Historiography

Strictly speaking, boundary denotes and demarcates the “we” and the “they,” distinguishing who belongs to a particular group and who does not. On that note, boundary constructs and shapes a collective identity of those who belong.¹ Harriett and Raquel point out that borderland should not be seen as merely a geographical territory but also an imagined one where people who speak different languages and come from distinctive social and political structures meet. ² Gloria Anzaldúa influential work Borderlands: La Frontera: The New Mestiza describes the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico as “es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” ³ As Connie Chancla aptly points out how borderlands are not only connoting abstract political demarcation of countries or academic paradigms to encapsulate cultural hybridity. On this basis, boundaries also contain memories, “the wounded borderlands,” that remind us how immigrants, many of whom were working-class women workers, suffered the violence and suppression of contemporary immigration policy. ⁴

Gloria coined the term “mestiza consciousness” to examine how the matrix of domination and the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality shapes the history of Chicana/o in the borderland. It is worth noting that one’s cultural or ethnic identities are not static and enduring historical legacies. Rather, as Joane Nagel points out, these notions are constructed through the process of “borrowing, blending, rediscovering, and reinterpreting from elements of the present or the past.” ⁵

Suarez- Orozco, Carola, and Marcelo M. Suarez- Orozco, Children of Immigration, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Romo, Harriett, and Raquel R. Márquez, “Who’s Who across the U.S.- Mexico Border: Identities in Transition,” In Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and in Motion, edited by I. WILLIAM ZARTMAN, (University of Georgia Press: 2010, 214-237). http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n4x8.13.
Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands: La Frontera: The New Mestiza, (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 25.
Gaitán, María Elena, The Adventures of Connie Chancla, 1999.
Nagel, Joane. “Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture.” Social Problems 41, no. 1 (1994): 152–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/3096847.