Gloria E. Anzaldua Quotes & Sayings

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 ... — Gloria E. Anzaldua

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 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. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don't let the pen banish you from yourself. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war? — Gloria E. Anzaldua

The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Depression is useful. It signals that you need to make changes in your life, it challenges your tendency to withdraw, it reminds you to take action. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

The process of falling apart (the Coyolxauhqui process), of being wounded, is a sort of shamanic initiatory dismemberment that gives suffering a spiritual and soulful value. The shaman's initiatory ordeal includes some type of death or dismemberment during the ecstatic trance journey. Torn apart into basic elements and then reconstructed, the shaman acquires the power of healing and returns to help the community. To be healed we must be dismembered, pulled apart. The healing occurs in disintegration, in the demotion of the ego as the self's only authority.20 By connecting with our wounding, the imaginal journey makes it worthwhile. Healing images bring back the pieces, heal las rajaduras. As Hillman notes, healing is a deep change of attitude that involves an adjustment and abandonment of "ego-heroics." It requires that we shift our perspective. La — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Though we tremble before uncertain futures
may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength
may we dance in the face of our fears.
— Gloria E. Anzaldua

Why am I compelled to write? ... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger ... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit ... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.
(Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.) — Gloria E. Anzaldua

But there are no safe spaces. 'Home' can be unsafe and dangerous because it bears the likelihood of intimacy and thus thinner boundaries. Staying 'home' and not venturing out from our group comes from woundedness, and stagnates our growth. To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing off to others. Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

This land was Mexican once,
was Indian always
and is.
And will be again. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes.
Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

I am mad - but I choose this madness. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven't. We haven't. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Enough of passivity and passing time while waiting for the boy friend, the girl friend, the Goddess, or the Revolution. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

To separate from my culture (as from my family) I had to feel competent enough on the outside and secure enough inside to live life on my own. Yet in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano is in my system. I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry 'home' on my back. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

In trying to become 'objective,' Western culture made 'objects' of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing 'touch' with them. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

By creating a new mythos - that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave - la mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject/object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Do work that matters. Vale la pena — Gloria E. Anzaldua

I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul, I am the dialogue between my Self and el espiritu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

These my two hands / quick to slap my face / before others could slap it. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

What we say and what we do ultimately comes back to us so let us own our responsibility, place it in our hands, and carry it with dignity and strength. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep — Gloria E. Anzaldua

The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture.
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Nobody's going to save you. No one's going to cut you down, cut the thorns thick around you. No one's going to storm the castle walls nor kiss awake your birth, climb down your hair, nor mount you onto the white steed. There is no one who will feed the yearning. Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

All reaction is limited by, and dependant on, what it is reacting against. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

The world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

We're afraid the others will think we're agringadas because we don't speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be "real" Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

I change myself, I change the world. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

It is our custom
to consume
the person we love.
Taboo flesh: swollen
genitalia nipples
the scrotum the vulva
the soles of the feet
the palm of the hand
heart and liver taste best.
Cannibalism is blessed.

I'll wear your jawbone
round my neck
listen to your vertebrae
bone tapping bone in my wrists.
I'll string your fingers round my waist -
what a rigorous embrace.
Over my heart I'll wear
a brooch with a lock of hair.
Nights I'll sleep cradling
your skull sharpening
my teeth on your toothless grin.

Sundays there's Mass and communion
and I'll put your relics to rest. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

But I'm more scared of not writing. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. The Writing is my whole life, it is my obsession. This vampire which is my talent does not suffer other suitors. Daily I court it, offer my neck to its teeth. This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body
flesh and bone
and from the Earth's body
stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

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. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

I can't seem to stay out of my own way. — Gloria E. Anzaldua