Mestiza Consciousness

The concept of mestiza consciousness has played an important role in the development of border theory and thus has had a significant impact on the definitive parameters of American studies. A leading scholar of the emerging subfield of border theories, Gloria Anzaldúa first subjectified the border through a conceptualization of the new mestiza and mestiza consciousness. The geopolitical border originally informing border scholarship lies between the United States and Mexico. A whole theory of border with its attending language, codes, identity, and history subsequently developed around this physical border. Theorists such as Anzaldúa abstract from a territorial demarcation the idea of psychic, racial, gender, class, and sexual “borders.” Hence, border may be defined as both a divisive boundary and as a cultural/psychic/spiritual “space,” an interstitial borderland with its own inhabitants (Castillo, 12-19).

Out of the theoretical perspective of the border, Anzaldúa created the idea of mestiza consciousness. The word mestiza refers to a female who is both Spanish Caucasian and Central or South American Indian. From this specific ethnic/racial category Anzaldúa abstracts an identity that includes Spanish, Caucasian, Indian, and African racial and cultural heritage, and a consciousness that is conceptually inclusive rather than limited by any one social status or biological reality. Part of the potential in mestiza subjectivity comes from its hybridity, or multiracial basis. As Anzaldúa writes in Borderlands (1987), the “mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural, and biological cross-pollination, an 'alien' consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness.” The idea of identity defined by multiplicity connotes a strength derived from the flexibility of numerous possibilities rather than the restrictions resulting from the rigidity of an externally imposed, often subordinate, social status (Castillo, 12-19).

As a racial category the mestiza developed in what is now the southwestern United States, Central America, and South America. The contemporary theoretical concept of border subjectivity therefore shares, in part, the same geographical context as the historical process of “mestizaje.” Living “in between” the Anglo and the Mexican cultures, Anzaldúa relates personally with the mestiza identity. Similar to the concept of the border, she has appropriated the technical definition of the mestiza and created a theory of individual and collective self-empowerment based on the concepts and realities of border culture, hybridity, self-awareness, multiplicity (of identity and experience), and alternatives (of identity, history, and theory). The idea of mestiza consciousness allows Anzaldúa, a Chicana lesbian, to reconcile personally and theoretically different, sometimes conflicting, identities.

Part of Anzaldúa's purpose is to define mestiza consciousness against a history of Western thought based on binaries in which one term of the binary is privileged over the other. Classic examples include male/female, left/right, mind/body, light/dark, white/black, master/slave, and civilized/savage. In Borderlands, Anzaldúa articulates the need to find alternatives outside this hierarchical Western paradigm of identity categorization. In the process of seeking alternatives, those disempowered within the dominant culture's hierarchies of identity may cope defensively with ...