Cultures of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands
Twenty-five years after Gloria Anzaldúa published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the U.S.–Mexico border is still “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” As Anzaldúa would have predicted, this “bleed[ing]” is both violent and vital, destructive and constructive; anytime “a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.” However, in ways Anzaldúa failed to see, this “blood” does not flow from a single Chicanx “country,” but rather through two settler states, dozens of Native nations, and countless migrant communities: the “blood,” in other words, does not flow from a single “border culture,” but rather through a range of border cul