NEPANTLA/COATLICUE/CONOCIMIENTO

Gerald Torres*

BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA. By Gloria

Anzaldúa. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. 1987. (Aunt Lute Books
2012 ed.). Pp. 300. $22.95.

INTRODUCTION
I was asked to review the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Gloria
Anzaldúa’s landmark book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.1 Even
though the secondary literature on this book is voluminous,2 interestingly,
there is very little legal use of her work despite its centrality to feminist theory
and its critique of identity politics as they had emerged in critical theory.3 So
what is she saying to those who study law, its uses, and its institutions?
Reading Borderlands, one is struck by how many of the ideas that
Anzaldúa surfaces have become commonplace in legal literature, although
such literature fails to reference Anzaldúa’s critical use of these terms. She
complicates ideas and fuses form and meaning in ways that challenge conven-
tional readings. Her work gives necessary cultural articulation to methodolo-
gies of expression and standpoint epistemology. Borderlands is an example of
how resistance to conventional expressive forms is part of the critique of those
forms and their ideological baggage. Critical race theory (CRT) has often used
this idea. For example, the early work of Patricia Williams and Derrick Bell
illustrates this move.4
This Review will first examine the crucial concepts that Anzaldúa deploys
in developing her theoretical perspective. It will then consider how these ideas
have been used in legal analysis, especially in critical legal studies (CLS) and

* Professor of Environmental Justice, Yale School of the Environment, and Professor,

Yale Law School. I would like to thank the generous contributions of Professors Yxta Murray,
Ella Maria Diaz, and Marc Spindelman who read and commented on an earlier draft.
1. Gloria Anzaldúa was a poet, author, and cultural theorist.
2. E.g., bibliog. The selected bibliography at the end of the 25th Anniversary Edition is
over thirteen pages long.
3. Several essays in THE LATINO/A CONDITION (Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic eds.,
1st ed. 1998) reference the work of Anzaldúa, especially Margaret E. Montoya, Masks and Iden-
tity, in THE LATINO/A CONDITION 37 (Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic eds., 1st ed. 1998). In
that chapter, Professor Montoya confronts the question of the border and the mestizaje. Notably,
she uses the idea of braided language and concepts that Anzaldúa used both to fully express sub-
tle ideas and as an analytic device.
4. See, e.g., DERRICK BELL, AND WE ARE NOT SAVED: THE ELUSIVE QUEST FOR RACIAL
JUSTICE (1989); PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS, THE ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS (1991).

1147
1148 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 121:1147

CRT. Many will likely object that the ideas Anzaldúa uses were developed in-
dependently of the legal context, which is likely true because some of these
ideas were in the air during certain historical moments. Whether they retain
the critical cutting edge emblematic of Anzaldúa’s work is a separate question
but necessary to assess her work’s impact in legal scholarship.
One of the critical things to remember is that Anzaldúa’s work is an ex-
ample of reflexive scholarship, which has marked the scholarship of both CLS
and CRT.5 Thus it was central to her work that she was a seventh-generation
American, a Chicana, a lesbian, a type-1 diabetic, and a working-class activist.
Her identity construction presaged labeling her analytic and epistemic posi-
tion as intersectional.6 Anzaldúa’s work was embodied in this way. Her mate-
rial position provided a vantage point into the historical conditions that gave
birth to her situation and the necessity for a new mestizaje epistemic. Yet, de-
spite her commitment to the materiality of knowledge (especially self-
knowledge), she remains firmly nondeterminist.
For many Chicano students and scholars, and for Anzaldúa, the first step
was to recognize the embeddedness of their experience to understand how it
produced discontinuities with received historical narratives and observed so-
cial life.7 The official stories were often one expression of the marginalization
they experienced. José David Saldívar, a professor of comparative literature at
Stanford, learned that “culture . . . always lived somewhere else—never in my

5. See, e.g., David Kennedy, Spring Break, 63 TEX. L. REV. 1377 (1985) (first-person de-
scription of human rights work).
6. In legal scholarship, intersectionality is linked importantly with Kimberlé W. Cren-
shaw and Pauli Murray. KIMBERLÉ W. CRENSHAW, ON INTERSECTIONALITY: ESSENTIAL
WRITINGS (2017); Pauli Murray & Mary O. Eastwood, Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimina-
tion and Title VII, 34 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 232 (1965).
7. In their book, Forget the Alamo, Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stan-
ford triggered a conflagration over the sacredness of Texas history surrounding the Alamo.
BRYAN BURROUGH, CHRIS TOMLINSON & JASON STANFORD, FORGET THE ALAMO: THE RISE AND
FALL OF AN AMERICAN MYTH (2022). The controversy led to the cancellation of a book event at
the Bullock Texas History Museum:
The cancellation comes amid a statewide and national firestorm surrounding
critical race theory and how citizens should understand, teach and learn how
racism has shaped American history. Abbott and other GOP state officials have
pushed back against emphasizing the role of race in schools.
At issue is the book’s challenge of traditional historical tenets surrounding
the Battle for the Alamo, Texas’ independence from Mexico and its origins re-
lated to preserving slavery.
Abby Livingston & Isabella Zou, State Museum Canceled Book Event Examining Slavery’s Role in
Battle of the Alamo After Texas GOP Leaders Complained, Authors Say, TEX. TRIB. (July 2, 2021,
1:00 PM), https://www.texastribune.org/2021/07/01/texas-forget-the-alamo-book-event-can-
celed [perma.cc/9HKE-M37N].
April 2023] Nepantla/Coatlicue/Conocimiento 1149

own backyard.”8 Professor Ella Maria Diaz goes directly to Anzaldúa to cap-
ture this sense of being in-between: “Flying away from the center of my uni-
verse . . . I entered a state of Nepantla in the Anzaldúan sense.”9 She goes on to
explain,
“Nepantla” is a Nahuatl word for “a space between two bodies of water, the
space between two worlds.” Physically it is a limited space, but according to
Gloria Anzaldúa, Nepantla is also conceptually infinite; it is a “space where
you are not this or that but where you are changing.” A physically confining
yet theoretically expansive space . . . .10
As both Saldívar and Diaz describe, Anzaldúa also explains the process of
needing to move away to understand the place you left.11 By inhabiting an “in-
betweenness,” you can construct critical and creative space that permits you
to know how the processes that alienated you from the sources of authenticity
were also those that tried to reduce the complexity of the identity that is at the
heart of mestizaje.12 An aesthetic and a political economy emerge from this
third place. The aesthetic and political economy are transcultural and antico-
lonial.13 Borders are crossed and recrossed, and language and expression gen-
erally become sites of contestation and manifestations of the multiple
epistemologically required consciousnesses.14 As I will discuss later, the con-

8. JOSÉ DAVID SALDÍVAR, BORDER MATTERS: REMAPPING AMERICAN CULTURAL

STUDIES 160 (1997). David Montejano confronts this received narrative in his landmark book
on Texas history. See DAVID MONTEJANO, ANGLOS AND MEXICANS IN THE MAKING OF TEXAS,
1836–1986 (1987).
9. ELLA MARIA DIAZ, FLYING UNDER THE RADAR WITH THE ROYAL CHICANO AIR FORCE,
at xii (2017).
10. Id. (citations and footnote omitted).
11. See p. 38.
12. See p. 19 (describing the alienation and exhilaration of living between two cultures).
13. See pp. 103–04.
14. See pp. 24, 77. In critical race studies, Mari J. Matsuda is famously associated with the
articulation of the idea of multiple consciousnesses. See Mari J. Matsuda, When the First Quail
Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method, 14 WOMEN’S RTS. L. REP. 297 (1992);
Angela P. Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 STAN. L. REV. 581 (1990).
Of course, the idea of double-consciousness is most commonly associated with its expression by
W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk,
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking
at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from be-
ing torn asunder.
W.E.B. DU BOIS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK 2 (1994).
1150 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 121:1147

cept of Nepantla, or both personal and temporal inbetweenness, the links be-
tween where we are, where we are from, and where we are excluded physically
and psychically, is at the root of both CRT and LatCrit.15
Before turning to Anzaldúa directly, I think it is important to point out
that emerging literature criticizes her for erasing Blackness and essentializing
Indigeneity.16 While I will not explore this criticism in depth, it strikes me as
missing the point of Anzaldúa’s project. While she does not ignore the pres-
ence of Afro-descendants in the construction of the mestizaje, it is not a central
focus of her inquiry and, in many ways, not central to the initial cultural milieu
with which she was embedded. The same could be said of the elision of Asian
presence. The point of Anzaldúa’s construction of the border as a theoretical
space is that it is perforce complex. Moreover, the colonial project that formed
Mexican culture was, by the time Anzaldúa was writing, already a distinct ad-
mixture of Spanish and British imperial designs that took a specific form in
Texas.17
The colonial project of the Spanish was distinct from that of the British
and the French.18 How each colonizing power dealt with native people was
complicated by specific colonial projects. For example, native people in the
Americas whom Spain colonized were made subjects of the crown and were
not recognized as having a distinct political existence.19 Labor was extracted
from them and given a legal gloss through the institution of the encomienda.20
The British colonial project excluded native people from the polity that the

15. Angela P. Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 STAN. L. REV. 581,
584 (1990) (“It is a premise of this article that we are not born with a ‘self,’ but rather are com-
posed of a welter of partial, sometimes contradictory, or even antithetical ‘selves.’ A unified iden-
tity, if such can ever exist, is a product of will, not a common destiny or natural birthright. Thus,
consciousness is ‘never fixed, never attained once and for all.’ ”); see, e.g., Enid Trucios-Haynes,
Why “Race Matters:” LatCrit Theory and Latina/o Racial Identity, 12 LA RAZA L.J. 1, 37 (2001)
(“Coalition building requires that each group openly acknowledge the ways in which it has as-
sisted in the maintenance of racial hierarchy.”); Keith Aoki, “Foreign-ness” & Asian American
Identities: Yellowface, World War II Propaganda, and Bifurcated Racial Stereotypes, 4 ASIAN PAC.
AM. L.J. 1, 48 (1996) (cautioning against “false homogeneity”).
16. E.g., Madelaine Cahuas, Interrogating Absences in Latinx Theory and Placing Blackness
in Latinx Geographical Thought: A Critical Reflection, SOC’Y & SPACE (Jan. 23, 2019),
https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/interrogating-absences-in-latinx-theory-and-placing-
blackness-in-latinx-geographical-thought-a-critical-reflection [perma.cc/DW76-GR93] (“In-
deed, there is a troubling absence of Black life, thought and history in Anzaldúa’s (2007) Border-
lands/La Frontera, which has been a fundamental text in Latinx theory and Latinx Studies more
broadly.”). For a broad-ranging discussion of the relationship between Indianness, indigenous,
and indigeneity, see Simón Ventura Trujillo, The Pasts and Futures of Latina/o Indigeneities, in
OXFORD RSCH. ENCYC., LIT. 1 (2019). Of course, when discussing borders, especially borders in
the West, the exclusion of Asian experience creates a gap that requires additional exploration.
17. For a comprehensive history of the various imperial projects in North America, cul-
minating in the Anglo-Mexican conflict in 1830s Texas, see T.R. FEHRENBACH, LONE STAR: A
HISTORY OF TEXAS AND THE TEXANS (Open Road Integrated Media ed. 2000) (1968).
18. See, e.g., ANTHONY PAGDEN, LORDS OF ALL THE WORLD (1995).
19. See FEHRENBACH, supra note 17, at 74.
20. See LESLEY BYRD SIMPSON, THE ENCOMIENDA IN NEW SPAIN 6 (2008 ed.) (1950).
April 2023] Nepantla/Coatlicue/Conocimiento 1151

settlers were constructing, and the native nations were recognized as having a
separate political existence. Thus, treaties were initially a device for regulating
Native people even as the wars of extermination continued.21 Each European
power brutally oppressed the people it encountered, but each had a funda-
mentally different juridical basis for doing so.22 The large maroon communi-
ties in Central and South America added a layer of complexity.23 They linked
the post-colonial fate of Afro-descendants and Indigenous people in ways fun-
damentally different from how their destinies are linked in Anglo-North
America.24
The impact of slavery and Afro-descendants on the colonial projects sim-
ilarly had complex implications that differed from country to country, espe-
cially after the colonies claimed their independence. Black people were always
present but in different ways. Black people were present in the Western and
Latin American colonial expansion if for no other reason than that a Muslim
Caliphate occupied the Iberian Peninsula for over 700 years. The Muslim col-
onists came out of North Africa and into the Iberian Peninsula, creating the
administrative territory of Al-Andalus.
It is instructive to remember that Pueblo historian Joe Sando wrote, “The
first white man our people saw was a black man.”25 Sando was referring to the
Moroccan guide, Esteban, who was the first non-Native to enter Pueblo terri-
tory.26 The extension of empire by the United States with its annexation of
Texas made Black chattel slavery legal again in a territory that had outlawed it
almost eleven years earlier. In the years before Texas’ independence, fewer
than 500 enslaved Black people were in the region, and it is likely they were
smuggled in by the settlers from the east. The foundational law of the Republic
of Texas annulled Mexico’s Emancipation Proclamation and stripped Black
residents of citizenship. This change in juridical condition meant that free
Texas residents of African descent could be re-enslaved, opening the door to
reimposing slavery as an institution.

21. The New England Colonies and the Native Americans, NAT’L GEOGRAPHIC, https://ed-
ucation.nationalgeographic.org/resource/new-england-colonies-and-native-americans
[perma.cc/MXT6-QK6E].
22. See SIMPSON, supra note 20, at 6; ROBERT T. ANDERSON, SARAH A. KRAKOFF &
BETHANY BERGER, AMERICAN INDIAN LAW 16–26 (4th ed. 2020).
23. See Silvia W. de Groot, Catherine A. Christen & Franklin W. Knight, Maroon Com-
munities in the Circum-Caribbean, in 3 GENERAL HISTORY OF THE CARIBBEAN (Franklin W.
Knight ed., 1st ed. 2003).
24. See id.; Mark Anderson, When Afro Becomes (Like) Indigenous: Garifuna and Afro-
Indigenous Politics in Honduras, 12 J. LATIN AM. & CARIBBEAN ANTHROPOLOGY 384 (2007).
25. JOE S. SANDO, PUEBLO NATIONS: EIGHT CENTURIES OF PUEBLO INDIAN HISTORY 50
(1992).
26. I describe the encounter at length in my essay. Gerald Torres, Who Is an Indian?: The
Story of United States v. Sandoval, in INDIAN LAW STORIES 109, 109–45 (Carole Goldberg, Kevin
K. Washburn & Philip P. Frickey eds., 2011).
1152 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 121:1147

Nonetheless, the ideology of racial purity was driven onto the rocks of the
mestizaje.27 In Texas and elsewhere, Afro-mestizos complicated the picture.
Though they were initially treated as Blacks and were thus subject to re-en-
slavement or deportation, the imperatives of social reality intruded. Professor
Martha Menchaca described the process:
Later that year, after many Anglo Americans claimed the Act was unjust, on
12 December 1840 the Texas Congress revised its position and exempted
some Blacks from enslavement and deportation. This policy change allowed
certain free Blacks to remain in Texas if they could prove that during Spanish
and Mexican rule they had not been slaves. The exemption was passed in
recognition that in Texas it was common for Mexicans to be of mixed Span-
ish, Indian, and Black ancestry, and thus they were not part of the enslaved
Black population brought to Texas by Anglo settlers.28
Rules governing marriage and property further unsettled efforts to reproduce
in Texas the same racial regime that existed in other parts of the American
South. As the new leaders of Texas tried to institute firm rules against misce-
genation, they had to confront the reality that interracial marriage was com-
mon in Mexico. If the new regulations of the Republic of Texas made those
marriages invalid, the claim of heirs would be insecure.29 Land, an essential

27. Despite the charge that Anzaldúa erases or ignores Blackness, she recognizes that in
both Mexican and American culture, Blackness plays a crucial role: “As long as woman is put
down, the Indian and the Black in all of us is put down.” P. 106.
28. Martha Menchaca, The Anti-Miscegenation History of the American Southwest, 1837
To 1970, 20(3) CULTURAL DYNAMICS 284 (2008) (citation omitted) (citing the Act for the Relief
of Certain Free Persons of Color, 12 December 1840, in Laws of Tex. Supp, 1822–1897, at 549
(1898)).
29. Professor Menchaca captured the dynamic well:
Texas Congress, in recognition that during Mexican rule intermarriage was com-
mon between Whites and people of African descent, chose to validate miscege-
netic marriages if contracted before 1836 (Smith, 1972: pp. ix–6). Such a liberal
action was not legislated for altruistic reasons but for economic need. Texas con-
gressmen validated all marriages occurring prior to independence in efforts to
legalize the inheritance rights of Anglo land grant heirs (Smith v. Smith, 1846;
Nicholas v. Steward, 1855). If Mexican marriage laws were not upheld, the nu-
clear family of Anglo American land grantees could be deemed illegitimate be-
cause under English common law, the system of law adopted in the Republic, an
illegitimate family could not inherit property. This was a monumental problem
that had to be quickly resolved. To do so, the Texas Congress decreed in the Act
of 5 June 1837 that all certified marriages enacted prior to that date were valid
and the children of these marriages were legitimate and capable of inheritance
(Act of 5 June 1837, s. 1, in Laws of Tex., vol. 2, 1898, p. 640). Miscegenetic mar-
riages contracted before that date were also validated under the Act—as Con-
gress declared that marriages contracted under the customs and practices of
Spain and Mexico were valid. Interracial marriages, therefore, were legally up-
held because they had never been prohibited in Mexico. Under section 2 of the
Act, Texas congressmen also upheld Mexico’s common law marriage statute.
April 2023] Nepantla/Coatlicue/Conocimiento 1153

source of wealth, would be up for grabs. Even the wealth of established families
would become unstable.30 It was a situation that required accommodating the
reality of social life in the colonized territory.
What this illustrates is that certain borders were made to be secure for
reasons that both revealed and upended the prevailing racial ideology. The
erasure of Blackness in the description of mestizaje, whether rooted in Vascon-
celos31 or elsewhere, was in the service of material conditions and economic
imperatives as much as it was in anti-Blackness. Of course, this erasure does
not discount the anti-Black reality of a slave state or the anti-Black animus in
American racial ideology. Still, any closed racial classification system would
come undone when confronting the facts on the ground. However, the failure
was not for want of trying.
California tried similar tactics during the same period, although it was not
a slave state. “Indians and mestizos were allowed to marry any race, but Whites
were prohibited from marrying ‘negroes or mulattos [sic].’ ”32 Again, this pre-
sented problems of enforcement. California legislators felt compelled to adopt
blood quantum policies because the population the new Anglo-colonial Cali-
fornians confronted was as racially mixed as that in Texas. The legislature
thought it had no choice but to say who was White.33 Yet, it had to do it in a
way that continued to preserve the emerging social order and wealth that
could not be stolen.
This activity to reframe and preserve Whiteness was undertaken as tribal
Indians were expelled from Texas,34 and treatymaking with tribes was largely
halted in California.35 Against this material background, the threat of reclaim-
ing the border as a space for exploring identity opens a history that is dynamic
and subject to reassessment. It reveals the uses of racial formation as a tech-
nique to control and discipline a population whose agency was feared. As a
place for theorizing, the borderlands are capacious, as Anzaldúa’s use of auto-
historia-teoría demonstrates, reaching across worlds, incorporating dreams,

This validation was necessary, as many Anglo Americans had not been married
by a priest or certified clerk. Mexico’s marriage laws were called Las Siete Par-
tidas and were originally adopted from Spain.
Id. at 285.
30. Id. at 285–87.
31. José Vasconcelos, who was a complicated figure, laid out one version of the mestizaje
in La Raza Cósmica. JOSÉ VASCONCELOS, LA RAZA CÓSMICA (Didier T. Taén trans., Johns Hop-
kins Univ. Press 1997) (1925).
32. Menchaca, supra note 28, at 290 (citing Act of Apr. 22, 1850, ch. 35, § 3, 1850–1853
Cal. Compiled L. 175, 175).
33. “People were considered White if they had less than one-half Indian ancestry or less
than one-eighth Negro ancestry.” Menchaca, supra note 28, at 290 (footnote omitted).
34. See, e.g., John H. Reagan, The Expulsion of the Cherokees from East Texas, 1 Q. TEX.
STATE HIST. ASS’N 38 (1897).
35. See Edward D. Castillo, Short Overview of California Indian History, CAL. NATIVE AM.
HERITAGE COMM’N, https://nahc.ca.gov/resources/california-indian-history [perma.cc/67L8-
A6JU].
1154 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 121:1147

confounding time and myth, and, through her embodied experience and po-
litical resistance, producing knowledge. Her method begins with the world as
it is and as it is experienced without privileging and interrogating the episte-
mology of that standpoint. The world-building that Anzaldúa sketches out
does not include every possibility but remains a place where alternative op-
tions are always present. Her use of autohistoria-teoría demands an open tex-
ture to knowledge and experience.

I. SHEDDING A COLONIAL SKIN

A. Nepantla
In briefly outlining some of the key ideas in Anzaldúa’s approach to theo-
rizing the border, I will telescope some aspects of her argument and only sug-
gest how transcategory and multilingual her method is. Central to her
autohistoria is her recognition of her indigenous roots and her use of Nahuatl
ideas and language. Of course, the use of Nahuatl, in some measure, obscures
the internal pre-Columbian empires that had their own kind of colonial dom-
ination. Nonetheless, its importance as one of the distinct transformative in-
fluences on the Spanish language is emblematic of the interweaving of cultures
and cultural influence so that we all use the language of the Aztec empire.36 It
is also a living language, so it continues to vivify the imaginary we inhabit.
Thus, Anzaldúa’s turn to Nahuatl makes sense, especially as she tries to make
sense of the spaces in which her identity was created.
As Anzaldúa explained,
Nepantla[ ]is a Nahuatl word for the space between two bodies of water, the
space between two worlds . . . . So, Nepantla is a way of reading the world.
You see behind the veil, and you see these scraps. Also it is a way of creating
knowledge and writing a philosophy, a system that explains the world.
Nepantla is a stage that women and men, and whoever is willing to change
into a new person and further grow and develop, go through. The concept is
articulated as a process of writing: it is one of the stages of writing, the stage
where you have all these ideas, all these images, sentences, and paragraphs,
and where you are trying to make them into one piece, a story, plot or what-
ever it is all very chaotic. So you feel like you are living in that mist of chaos.
(p. 276)
The feeling of “inbetweenness” creates uneasiness, destabilizing the sto-
ries that anchor our narratives. Those stories provide a meaning that seems to
be a given rather than made. The process of challenging received wisdom is
chaotic, it is threatening, but it is ultimately illuminating. Moving through and
across borders requires constantly changing perspectives and, in turn, points

36. If you think you don’t, then you have never used the word chocolate, avocado, or tomato,
to name just a few examples. 8 Words from Nahuatl, the Language of the Aztecs: Avocado, Chocolate,
and More, MERRIAM-WEBSTER WORDS AT PLAY, https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-
play/words-from-nahuatl-the-language-of-the-aztecs [perma.cc/PVP6-HNZT].
April 2023] Nepantla/Coatlicue/Conocimiento 1155

of view. The imperatives don’t come from nowhere; they are driven by the
need to make sense of the world you inhabit that tells you things you know are
not true, or at least that don’t ring true in your experience.
One of the virtues of Anzaldúa’s work is that it requires the reader to un-
derstand both rootedness and rootlessness. By switching between poetry and
prose, from English to Spanish to Nahuatl to Caló, Anzaldúa forces the reader
to move between the worlds that language creates. The history that attaches to
language is part of the challenge that Anzaldúa poses. Her discomfort is given
form.
By occupying a space that is neither here nor there, Anzaldúa also plays
with temporality. By rejecting the linearity of time, Anzaldúa introduces myth,
dreams, memory, and history. For example, when the Catholic Church sanc-
tified la Virgen de Guadalupe and made her the equal of the Virgin Mary, they
did more than concede the presence of God in the new world; they validated
the existence of God through an Indian body. But la Virgen de Guadalupe does
more; she also mediates the Indian, Spanish, and African content of the mes-
tizaje (pp. 50–53). Importantly, hers is a continual presence. The appearance
of la Virgen de Guadalupe to Juan Diego was not just a historical moment but
also the creation of a conduit for multiple cultures to flow from the past to the
present. It also worked in reverse by providing a European vessel for Native
spirits. Anzaldúa occupies all these spaces and brings a critical eye as she pulls
the myths, histories, and conventional wisdom apart. Unfortunately, it leaves
her in-between, where she is obliged to create a standpoint that becomes the
basis of emerging identity claims.
Nepantla requires analytic and expressive hybridity. Anzaldúa’s hybrid in-
novations are tied to how her identity is complicated and her explorations of
that complication. By forcing the reader (and herself) to confront conflicting
discourses, Anzaldúa creates a path out of the chaos, even if it is only provi-
sional. Her use of different forms is essential to explore how knowledge is cre-
ated in addition to exposing the limitations of received learning. Her method
is a direct challenge to cultural orthodoxy.

B. Coatlicue
Closely related to the knowledge revealed in Nepantla is the space
Anzaldúa calls Coatlicue. She describes this as the Coatlicue state. To give your-
self a sense of what she means, reflect on the following:
Coatlicue is a rupture in our everyday world. As the Earth, she opens and
swallows us, plunging us into the underworld where the soul resides, allow-
ing us to dwell in darkness.
. . . For me, la Coatlicue is the consuming internal whirlwind, the symbol of
the underground aspects of the psyche. Coatlicue is the mountain, the Earth
Mother who conceived all celestial beings out of her cavernous womb. God-
dess of birth and death, Coatlicue gives and takes away life; she is the incar-
nation of cosmic processes. (p. 68; footnotes omitted).
1156 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 121:1147

She describes cosmic processes that refer to the synthesis of rational du-
ality that yields a third space where creativity can take place. The myths on
which Coatlicue stands are commonly portrayed as contradictory, but accord-
ing to Anzaldúa, those interpretations miss the point. The fusion of opposites
creates a place where the conscious mind is “occupied or immobile[ and
where] the germination work takes place in the deep, dark earth of the uncon-
scious” (p. 69). The immobility, however, is merely apparent because Coat-
licue is a dynamic state. The transformation discussed in the section on
Nepantla is part of what is going on in Coatlicue:
I am again an alien in new territory. And again, and again. But if I escape
conscious awareness, escape “knowing,” I won’t be moving. Knowledge
makes me more aware, it makes me more conscious. “Knowing” is painful
because after “it” happens I can’t stay in the same place and be comfortable.
I am no longer the same person I was before. (p. 70)
This state is both painful and generative. In her discussion, Anzaldúa uses
the metaphors of birth and shells cracking open to describe things being re-
leased by the presence of Coatlicue. The Serpent Goddess Coatlicue possessed
her. She explains the emergence of the myth as both ancient and partially a
response to the male domination of the Aztec-Mexica culture. The earliest rep-
resentations of the Goddess were sinister. “She had a human skull or serpent
for a head, a necklace of human hearts, a skirt of twisted serpents and taloned
feet” (p. 49). Though the Spanish tried to make the Indian deities works of the
devil, they ultimately reconciled them in the person of Guadalupe, who was
homophonous with the Nahuatl word Coatlaxopeuh, the Goddess of serpents.
In the Coatlicue state, Anzaldúa confronts the contradictions of the cul-
tures, but because of the fluidity of time, she is not merely discussing the trans-
formation with anthropological distance. She is talking about the process of
investigation and creation that has both external and internal aspects. Her po-
litical work is contingent on her reconstruction of identity. Reconstruction is
an ongoing task that defines and makes her work possible. It is the work of
confronting borders wherever they are.
The work of understanding the existence of borders and how they limit
conceptions of the possible is what Anzaldúa is describing. When she says she
identifies as Raza, she is gathering all the myths and histories that combine to
create the possibility of such an identity. She also explains the concrete cultural
expressions of Chicanismo and the opportunities for resistance that it ex-
presses. Her discussion of the Coatlicue state captures both a personal and a
political process, a current and a historic moment.

C. Conocimiento
The concept of Conocimiento captures the passage through Nepantla and
the Coatlicue state. Conocimiento is not an endpoint but a provisional position
that contains the wisdom revealed through the traversing of borders. One of
the most potent revelations that emerges from Borderlands/La Frontera: The
April 2023] Nepantla/Coatlicue/Conocimiento 1157

New Mestiza is the attempt to decolonize knowledge.37 Decolonial thinking is

a critical project. It is a project of critical theory.38 Conocimiento might, on one
level, be characterized in the way Professor Saldívar characterizes it: as a
bridge consciousness. Anzaldúa “explore[s] and exploit[s] [her] double vision
as both participant and observer and as [a] displaced subject[] across multiple
discourses.”39
The open wound of the border is the trauma that compels Anzaldúa into
extended meditation on the coloniality that anchors border thinking and frees
her from the necessity of conceding epistemic priority to any particular colo-
nial history. The Rio Grande represents that wound, but it marks only one
border.
Bridge consciousness as critical theory builds knowledge by confronting
multicultural histories, politics, and symbology. The method adopted by
Anzaldúa is designed to create the same constantly shifting balance points she
provokes in the reader. Conocimiento is knowledge of self, place, and structure
that emerges only after actively engaging with the forces that form the critical
matrices of identity and recognizing the coloniality of that identity. At that
point, self-knowledge becomes decolonial knowledge. It is at that stage that a
new consciousness can emerge.
Anzaldúa claims that exploring the nature of the mestizaje is vital to cre-
ating a new consciousness. However, because she has complicated the idea of
the mestizaje, it does not follow conventional constructions even though she
begins by referring to José Vasconcelos and his argument for creating a new
race, La Raza Cósmica:
Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity
that white America practices, his theory is one of inclusivity . . . . [T]his mix-
ture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid prog-
eny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. From this
racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an “alien” con-
sciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness . . . . It is
a consciousness of the Borderlands.40

37. I am conscious of the critique of the loose use of the idea of decolonization. For more
on this concept, see Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor, 1
DECOLONIZATION: INDIGENEITY, EDUC. & SOC’Y 1 (2012), as well as how it is used by Walter D.
Mignolo, Introduction, Coloniality of Power and De-colonial Thinking, 21 CULTURAL STUD. 155
(2007).
38. I am following the description of critical theory that originated with the Frankfurt
School. See, e.g., MAX HORKHEIMER, CRITICAL THEORY: SELECTED ESSAYS (Matthew J. O’Connell
et al. trans., 1992); MAX HORKHEIMER, ECLIPSE OF REASON (2004). There are many kinds of
critical theory, but at minimum, for a theory to be critical, it must aim for human emancipation
through social transformation, and it must be normative as well as explanatory and practical.
39. See JOSÉ DAVID SALDÍVAR, BORDER MATTERS: REMAPPING AMERICAN CULTURAL
STUDIES 109 (1997) (footnote omitted).
40. P. 99. As discussed previously, Vasconcelos is a complicated figure, but in her notes,
Anzaldúa suggests that her use of his idea is her own. P. 119 n.1.
1158 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 121:1147

Anzaldúa says the first step in creating this consciousness is to take inven-
tory of all you have inherited from all sources. Then there must be “a conscious
rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions” and a rein-
terpretation of history through new symbols and myths (p. 104). The realm of
necessity, which that conventional narratives of the life into which you were
thrown suggest is natural, is instead destabilized and understood as a function
of the social situation of knowledge. Exposing the social construction of
knowledge in its most profound sense is what Anzaldúa aims to do. Only by
achieving that can the bridge consciousness of the mestiza emerge. She maps
a practical path to liberation, but as her text stresses, it is complex and painful.

II. EVERY MEMORY IS A PALIMPSEST: ANZALDÚA AND THE LAW

With this brief introduction to the complex thought of Gloria Anzaldúa,
the question remains: why review her text in a law journal? It is beyond per-
adventure that Anzaldúa’s reach has extended into the realm of feminist the-
ory, queer theory, and cultural studies.41 It is also true that each of these areas
of inquiry has had expression in legal scholarship.42 Thus, to the extent that
Anzaldúa has influenced these subfields, it could be said that she has impacted
legal scholarship. The genealogy has, to my knowledge, never fully been
traced. Yet, the critical nature of the theory Anzaldúa advances has a home in
most critical legal theories.
Unfortunately, the complexity of Anzaldúa’s text leaves her open to mis-
interpretation. In a critique of Professor Samuel Huntington’s book, Who Are
We?, Professor Charles Venator Santiago, a political scientist, suggests that
“Latino/a borderlands narrative[s] such as those articulated by Chicana writ-
ers like Gloria Anzaldúa” merely reproduce the nationalist argument ad-
vanced by Huntington, only this time in brownface.43 What is more, he
suggests that “rather than engaging concrete material injustices, both Hun-
tington and Anzaldúa resort to founding racial myths and ideological psycho-
babble in order to substantiate what turns out to be a project that reifies a

41. A cursory look at the secondary literature on Anzaldúa, especially her entire body of
work, supports this claim. See, e.g., bibliog. The works cited there cover thirteen pages, including
feminist theory, queer theory, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and Latino studies, as well
as studies of modern poets. See also CRITICISM IN THE BORDERLANDS: STUDIES IN CHICANO
LITERATURE, CULTURE, AND IDEOLOGY (Fredric Jameson, Héctor Calderón, José David Saldívar
& Stanley Fish eds., 1991).
42. As early as 1993, there was a volume collecting the essential essays in feminist juris-
prudence. See, e.g., FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE (Patricia Smith ed., 1993). Similarly, queer theory
was also generative. See, e.g., FEMINIST AND QUEER LEGAL THEORY: INTIMATE ENCOUNTERS,
UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS (Martha Albertson Fineman, Jack E. Jackson & Adam P.
Romero eds., Routledge 2016) (2009); Francisco Valdes, Afterword & Prologue: Queer Legal The-
ory, 83 CALIF. L. REV. 344 (1995); Naomi Mezey, Mapping a Cultural Studies of Law, in THE
HANDBOOK OF LAW AND SOCIETY 39 (Austin Sarat & Patricia Ewick eds., 2015).
43. Charles R. Venator Santiago, Huntington’s White Patriotism and Anzaldúa’s Brown
Nationalism, 4 FIU L. REV. 33, 44 (2008).
April 2023] Nepantla/Coatlicue/Conocimiento 1159

capitalist status quo.”44 On the contrary, Anzaldúa explicitly recognizes the

materiality of culture (p. 38). The material conditions out of which cultures
are created include the economic systems of production and primitive and
modern forms of accumulation. The system Anzaldúa traces is deeply histori-
cal and dynamic. Her method, which Venator Santiago disparagingly refers to
as “psychobabble,” instead represents a different way of qualitative theorizing
recognized in anthropology and other disciplines.45 Her autohistoria-teoría is
a kind of autoethnography. This reflexive scholarship is a form of qualitative
research that explores wider cultural, political, and social meanings by ex-
pressing those meanings in the author’s lived experience.
CRT has long used this method as a way to analyze the meanings that law
creates.46 CLS and CRT are both reflexive theories,47 which is a defining char-
acteristic of Anzaldúa’s method. If you take the premises that undergird CRT,
you find parallels in Anzaldúa’s work. First is that racism in its many forms
has been naturalized into American life (the work in the Black Radical Tradi-
tion demands that we take American life as only one cultural example of this
process).48 Second, and consistent with this, the social production of
knowledge must be complicated with alternative histories, myths, and stories
to decenter power.49 Third, interest convergence is the socially limiting factor
in change.50 Finally, as I discussed earlier, experiments with form and expres-
sion also mark CRT.
In Borderlands, Anzaldúa not only exemplifies these premises but also
dives deeply into the historical roots of her identity to understand why the
received knowledge sits uneasily in her mind. There is no pure form that she
recurs to for redemption. She opposes idealism through her reconstruction of
the mestiza and, with it, the entire mestizaje. One other link between CRT and

44. Id. at 42.

45. E.g., David M. Hayano, Auto-Ethnography: Paradigms, Problems, and Prospects, 38
HUM. ORG. 99 (1979).
46. See, e.g., Paulette M. Caldwell, A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and
Gender, 1991 DUKE L.J. 365 (1991); Margaret E. Montoya, Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas:
Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, 17 HARV. WOMEN’S
L.J. 185 (1994). These are just two examples. CRT scholarship is replete with examples.
47. Frank Munger & Carroll Seron, Critical Legal Studies Versus Critical Legal Theory: A
Comment Method, 6 L. & POL’Y 257 (1984); Mustafa Emirbayer & Matthew Desmond, Race and
Reflexivity, 35 ETHNIC & POL’Y STUD. 574 (2012).
48. E.g., pp. 29, 99; see OLÚFẸ́MI O. TÁÍWÒ, RECONSIDERING REPARATIONS 30 (2022) (ex-
plicating the work of Cedric Robinson, among others: “Robinson argued that capitalism, which
spread after European global conquest, came to the rest of the world bundled with cultural mores
and tendencies that affected social organization much more broadly than did its labor and pro-
duction schemes” (footnote omitted)).
49. See, e.g., p. 90.
50. Mary L. Dudziak, Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative, in CRITICAL RACE THEORY:
THE CUTTING EDGE 110, 111 (Richard Delgado ed., 1st ed. 1995) (noting how interest conver-
gence theory is associated with the work of Professor Derrick Bell).
1160 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 121:1147

Anzaldúa is the space she creates for both a pluralism of cultural expression
and pluralism of the good.51
Being open to the ways in which knowledge is created is central to the
project undertaken both by CRT and Anzaldúa. Anzaldúa’s concept of Coat-
licue recognizes the third space where creativity can take place as well as a pro-
cess of conflict and strife that is reflected in the sometimes euphoric and
sometimes productively discordant consciousness-raising processes within
CRT. Coatlicue and Conocimiento are linked in the creation of knowledge, and
this has been true in the evolution of CRT and LatCrit. The hybridity reflected
in the work of scholars like Montoya, Matsuda, and Harris shows that these
theories hold hands with Anzaldúa. This relationship is apparent if you con-
ceive of CRT as a legal experiment trying to root out ideological bias and the
colonial habits that infect our thought, as described, for example, by Mary
Coombs and Berta Hernández-Truyol.52 These processes are also reflected in
the cognition-trauma work of people like Susan Bandes.53 Remembering that
people everywhere are engaged in the process of creating meaning is central
to the political and legal project of CRT. As historian E.P. Thompson put it:
[O]utside the university precincts another kind of knowledge-production is
going on all the time. I will agree that it is not always rigorous. I am not care-
less of intellectual values nor unaware of the difficulty of their attainment.
But I must remind a Marxist philosopher that knowledges have been and still
are formed outside the academic procedures. Nor have these been, in the test
of practice, negligible. They have assisted men and women to till the fields,
to construct houses, to support elaborate social organizations, and even, on
occasion, to challenge effectively the conclusions of academic thought. 54
The practical knowledge and the social justification for one practice or
another are at the heart of the autohistoria-teoría employed by Anzaldúa. That
she unwinds myths to understand why we see things the way we do now, but
also to resist normalizing oppressive relations, is aligned with the critical
method of CRT. David Graeber and David Wengrow tossed a bomb into the

51. E.g., pp. 52–53. I make just this point about CRT in Gerald Torres, Critical Race The-
ory: The Decline of the Universalist Ideal and the Hope of Plural Justice—Some Observations and
Questions of an Emerging Phenomenon, 75 MINN. L. REV. 993 (1991).
52. See Mary I. Coombs, Outsider Scholarship: The Law Review Stories, 63 U. COLO. L.
REV. 683, 712 (1992); Berta Hernández-Truyol, Angela Harris & Francisco Valdes, Beyond the
First Decade: A Forward-Looking History of LatCrit Theory, Community and Praxis, 17 BERKELEY
LA RAZA L.J. 169, 201–02 (2006) (discussing the “productive tensions” in LatCrit, an annual CRT
conference, wherein people question “ ‘Do Black people belong in LatCrit?’ or ‘Do Asian people
belong in LatCrit?’ or even ‘Do Indigenous people belong in LatCrit?’ ”).
53. See Susan A. Bandes, Feeling and Thinking Like a Lawyer: Cognition, Emotion, and the
Practice and Progress of Law, 89 FORDHAM L. REV. 2427, 2428–29 (2021); THE PASSIONS OF LAW
(Susan Bandes ed., 1999) (anthology of original interdisciplinary essays about emotion and the
law).
54. E.P. THOMPSON, The Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors, in THE POVERTY OF
THEORY & OTHER ESSAYS 1, 8 (1978).
April 2023] Nepantla/Coatlicue/Conocimiento 1161

ways we understand the past.55 When they suggested that the Enlightenment
moved from west to east, rather than the reverse, the scorn heaped on them
was as much ideological as evidentiary.56 Similarly, the emergence of border-
land theory and critical legal theories recognized the value of understanding
how the people themselves produce knowledge as well as the constraints they
face in challenging “what everybody knows.”

CONCLUSION
What I hope I have illustrated is that wrestling with Gloria Anzaldúa’s
book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, will continue to open new
lines of inquiry that are useful for critical theories of law. Her method permits
the formation of questions that legal scholars should consider. Let me end with
one example; recently, the Supreme Court seemed ready to grapple with the
Insular Cases.57 Most commentators, including Justice Gorsuch, think that it
is past time to do so. As reported in Forbes,
Justice Neil Gorsuch had said the Supreme Court should take up the Insular
Cases in April in a separate case concerning benefits for Puerto Ricans, argu-
ing the cases “rest on racial stereotypes”—the decisions argue territory resi-
dents shouldn’t have equal rights because they’re “alien races” who shouldn’t
be governed “according to Anglo-Saxon principles”—and “deserve no place
in our law.”58

55. DAVID GRAEBER & DAVID WENGROW, THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: A NEW HISTORY
OF HUMANITY 48–59 (2022).
56. E.g., Ian Morris, Against Method, 126 AM. J. ARCHEOLOGY E065 (2022),
https://doi.org/10.1086/720603 (evidentiary critique); Chris Knight, In Fundamental Ways In-
coherent and Wrong, CLIMATE & CAPITALISM (Dec. 17, 2021), https://climateandcapital-
ism.com/2021/12/17/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong [perma.cc/C8VV-
ZKW8] (ideological critique).
57. The Insular Cases are usually considered to include only the original six opinions is-
sued concerning territories acquired through the 1898 Treaty of Paris: De Lima v. Bidwell, 182
U.S. 1 (1901); Goetze v. United States, 182 U.S. 221 (1901); Dooley v. United States, 182 U.S. 222
(1901); Armstrong v. United States, 182 U.S. 243 (1901); Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901);
and Huus v. New York & Porto Rico Steamship Co., 182 U.S. 392 (1901). See Juan R. Torruella,
One Hundred Years of Solitude: Puerto Rico’s American Century, in FOREIGN IN A DOMESTIC
SENSE 241, 243 n.14 (Christina Duffy Burnett & Burke Marshall eds., 2001). However, others
have expanded the list to include Grossman v. United States, 182 U.S. 221 (1901); Dooley v. United
States, 183 U.S. 151 (1901); Fourteen Diamond Rings v. United States, 183 U.S. 176 (1901); and
other cases decided as late as 1922. See Efrén Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of American
Colonialism: The Insular Cases (1901–1922), 65 REVISTA JURÍDICA UNIVERSIDAD DE PUERTO
RICO 225, 240 & n.40 (1996); PEDRO A. MALAVET, AMERICA’S COLONY: THE POLITICAL AND
CULTURAL CONFLICT BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND PUERTO RICO 38 (2004).
58. Alison Durkee, Supreme Court Won’t Consider Rights for U.S. Territory Citizens—Even
After Neil Gorsuch Slammed Its Racist Precedents, FORBES (Oct. 17, 2022, 10:54 AM),
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/10/17/supreme-court-wont-consider-rights-
for-us-territory-citizens-even-after-neil-gorsuch-slammed-its-racist-precedents
[perma.cc/L9H4-Q8FH].
1162 Michigan Law Review [Vol. 121:1147

In declining to review the case of Fitisemanu v. United States,59 which would

have determined whether residents of the territory of American Samoa would
have American citizenship, the Supreme Court declined to reassess the
grounds on which the Insular Cases rest. In the cases below, the district court
said yes, residents of American Samoa are citizens; the Tenth Circuit said no,
and the determination rests with Congress.60 This case is redolent of the early
Indian law cases, especially United States v. Sandoval, where the Court held
that only Congress could say what the legal status of colonized people was.61
Anzaldúa’s method counsels an understanding of the distinctions be-
tween the various people subject to the rules of the Insular Cases. She would
urge us, as my late colleague Professor Frickey did, to do the “hard work”:
[D]o the hard work . . . to challenge rather than to accept blindly assump-
tions rooted in colonialism, of which there are many today; to interpret doc-
uments of positive law flexibly in order to promote the ongoing sovereign-
to-sovereign relationship of the tribe and the federal government; to keep the
judiciary out of the business of imposing new forms of colonialism; and to
refuse to relieve Congress of the responsibility to determine expressly
whether future exercises of colonialism should occur.62
In a brilliant essay, James Campbell argues precisely for this outcome. 63
The people in the territories should be the agents of their own future. To do
this, to adopt the legal position that would enable that result, requires the kind
of searching inquiry Anzaldúa models. To be converted to legal use merely
means that the skills we bring to the task as lawyers need to be sensitive to the
knowledge the people themselves produce.64

59. 1 F.4th 862 (10th Cir. 2021), rev’g 426 F. Supp. 3d 1155 (D. Utah 2019), cert. denied,
143 S. Ct. 362 (2022) (mem.).
60. Fitisemanu, 1 F.4th 862.
61. 231 U.S. 28, 45–46 (1913).
62. Philip P. Frickey, Marshalling Past and Present: Colonialism, Constitutionalism, and
Interpretation in Federal Indian Law, 107 HARV. L. REV. 381, 428 (1993).
63. James T. Campbell, Aurelius’s Article III Revisionism: Reimagining Judicial Engage-
ment with the Insular Cases and “The Law of the Territories,” 131 YALE L.J. 2542, 2560, 2639–42
(2022).
64. For a compelling expression of this view, see Yxta Maya Murray, The Takings Clause
of Boyle Heights, 43 N.Y.U. REV. L. & SOC. CHANGE 109 (2019); Yxta Maya Murray, Blights Out
and Property Rights in New Orleans Post-Katrina, 68 BUFFALO L. REV. 1 (2020); Yxta Maya Mur-
ray, “FEMA Has Been a Nightmare:” Epistemic Injustice in Puerto Rico, 55 WILLAMETTE L. REV.
321 (2019).
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