“The future will belong to the mestiza”

Gloria Anzaldúa. Photo by K. Kendall, CC-BY 2.0. Unlike “progressive” Americans who embrace race, the caste reformer B.R. Ambedkar envisioned a world where race/caste distinctions were annihilated – and specifically by mixing, by intermarriage. The view of racial purity shared by the mainstream American left and right – where Barack Obama’s white ancestry counts for nothing – makes that annihilation more difficult. But not everyone in the Americas – or even in the United States – shares that view. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is an eccentric book now often considered a classic of Chicana (Mexican-American) literature. It mixes essays and poetry, English and Spanish – perhaps appropriate for someone whose ethnic identity is itself mixed, the mestiza of the subtitle, as indeed are most Mexicans. In striking contrast to the life story Ibram X. Kendi tells, which struck me as generally comfortable and middle-class, Anzaldúa lived in a more clearly oppressed…