Gloria E. Anzaldúa - Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)

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I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.
'un herida abierta' means 'an open wound'

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Deviance is whatever is condemned by the community. Most societies try to get rid of their deviants. Most cultures have burned and beaten their homosexuals and others who deviate from the sexual common. The queer are the mirror reflecting the heterosexual tribe's fear: being different, being other and therefore lesser, therefore sub-human, in-human, non-human.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
I am visible — see this Indian face — yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven't, we haven't.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
To separate from my culture (as from my family) I had to feel competent enough on the outside and secure enough inside to live life on my own. Yet in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano is in my system. I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry 'home' on my back.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
My 'awakened dreams' are about shifts. Thought shifts, reality shifts, gender shifts: one person metamorphoses into another in a world where people fly through the air, heal from mortal wounds. I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul, I am the dialogue between my Self, and el espirítu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world.
'El espirítu del mundo' means 'The spirit of the world'

Gloria E. Anzaldúa