Gloria, Hallelujah!

Gloria Anzaldua is another fabulous insightful moving pained and productive writer that we've read this semester. I'll certainly be holding onto this one. Although the preface was very dense in sociological, socio-political and other academic concepts, I found it was very important information which helped me to approach the material she was presenting me with which was very far from my own bubble. As a third generation American, living comfortably off the successful mobility of those before me, with a past dominated by experiences in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts - I at first can't relate. But how about the fact that I've lived a life of crossing borders, of tireless and seemingly endless travel to over twenty countries? Isn't my desire to be somewhat settled, or at least to have roots, while not being nailed down, similar to her distress over not having a home or not being able to return to it or claim it? And although shes a lesbian and I'm a bisexual, we share the process of rejection and acceptance which comes as a result of that identity. What we don't share with in that regard, however, is perhaps a sense of community. Very early on I found others like me, I was affirmed and reaffirmed, whereas she had to affirm herself in the face of direct confrontation and perhaps or probably only recently in her academic world found "the community".
I feel very thankful that I studied Spanish for three years and even though failed horribly at it as a class because of being intimidated out of my ability to speak it I still enjoy listening to it, reading it out loud and speaking the little I do know in casual conversation. Tenses I know not at all, and my vocabulary is limited, so my translation is always rather poor, but there is something about the pronunciation of the language that lends itself to feeling being expressed. That is why I read her work aloud and reacted particularly strongly to words such as "authentic" which were expressed in regards to it.