Borderlands La Frontera

Chapter 3 opens with lyrics from a song by Silvio Rodriguez, titled “Sueño con Serpientes.” Anzaldúa describes her mother’s warnings about snakes: “A snake will crawl into your nalgas, make you pregnant” (47). She describes an encounter with a rattlesnake while chopping cotton as a young girl with her mother: It bit her boot, and her mother killed it. In the morning she felt the venom coursing through her blood, but she was “forever immune.” Since that day, Anzaldúa has been deeply connected to the serpent, attempting to assimilate her animal body into her soul.

She describes Coatlalopeuh, la Virgen de Guadalupe’s Indigenous name. Coatlalopeuh is descended from fertility goddesses, with the earliest known as Coatlicue, “Serpent Skirt.” The male-dominated Aztec culture divided Coatlicue’s light and dark powers. After the conquest of Mexico, the Spaniards further desexed Guadalupe, creating a divide between the Catholic deities as pious virgins and the Indigenous deities as beastly “putas”—“whores.”

Anzaldúa goes on to describe the rise of the Virgin of Guadalupe as the most important religious figure for the Chicano. Embraced by the Mexican revolutionaries, striking farmworkers, and the Zoot Suiters, she is more venerated than Jesus in Texas and Mexico. Synthesizing the old and new world, she is a symbol of the mestiza. Guadalupe, with la Chingada (the raped, abandoned mother) and la Llorona (the mother who seeks her lost children and is a combination of the two) is the mother of the Chicano people, and yet, Chicano culture continues to apply a virgin/whore dichotomy to these three goddesses. The Aztecs took the first step toward this dichotomy in their move from a balanced, matrilineal society to a war-mongering patriarchal society. Anzaldúa details this history of the Aztecs, pointing to this ideological change as the reason for the fall of their empire.

Returning again to the presence of the serpent throughout her life, Anzaldúa discusses how her encounters with the otherworldly have been silenced by the dominant white culture. Institutionalized religion is partly to blame, as it characterizes the spirit world as witchcraft, encouraging a “split between the body and the spirit” (59). Still, Anzaldúa has la facultad: “[T]he capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities” (60). She believes these faculties are more pronounced in people “who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in this world” (60). Fear develops this sense and ultimately allows the person to experience communion with the soul. The price for this ability is the loss of innocence.