Abstract

Queer, Chicana feminist scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa, describes the U.S./Mexican borderlands as una herida abierta, an open wound, a liminal space of negotiations, which births a unique type of consciousness. Border consciousness is generated in this ambiguous space that exists between two cultures, two countries, two languages, and is marked by a unique mode of identity production and meaning making. I argue that her border theory supplies the necessary tools for thinking critically about the social and political situation of our present border crisis, a crisis of home, identity, history and future. In particular, I would like to bring her philosophy to bear on the symbolic nature of the border wall, to explore and address its function and harms for our social, cultural and national identities as well as our everyday lived experiences and interpersonal interactions. My claim is that Anzaldúa’s border philosophy offers a healing process, which functions to destroy desconocimiento [ignorance], dismantle false oppositions, cultivate a tolerance for ambiguity through her non-binary, connectionist mode of thinking, and decolonize myths and minds. It is through taking up her process of healing that we may shift and rethink our approach to the borderlands themselves as a therapeutic landscape with the capacity to promote the health and well-being of its inhabitants and neighboring nations.