Happy Birthday, Gloria Anzaldúa

Born September 26, 1942, Harlingen, TX | Died May 15, 2004, Santa Cruz, CA

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates scholar, author, and cultural theorist Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, on the eighty-second anniversary of her birth. Anzaldúa authored poetry, essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, and children’s books. 

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Gloria Anzaldúa in 1990, photographer unknown

“Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.”

This Bridge Called My Back (1981) is Anzaldúa’s first book, an anthology co-edited with Cherríe Moraga. Borderlands La Frontera (1987) is a semi-autobiographical work that examines the Chicana experience through the lens of gender, identity, race, and colonialism. Anzaldúa later edited Making Face, Making Soul / Hacienda Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (1990), a collection of over seventy works of poetry, prose, and art.

“Why am I compelled to write?… Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger… To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit… Finally I write because I’m scared of writing, but I’m more scared of not writing.”

[…]

“By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you.”

First published nonfiction work:

• This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 1981, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga. A ground-breaking anthology when it was first published, This Bridge Called My Back has been reprinted many times, including a fortieth anniversary edition.

Select Nonfiction Bibliography:

• The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, edited by Ana Louise Keating (Duke Univeristy Press, 2009).

See also:

Erin Vasquez, “The Legacy of This Bridge Called My Back,” in The Feminist Poetry Movement, December 2019.

Explore Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on her website

Listen to Gloria Anzaldúa reading her poetry at the University of Arizona, 1991

Visit Remembering Gloria Anzaldua Smithsonian Latino Center for a special Hispanic Heritage Month and LGBT History Month program honoring Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004), on the 70th anniversary of her birth.

Read “An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa,” University of Arizona Poetry Center Newsletter, November 1991.

Watch Gloria Anzaldua: Reflections from the Borderlands, University of Texas, 2013.

Visit the Gloria Anzaldúa Exhibit at the Collective Museum.