A third vector pries out the doubling, the dual.
"1,950 mile-long open wound / dividing a pueblo, a culture, / running down the length of my body, / staking fence rods in my flesh, / splits me splits me / me raja me raja / This is my home / this thin edge of / barbwire. / But the skin of the earth is seamless.../...This land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again" (24-5).
"It is in a constant state of transition" (25).
"what Reagan calls a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country" (33).
"What we are suffering from i s an absolute despot duality that says we able to be only one or the other" (41).
"The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in us is the betrayer. We, indias y mestizas, police the Indian in us, brutalize and condemn her" (44).
"I know things older than Freud, older than gender...to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul (48).
"She [la Viregn de Guadalupe], like my race, is a synthesis of the old world and the new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche, the conquerors and the conquered...She mediates...the tolerance of ambiguity...people who cross cultures" (52).
"We're not supposed to remember such otherwordly events. We're supposed to ignore, forget, kill those fleeting images of the soul's presence and of the spirit's presence. We've been taught that the spirit is outside our bodies or above our heads somewhere up in the sky with God. We're supposed to forget that every cell in our bodies, every bond and bird and worm has spirit in it" (58).
"The other mod of consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the imagination...they call the "magical" mind, the "savage" mind, the Participations mystique of the mind that says the world of the imagination—the world of the soul—and of the spirit is just as real as physical reality. In trying to become "objective," Western culture made "objects" of things and people when it distance itself from them...This dichotomy is the root of all violence" (59).
"Thus people who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface between the two, forced to become adept at switching modes" (59).
V PoMo:
"La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface...The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world" (60).
"The mirror is an ambivalent symbol. Not only does it reproduce images (the twins that stand for thesis and antithesis); it contains and absorbs them...its gaze...it can 'possess' us" (64)
Coatlicue "Simultaneously, depending on the person, she represents: duality in life, a synthesis of duality, and a third perspective—something more than mere duality or a synthesis of duality...Coatlicue depicts the contradictor...the fusion of opposites" (68-9).
"Mine. OUrs. Not the heterosexual white man's or the colored man's or the state's or the culture's or the religion's or the parents'—just ours, mine. / And suddenly I feel everything rushing to a center, a nucleus. All the lost pieces of myself come flying from the deserts and the mountains and the valleys, magnetized toward that center" (73).
"Language is a mall discourse...But Chicago Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally...a living language...A language which they can connect their identity to...españl ni inglés, but both...a forked tongue...language is a homeland close than the Southwest" (76-77)
"It is illegitimate, a bastard language" (80).
"Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate" (81).
"copping out" (84)
"This voluntary (yet forced) alienation make for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity—we don't identity with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don't totally identity with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degress of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometines I feel like once cancels out the otehr and we are zero, nothing, no one" (85)
"I see a mosaic pattern )Aztec-like) emerging, a weaving pattern, thin here, thick there. I see a preoccupation with the deep structure, the underlying structure...I can see the deep structure, the scaffolding...the bones often do not exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped after a vague and broad shadow of its form...I am preoccupied with texture as well...I see a hybridization of metaphor...full of variations and seeming contradictions" (88)
"an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work with several leitmotifs and with a central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance" (88).
"The aesthetic of virtuosity, art typical of Western European culture, attempts to manage the energies of its own internal system such a conflicts, harmonies, resolution and balances. It bears the presences of qualities and internal meanings. It is dedicated to the validation of itself. Its task is to move humans by mean of achieving mastery in content, technique, feeling. Western art is always whole and always 'in power'" (90).
"Let's all stop importing Greek myths and the Western Cartesian split point of view and root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this continent" (90).
"Being a writer feel very much like being a Chicana, or being queer—a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo" (94).
"Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else" (101).
"The third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm" (102).
"In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures" (103).
"Before...we need to know the history of their struggle and they need to know ours" (108)
"Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happen in the images in our heads" (Borderlands / La Frontera, 109)
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