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Your NameDateMCWP 50 sec ??Annotated Bibliography Draft #1Instructor Name

Annotated Bibliography

Research Question: Why are borders and border spaces so contested in contemporary America? Specifically focusing on San Diego, what anxieties are demonstrated by the renewed debate over illegal immigrant rights here and the “racing” of San Diego communities like UCSD?

Anzaldua, Gloria. “The homeland, Aztlan/El otro Mexico.” Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. 23-35. Print.

This is an introductory section of Anzaldua’s experimental, autobiographical, and artistic text

that mediates on the irony of the “Homeland” for Chicanos. Although it isn’t explicitly stated,

Anzaldua’s main claim is that binary identities (here: American or Mexican) are arbitrarily created by

those in power and that the Southwestern areas of the United States are legitimate “homelands” to

those in Mexico. Using a broad historical and anthropological overview of the ancient ancestors in this

area, she stresses the European colonization in 1500 and the mixing/mestizaje of the indigenous peoples

to calls into question our reliance on “race” and the definition of “Mexican.” In one useful example, she

points to the US-Mexico war of 1846-1848 where the entire Southwest portion of Mexico was ceded to

the US and overnight, thousands of people were suddenly “foreigners” to their home. Here, she again

calls into question the binaries of native/alien, belonging or home/illegality, domestic/foreign. Anzaldua

seems to be motivated by the ongoing tensions and uncertainty of the border space between the US

and Mexican border – specifically noting the violence enacted upon those who don’t “fit” in her

personal history (the racism that trapped her family in a system of sharecropping) and as a general social

trend (the fate of the border crosser). In this way, her opening up of the meaningless identities of

“Mexican” or especially “illegal” and “American” can be seen as her political interjection into the ideas

that propagate violence upon others.

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Anzaldua’s main claim is bolstered by her redefinition of the border space. She identifies a

border as that which defines in order to divide. And yet, borderlands are vague, transitional spaces

filled with the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary: tension, ambivalence, unrest. The people

here are those who pass through the confines of the so called normal (2). This is significant because I

am interested in how San Diego is a border space with latent racial tensions. Anzaldua’s concept of the

border and borderland as a wound seems contradictory when I consider my experiences in suburban,

wealthy, “peaceful” La Jolla. At the same time, it seems that La Jolla is demarcated too: certain jobs are

racialized, La Jolla has a history of legalized anti-Semitism. I also wonder how UCSD becomes an

“outside” space at times, especially as it insulates students from the community and in terms of how it is

stereotyped as a “nerdy Asian school.”