This book is a tormented stream of consciousness from a lady who was obviously fighting major demons. It is exactly the type of book that you would expect an amateur academic to "wow" and "gush" over, as it nicely fits into the dogmatic radicalism of Chicano Studies. The discerning reader, on the other hand, sees page after page of outdated cliches, sob-stories, and anger-filled tantrums. Anzaldua would like you to believe her suffering and self-searching is all the fault of the "white" culture encroaching upon the enlightened cosmic race of the mestiza. She'd like you to think that her mestiza/chicana/lesbian/female identity is the sole cause of her misfortune and hardship. What becomes overwhelmingly evident upon reading her unabashed torrent of decadent self-pity is the learned and self-enforced quality of her "opression". Anzaldua helplessly wallows in her romantic fatalism dreaming of the great mestiza revolution that will fix all of the world's problems by turning the middle class value system upside down.

If you like romantic literature, and enjoy the hopeless and sorrowful ramblings of society's self-marginalized, I might suggest "The Sorrows of the Young Werther" by Goethe or some poems by Lord Byron - at least then you get some literary value.

While most reviewers seem to be bent on lauding Gloria Anzaldúa's "insightful and progressive" writings, I can't help but take a different viewpoint. The vast majority of her essays, while cloaked in a sense of righteous equality, are quite simply racist drivel. She speaks of acceptance and tolerance for foreign cultures in America, and harps on the evils of correcting students when they use improper English, yet instills her writing with a blatant and offensive racism.

I make specific reference to the article "How to Tame A Wild Tongue". In her conclusion, she praises the perseverance and endurance of the mestizo race/culture, making reference to walking by "the crumbling ashes" of American civilization. An eagerness is felt to see the day that "white laws and commerce will rot in the desert". One would be hard pressed to come up with a more hypocritical conclusion. Here is an author preaching tolerance and acceptance of different languages and cultures throughout her entire article. She whines about the troubles she had fitting in with English speaking people. She goes in depth to explain the numerous bastardizations of Spanish that are spoken in various Hispanic cultures and tries to convince us of how each is a viable language, even so-called "Spanglish", just a blend of English and Spanish that you might hear in a high school Spanish I class ("el chairo = chair,la ceilingo = ceiling, etc.) . And after all that talk of acceptance, she ends by completely blasting American culture and expressing her wish to see it crumble to dust, while at the same time presenting the mestizo as the dominant race which will endure this fall. Talk about racist. I understand pride of your country and people, but this goes far beyond simple nationalism, especially in light of the overall message of the article. Tolerance is right out the window here.

Don't be fooled by Anzaldúa's overly wordy diction and pseudo-intellectualism. She is a flat out racist that for some reason is tolerated (forget that, praised to the roof!) in many academic circles. Her educational philosophy is naive, irresponsible, and fundamentally flawed. Hopefully her writings will soon fall out of the limelight.

Other reviewers have covered many of the qualities of the work, so I want to dwell on just one point - don't be fooled into thinking that this work is useful only as a personal study on Anzaldua's cultural/gender/queer theory.

Anzaldua is of high importance to any philosophy of the social; within her writing you can find the key insights of figures such as Derrida and Nietzsche, as they relate to personal identity crafted out of a fractured heritage. Her point is that we are ALL borderlanders given that the human condition involves being stretched across a chasm of self-alterity. Only through a full recognition of this can a critical inventory of the self be undertaken, which is a prerequisite to responsibility and genuine care of the self.

Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera is very meaningful. Anzaldua's use of imagery and sybolism gives the reader an insight to her feminist thought. I really enjoyed her way of using the land of Azltan as a way to tie us all back to our ancestry. It is also very interesting, as a Chicana woman, to see how the Movement has evolved from her days to today. I recommend this book to any woman of color.

-Kesia