One of the books I’m reading right now is Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa, the radical Chicana lesbian feminist poet. Mixing Spanish and English, she writes about psychological, sexual, and spiritual borderlands, saying:
“The Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”
Borderlands, the way Anzaldúa thinks of them, can exist within individuals and between them, in physical ways and in ways that are felt, imagined, sensed, constructed. But where else could the spiritual, sexual, and psychological threads of the borderlands intertwine so strongly, so sadly, and so sweetly as between two lovers? How do we mirror and change one other? What dynamic whole emerges from the fragments of ourselves that we exchange with someone we love?
“Simultáneamente me miraba la cara desde distintos ángulos. Y mi cara, como la realidad, tenía un carácter multíplice.”
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