[San Francisco, CA] — Aunt Lute Books is pleased to announce the upcoming release of a critical edition of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, written by Gloria Anzaldúa, edited by Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez and Norma Elia Cantú. Featuring an afterword by scholar AnaLouise Keating, this conclusive exploration into the iconic text that changed the course of Chicanx, queer, and feminist theory breathes new life into the themes still present in today’s political and social climate. It will be available for purchase August 31, 2021, with presale starting July 1.
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza was first published in 1987 after an organic composition process, mixing prose and poetry and integrating personal memories with a philosophical search for a consciousness-raising and coalition-building method for the oppressed. Conceptually innovative, visionary, and rebellious at the time, Borderlands has continued to be studied as a distinctive creative work and a spiritual guidebook to heal and empower Chicanxs, queer communities of color, and other marginalized groups. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in Borderlands/La Frontera, her first book and signature work, remap our understanding of “borders” as psychic, social, and cultural terrains that we inhabit and that inhabit all of us.
Drawing heavily on archival research and a comprehensive literature review, this critical edition elucidates Anzaldúa’s complex composition process and its centrality in the development of her philosophy and contextualizes the book within her theories and writings before and after its 1987 publication. It opens with two introductory studies; offers a corrected text, explanatory footnotes, translations, and four archival appendices; and closes with an updated bibliography of Anzaldúa’s works, an extensive scholarly bibliography on Borderlands, and her brief biography.
GLORIA EVANGELINA ANZALDÚA (1942-2004) was a Tejana Chicana queer feminist visionary spiritual activist, poet, philosopher, and fiction writer from South Texas. In addition to authoring Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute, 1987), she was the editor of the critical anthology Making Face/Making Soul: Haciendo Caras (Aunt Lute, 1990) and co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Persephone, 1981), winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. Her works also include Interviews/Entrevistas (Routledge, 2000) and this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation, co-edited with AnaLouise Keating (Routledge, 2002). She also authored three bilingual children’s books, including Prietita Has a Friend/Prietita tiene un amigo. She taught Creative Writing, Chicano Studies, and Feminist Studies at University of Texas, San Francisco State University, Vermont College of Norwich University, and University of California Santa Cruz.
Gloria Anzaldúa passed away in 2004 and was honored around the world for shedding visionary light on the Chicana experience by receiving the National Association For Chicano Studies Scholar Award in 2005. Gloria was also posthumously awarded her doctoral degree in literature from the University of California Santa Cruz. A number of scholarships and book awards, including the NWSA's Anzaldúa Scholar Activist Award and the ASA's Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars, are awarded in her name every year.
Praise for the Critical Edition:
“Imagine Borderlands as a timeless pyramid of ideas that has been added to, deconstructed, reconstructed, transcribed, translated, and trans-interpreted by every generation of Chicanx and non-Chicanx feminist scholars in the thirty-five years since its publication. This critical edition offers both a painstakingly articulated scholarly scaffolding around Anzaldúa’s original text and a bridge into the life and memory of the author who designed the blueprint of that pyramid.”
— Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Professor of Chicana/o Studies, English, and Gender Studies, UCLA
“Vivancos-Pérez takes readers by the hand in this straightforward, well-crafted edition, offering a detailed introduction describing the eminent author’s iterative process of writing Borderlands. The archival documents—including unpublished poetry and essays with Anzaldúa’s own annotations—add flavor, temperament, and in-depth insight into the complex philosopher’s early writings. Scholars, students, family, soul-mates, and friends of Anzaldúa (myself included) will be thrilled with this long-awaited, noteworthy critical edition.”
— Emma Pérez, author of The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History
“Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez’s meticulous archival work and Norma Elia Cantú’s life experience and expertise converge to offer a stunning resource for Anzaldúa scholars; for writers, artivists, and activists inspired by her work; and for everyone. Hereafter, no study of Borderlands will be complete without this beautiful, essential reference.”
— Paola Bacchetta, Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley
“Readers will delight in the new pathways to Anzaldúan thought thanks to the work of the editors. Whether coming to Anzaldúan thought for the first time or returning again to a much-treasured Borderlands, the editors’ loving care will enable us all to hear her call—no hay más que cambiar . . . there’s nothing else to do but change.”
— Nancy Tuana, author of Beyond Philosophy: Nietzsche, Foucault, Anzaldúa
The Editors
RICARDO F. VIVANCOS-PÉREZ (he/they) is Associate Professor at George Mason University in Northern Virginia and specializes in the cultural production of Hispanics and Latinxs in the United States. Vivancos-Pérez is the author of the book Radical Chicana Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and the editor of the special dossier “Transdisciplinary Approaches to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Thought” in the peer-reviewed journal Cuadernos de ALDEEU (2019). Their publications also include articles on social movements in Spain and Latin America, on exile and displacement in Hispanic literatures, on masculinities in transatlantic Hispanic Studies, and on the relationship between cultural production, human rights, and feminist activism.
NORMA ELIA CANTÚ (she/her), founder and director of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, organized El Mundo Zurdo, a gathering of Anzalduistas from 2017–2019. She currently serves as the President of the American Folklore Society and is the Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Her research and creative writing have earned her an international reputation as a folklorist, scholar, poet, and novelist. Her most recent publications include the co-edited Anthologies Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogies and Practices for our Classrooms and our Communities and Mexicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction; the novel Cabañuelas; and Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor.
Afterword by AnaLouise Keating
ANALOUISE KEATING (she/they) is Professor of Multicultural Women’s & Gender Studies at Texas Woman’s University. Keating co-edited this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation with Gloria Anzaldúa and is the editor of Anzaldúa’s Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality; The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader; and Interviews/Entrevistas. Keating’s most recent book is Transformation Now! Towards a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change.
Purchasing Information
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Critical Edition will be available for purchase August 2021. We at Aunt Lute Books do everything we can to price our books as affordable and accessible as possible. The price will be $35.95. If you’re looking to reserve your copy ASAP or to catch our presale discount, you can pre-order the book at the discounted price of $29.95 with free shipping.
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Critical Edition edited by Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez and Norma Elia Cantú | Aunt Lute Books | August 31, 2021 | $35.95 | 552 pp | ISBN 978-1-879960-95-4
Aunt Lute Books is an intersectional, feminist press dedicated to publishing literature by those who have been traditionally underrepresented in or excluded by the literary canon. Core to Aunt Lute’s mission is the belief that the written word is critical to understanding and relating to each other as humans.
For over thirty years, we have published the perspectives of women from a broad range of communities, including several well-known feminist, lesbian authors, including Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde and our titles include the first U.S. collection of Filipinx American women writers (Babaylan), the first collection of Southeast Asian women writers (Our Feet Walk the Sky), as well as multiple translated texts.