Doing work that matters : the impact of Gloria Anzaldúa's "Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza"

Abstract

I’ve broken down this brief essay into three sections: first, I offer a very brief biography of Anzaldúa, and the trajectory of the more than twenty years since the book’s publication, including the founding of an organization that continues the work of Anzaldúa’s life project. Secondly because this paper interrogates how Borderlands has radically changed the way we conduct certain areas of scholarly work, I look at some specific areas where this is evident and include an example of how Anzaldúa’s coining or reclaiming of certain terms like mestizaje and facultad laid the groundwork for later work, as she delineated a path for spiritual activism. This leads to my final point: that the book shifts epistemological and ontological frameworks, functioning as a paradigm shift as described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a paradigm shift that we need as we are in a time of transition, politically and socially in our globalized world.