The consciousness of the new mestizo in borderlands/the border. The new mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa. A proposal of epistemic disobedience
Keywords:
descolonialism, epistemicdisobedience, chicano, border, mestiza, feminismAbstract
Abstract
This article is the result of a critical introduction to various aesthetic cultural productions born in the suffering America that express the histories of its people. Specifically, this paper proposes an approach to Gloria Anzaldúa’s border thinking and through it, to the chicano’s history, by addressing her anthropological-literary work Borderlands/La frontera. The New Mestiza (1987). It is understood that logics of power, of being and of knowledge constitute coloniality, conceptualised by Quijano and Mignolo, which is a result of the European colonization and configure the control over bodies, voices and subjectivities. This means that there are categories and legitimated ways of knowing imposed by the European paradigm and reproduced in American people histories and cultures. Faced with this, decolonial theory considers decolonization of being as necessary and postulates epistemic disobedience as a path to the coexistence of different paradigms and to the constitution of exteriority or border epistemologies. Anzaldúa, standing on a physical and conceptual border, shows her own suffering body, geopolitically located, and narrates her personal version of the history of the chicanos from a decolonializing and feministic perspective but above all, from disobedience. Epistemic disobedience is the most persistence phenomenon, manifested in at least three stages of her work: in the multilingual and polymorphic verbal expression, in her self-reference as queer and in the propose of the new mestiza consciousness. The hope of being liberated of the burden of coloniality depends on an actitud of disobedience of what has been hegemonically established, followed by a proposal which integrates a diversity of paradigms.
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