The New Mestizas

Abstract

In this chapter, I address the subsequent deconstruction of heteropatriarchy by feminist thought and its cultural manifestos. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Ana Castillo’s The Massacre of the Dreamers recreate new systems of self-representation during the 1980s and 1990s, and transform social activism through their feminist and queer vision of the new mestiza and the Xicanista approach. Chicana feminists, by proposing a disrupted wholeness or the total Self, produce the image of a rotating wheel of interconnecting opposites—a fractured identity always transforming, and a rejection of “tradition” as a static Mexican-Americanness. Chicana feminist thought connects images of wholeness to a healing, interconnecting sense of representation that allows them to transcend narrow understandings of self and culture.