the Frame,” Anzaldúa observes, “Even those of us who don’t want to buy in get sucked into the vortex of the dominant culture’s fixed oppositions, the duality of superiority and inferiority, of subject and object. Some of us, to get out of the internalized neocolonial phase, make for the fringes, the Borderlands. And though we have not broken out of the white frame, we at least see it for what it is.”68 In this passage, Anzaldúa describes how the binary values of white, “dominant culture” have a negative impact on people of color, who struggle not to “internalize” these false and “fixed oppositions.” The labels on her chalkboard drawings echo the language of the passage in visualizing the split between “subject and object” and how the “white frame” traps people of color. The drawings also go even further to visualize the impact of these pressures through her image of the bisected body, which is divided horizontally into many slices by perpendicular hash marks and torn open by arrows on either side of the chest cavity, as if to extract the heart. This body initially appears fixed in one place by the pervasive Lilliputian microaggressions of white culture. In the passage, Anzaldúa describes how “some of us” can escape and “make for the fringes, the Borderlands,” and she visualized that action on the chalkboard by the lines radiating out from both the body and the nearby white frame of reference. Putting this photograph back into conversation with her published writing shows how her method of filling the board with many conceptual drawings, which she annotates as she talks, allows her to connect various ideas together.

She would continue to use this same presentation method and drawing style throughout her career, though her presentation tools shifted, as shown by the video recordings of her talks and as corroborated by Anzaldúa in various interviews.69 Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Anzaldúa presented her work with chalkboard drawings. Then, in the mid-1990s, she switched to using a projector to show her drawings on transparencies. In a video recording from the year before her death, she was still using the transparency drawings, but they had been digitized into PowerPoint slides. Across all these presentation formats, Anzaldúa moved through many drawings in the course of a talk. When discussing the use of these images during her talks, Anzaldúa would tell the audience that the visuals’ purpose was to help audiences remember the ideas afterward. In an interview from the early 1990s where Anzaldúa speaks about how she connects with and teaches others through her work, she posits, “My role is that of teacher, healer, translator, mediator. That’s my job as a writer. People look to me for images, for ideas. They take these ideas, think about and expand on them. They think of me as a model.”70 Key here is how she equates “images” and “ideas” as what others “look to” her for. In her talks, not only does she herself serve “as a model,” but the images themselves also play this role. Their streamlined simplicity made her ideas accessible to her audience, so that these ideas could be transported into their lives. In this way, Anzaldúa’s adoption of the visual register echoes that of the other artists in this book, who worked to synthesize complex concepts and make them broadly accessible through visual frameworks.

Her drawings of mestiza identity work as models on multiple registers. The mestiza, a person who occupies multiple identity (race, class, etc.) categories, inhabits these many positions, and this multiplicity becomes the focus of Anzaldúa’s renderings as she speaks to her own experience and awakens the audience to their own hybrid identities. Roughly a dozen of her transparencies reference mestiza identity and related concepts, and she would sometimes use multiple of these mestiza transparencies in a single talk to further underline the many ways this multiplicity manifested. In my analysis, I include groupings of multiple images to echo how Anzaldúa drew on many images in her talks, and I title each of these images according to prominent words present on the transparency. Patterns of representing mestiza identity emerge through these groupings, and it becomes clear how Anzaldúa connects this concept to other ideas in her larger network of thought.

One of these drawings, which Anzaldúa explicitly references as a “model,” works particularly well in introducing both the concept of mestiza identity and also her process of welcoming the audience into her thinking (Figure 4.5).71 With a bit of humility, Anzaldúa writes to the left of her drawing of the mestiza, “Model—just a representation of how I see reality, a reduction of the real. My fantasy.” This piece of metacommentary, which would be the first thing viewers would read if they scanned the image from left to right and from top to bottom, facilitates audience participation. By emphasizing the autobiographical specificity of this image and how it only speaks for “how [she] see[s] reality,” Anzaldúa encourages folks to reflect on their own experience while thinking with this “model.” Her drawing distills the core elements of mestiza experience, but it isn’t meant to be understood as the definitive diagram. Instead, it opens up the visual field to other representations of the hybrid mestiza experience—other people’s “fantas[ies].” This text, in maintaining that this is only how Anzaldúa sees, asks her audience how they see and how they might theorize visually. Through her images, text, and presentation, Anzaldúa creates a relationship with her audience that prizes their potential contributions, embodying what feminist rhetoricians call “invitational rhetoric.”72

Her declaration of this image as only one way of seeing explains why Anzaldúa redraws the mestiza in so many transparencies and why she keeps all these iterations: they open up new ways of seeing this hybrid figure. It takes an accumulation of two-dimensional drawings to embody this concept fully and make it three-dimensional for her audience. At the beginning of her Borderlands chapter on mestiza consciousness, Anzaldúa encapsulates many of the facets of mestiza identity in a short, eight-line poem that she expands on across the course of the chapter.73 She identifies the mestiza by her perpetual motion through “cultures,” articulating that experience as both a physical reality and an internal struggle. In the first half of the poem, she describes the mestiza as both walking through and standing in “all cultures at the same time.” In the second half, she turns to the mestiza’s psyche, depicting how her soul straddles multiple worlds and how she feels disoriented by “todas las voces” talking in her head “simultáneamente.” The visual language with which Anzaldúa theorizes in her written texts lends itself to these transparencies, which combine images and words together.74 This particular drawing of the mestiza exemplifies that movement by giving the model six legs with which to navigate these multiple cultures. These multiple legs certainly represent the mestiza in motion, but they also gesture to her mental disorientation through their sheer numerical impossibility. In the other text surrounding her, Anzaldúa details the daily “adjust[ments]” and “shift[s]” that the mestiza has to negotiate because of this positioning “in all cultures.” These words act as a postscript to the poem where, in a catalog under the drawing, Anzaldúa prioritizes the positive results that can come through embracing this identity. These positive attributes are ones that Anzaldúa further explores across her chapter in Borderlands, as well as throughout her career in the concepts of “nepantlera” and “nos/otras” that she names and associates with the mestiza on this transparency.

Mestiza models in other transparencies visually echo this one by also showing the figure enmeshed in many cultures underfoot (Figure 4.6).75 In each rendering, Anzaldúa represents the additional sets of enmeshed feet in distinct ways, each of which emphasizes different effects of being positioned in multiple cultures. First, multiple feet of different lengths embedded in overlapping and multicolored shapes create visual chaos, depicting how the mestiza “disrupts neat categories,” as Anzaldúa annotates to the right of the composition. By contrast, the body in the next image is orderly, with two feet firmly planted in one space labeled “artista” while other puzzle piece–like shapes fit together around her form, identified in annotations as the “interlocking communities” where she can act as an “activista.” Labeled drawings to the right of the mestiza further reflect on the “imagin[ed]” and “[real]” possibilities for how such “communities” will provide support. The mestiza in the third image is the most visually similar to Figure 4.5 with the same green circles for eyes and a profusion of legs growing out of her form, like roots from a tree trunk. Across Borderlands, Anzaldúa discusses rootedness in different cultural positions as embodied phenomena, celebrating “where she can plumb the rich ancestral roots” while critiquing where “we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.”76 In this representation, Anzaldúa labels the cultural positions that occupy the spaces closing around her feet in different colors: “present class,” “class of origin,” “Jew,” “white ethnicities,” “queer,” “home/ethnic community,” “academy,” “of color,” “professional community.”77 These are the rooted and uprooting influences that she must navigate as she moves through space. Labeling them more directly demonstrates the complexities inherent in how a mestiza moves through her daily life while negotiating multiple identities. Anzaldúa fills in some of the spaces in solid red, suggesting the taxing energy required by moving through certain identities while broadly gesturing to the unique demands of being situated in any particular identity.

Looking at these three transparencies together with the first gives a sense of Anzaldúa’s overall stylistic approach and reveals how small differences in the figure and its framing can emphasize different facets of mestiza identity and the connection of this concept to others. These drawings show how her visual theoretical style developed from her graduate school notes. Unlike those earlier drawings, these are composed with multiple colors and integrate words as part of the drawings. She has also streamlined her drawing of human forms, reducing them to outlines and stick figures. She specifies their identities further by the words that surround them. By simplifying the human forms, she can focus attention on modeling particular aspects of mestiza identity, which we see in these four transparencies through her attention to enmeshed feet. Her deployment of drawings to convey complex theories with striking simplicity underscores the capacity of visual artwork to communicate concisely, suggesting why she and the other artists in this book embodied their core ideas about identity in a visual format that their audiences could take in and viscerally feel as they identified with the body on the page. Whereas earlier artists like Marrs, Gregory, and Bechdel particularized their characters in order to make lesbian and bisexual women visible, Anzaldúa creates her mestizas in a nondescript manner in order to welcome all in to identify accordingly.

As Anzaldúa’s opening poem in Borderlands details, the mestiza navigates multiple cultures both externally as well as internally in her daily life, and this duality also shows up in her transparencies. In these transparencies (Figure 4.7), Anzaldúa continues to show how the mestiza is standing in many multicolored cultural positions, but that multiplicity is also shown in the proliferation of shapes that occupy the headspace.78 First, the head is replaced by an interlocking series of six circles, like a knockoff Olympics logo. As she did in labeling the positions underfoot with the third image of Figure 4.6, so does Anzaldúa label the mental positions crowding the mestiza’s headspace in the second image of Figure 4.7. This psychological rendering illustrates how all these identities put pressure on personal identity—the “I, mi, yo” nestled near center—and epitomize Anzaldúa’s textual representation of this state of affairs in Borderlands / La Frontera: “In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. She has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries.”79 In this drawn depiction, Anzaldúa makes use of ovals in order to demonstrate the mestiza’s permeable boundaries. There’s a generous oval inscribed for the head, but the labeled identities do not end there; additional identities “[swamp these] psychological borders.” A second, larger circle labeled “white frame of reference” encompasses this figure, compressing all of these separate identities and creating strain as the mestiza is forced to take up and embody all these conflicting perspectives. This spatial coalescence in one representative mestiza drawing communicates not only this impossible, hyper-embodied strain, but also the affinities among the marginalized subjectivities named here. In Borderlands, Anzaldúa puts these identities together in a catalog where she weighs the psychological implications: “The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”80 With this list, Anzaldúa expresses the possibilities of coalition among these identities marginalized by race or class, uniting them under the banner of “our psyches” and a shared “struggle” that begins in the crowded “inner” space. She insists on the close relationship between “inner” and “outer” by exploring the dynamics between these spaces in each of the three following sentences. The inner psyche reflects outward and can make “changes,” but slowly. In her transparency, the “white frame of reference” represents this stumbling block to change, constraining possibilities. Her annotation of the space between the figure and this outline—“dominant culture monoculture”—shows how this white frame completely overwhelms her. Just like the small red “fish in [the] white sea” next to her, she is completely awash in white culture.

Anzaldúa fits nearly thirty written identities in and around the bounds of the mental headspace, tripling the number of identities from her written list in Borderlands / La Frontera. In addition to naming racial and ethnic subject positions in her transparency—“Chicana, Black, Asian, Native American, or Jewish”—she also adds sexual and social locations—“queer, patlache, feminist, activist, artist, theorist, dyke, intellectual, woman, poet, academic”—that integrate with these racial identities in order to connect or isolate these women from community. All these identities swirl in the psyche around the struggle for self—the “I, you, mi, tu, yo, mind, body” at the center of the crowded mestiza mental space. The nonlinear page space permits Anzaldúa to elaborate on what’s happening within the mestiza’s head. Whereas text allows for an ordered catalog and three-sentence exposition on the interactions between inner and outer, this illustration can encompass and interrelate multiple sets of identities, swirling them together to underline the ebb, flow, and chaos of this interaction. This transparency, with all these labeled identities, encourages her audience to locate themselves in this space and consider their own connections and what identities they navigate through on a daily basis.

While Anzaldúa’s articulation of mestiza identity in Borderlands / La Frontera was so fundamental to critical conversations in future years, her drawings, which reached an overlapping but distinct group of people on the many occasions that Anzaldúa gave talks every year, touched her listeners with an even greater intimacy. These drawings, echoing Anzaldúa’s own visually attuned words, not only helped her audience “envision a different reality” through these “new blueprints” of mestiza identity but went further in “formulat[ing] new strategies for coping” and enacting “positive social change” by showing the mestiza engaged in collective action.81 With her transparencies, Anzaldúa connects theory to action by visualizing how mestizas could take action, given these constraints, thinking through the possibilities of both collective and individual actions (Figures 4.8 and 4.9).82 In both of these transparencies, the mestiza body is reduced to a stick figure in order to focus on the environment that the mestiza finds herself enmeshed within. In Figure 4.8 that shows a number of mestizas gathered together, Anzaldúa represents the prospect for solidarity as the mestizas unite, acknowledging their “commonalities” and “differences” while standing together as “nos/otras” under an umbrella. The umbrella, itself labeled mestisaje, groups multiple identities under it and functions like the single mestiza figure by gathering many subjectivities. Together, they stand in coalition “under the sky of feminism,” and the relationship they have with this environment can be understood in at least two directions. Within Borderlands / La Frontera, Anzaldúa argues that “the struggle of the mestiza is above all a feminist one,” and this image depicts mestizas living in a world governed by feminism, which attains god(dess)ly presence in its skyward position.83 However, the existence of raindrops from the sky onto the umbrella details a more complicated relationship between these two contingents—even if mestizas operate as feminists, they are also, simultaneously, embattled against some of the prevailing forces of feminism. In this vein, we can consider this feminism as synonymous to the “white frame of reference.” In this manner, this transparency also tells the tale of This Bridge Called My Back where women of color feminists speak out against not only the dominant white culture but the dominant white feminist culture as well. In gathering the women together, the rain allows them to root themselves strongly and deeply, as signaled by the tree on the right of the transparency. Altogether, the image portrays how collective action allows the mestiza to remake herself and survive.

Anzaldúa’s transparency drawings also show how her visual works resonated with feminist discourses surrounding the scale of political actions, demonstrating how a mestiza can engage her community when acting individually and encouraging members of the audience to feel empowered doing so. Figure 4.9 illustrates this point. In this transparency, a mestiza stands before an audience, much like Anzaldúa often found herself in front of a classroom or another space when giving a talk. She focuses her representation on all the influences outside of mestiza identity and separates these forces into multiple layers of pressure. At the center, we have the mestiza orating, thinking “words/images/theories.” In Borderlands / La Frontera, Anzaldúa theorizes the responsibilities of the mestiza, positing, “Our role is to link people with each other—the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials. It is to transfer ideas and information from one culture to another.”84 The mestiza performs this process of bridging by “transfer[ring] ideas and information,” but the space of the transparency productively complicates Anzaldúa’s notion of transmission “from one culture to another.” In this transparency, when the mestiza speaks, she reaches from her “ethnic community” and projects outward to touch increasingly larger groups, both “academic” and “greater communit[ies]” as well as the embodied idea of “critical discourse.” The word-filled paper she speaks from becomes a book that the group of stick figures—standing among the labels for and simultaneously representing “academic community,” “greater community,” and “critical discourse”—hold.

But this image does not simply show the outward dissemination of ideas, as Anzaldúa uses text (“what artist/critic owes community / what communities owe artist”) to qualify that there exists or should ideally exist a reciprocal relationship. This text redefines how we read the spatiality of the diagram as dynamic and flowing continuously in multiple directions. Further, while the image itself and the textual labels encourage an understanding of the outward movement of ideas, these dynamic spatial descriptors pull us back to the mestiza at the center and ask us to consider again how the mestiza as creator operates from within and in relationship to her own community. She, like Anzaldúa, acts as a bridge, and this image itself also functions as a bridge for the audience in providing access to knowledge.

In their present location in the archives, Anzaldúa’s drawings sit alongside many other materials that demonstrate her multifaceted focus on community building. Whereas some of these efforts, like the bibliography in This Bridge or her speakers list, were projects bounded in time, her images were her most public work that drew folks into movement with her. Anzaldúa brought her ideas to life through two-dimensional transparencies, giving them a body and form as they became three-dimensional live performances. These transparencies and her graduate school notes before them retain these public connections as they move into the archives, acting anew as bridges that reactivate Anzaldúa’s ideas for those who encounter them.

Archives and Afterlives: Activating New Communities

It only took a year following Anzaldúa’s unexpected death in 2004 for her collection to open as part of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection in 2005. Though her journals remain closed to researchers for twenty years, this quick move meant that her ideas could continue to develop in dialogue with other scholars as they accessed her work and pored over her unpublished manuscripts, including her images. Keating has published some of her transparencies posthumously in two volumes she edited, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (2009) and Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015). The former collects writings from across Anzaldúa’s career and includes the images as their own “gallery” section, while the latter, which is an edited version of Anzaldúa’s dissertation she was completing at the time of her death, intersperses a number of transparencies throughout the text.

In addition to these projects, which introduced readers to Anzaldúa’s visual production and gave them a chance to think about the interrelationships between these images and her text, the director of the Benson Collection, Julianne Gilland, curated an art exhibition of Anzaldúa’s transparencies, “Between Word and Image: A Gloria Anzaldúa Thought Gallery.”85 The opening of this exhibition in May 2015 coincided with the meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa at the University of Texas at Austin that year, meaning that her images had another opportunity to speak with a large body of interested interlocutors. The exhibition has since traveled to multiple locations both nationally and internationally, giving these images further opportunity to reach audiences. Though Anzaldúa can no longer activate these images herself, lectures and events scheduled alongside the exhibit in addition to her body of work perform those connections. These new modes of circulating underline the power of images as an “archival genre” in that they are malleable to these transformations, which open up new “textual and social space[s]” for the audiences who encounter them.86 Moreover, all these posthumous circulations both continued the bridging work that Anzaldúa did in her lifetime and foregrounded in real-world encounters how the archives can extend that bridging.

The following, final chapter will pick up on this thread of visual circulation in thinking through how images can be recontextualized in different formats and spaces to do specific political work by looking at Nan Goldin’s photographic and curatorial work. As Anzaldúa’s images allowed her to plumb the depths of her texts and open up new meanings for her audiences, Goldin achieves this aim as a primarily visual artist presenting her photographs in multiple ways across the 1980s. When the HIV/AIDS crisis devastated her larger artistic community, it propelled Goldin to reconceptualize her earlier photography and the activism it could do to bring visibility to this issue. The work of both of these artists and the archives demonstrates the openness of images to addressing political change.