Category Archives: Working

This paragraph:

Whether “border” identities are necessarily radical ones is another pertinent question here. Though Anzaldúa’s book is based on the notion of radicalizing experience, it does not address the failure of experience to provide radical consciousness. For example, when Anzaldúa asserts a type of natural bond between the gay and the mestiza, she denies the existence of racism in the gay community. Where does the gay white Republican fall on the [r]evolutionary continuum? How do we account for the assimilationist politics of Chicano writer Richard Rodríguez—a contemporary of Anzaldúa’s—or explain intra-minority racisms? Why is solidarity so hard to attain?

These questions have been addressed, to some degree, by others, but not in a way satisfactory to me. I didn’t footnote those scholars or those discussions–that, again, is for another day.

Axé.

Tabuenca has written a great deal more, but all of it would have to come by interlibrary loan, so I am saving that reading for the next time I write on Anzaldúa. In another key, this is her interesting syllabus.

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Then there is the Robert Irwin article (see 518-519 on Anzaldúa, and the discussion of Murrieta scholarship as an case study for his argument). Border studies in the U.S. model erases the Mexican borderlands but also scholarship in Spanish. (It’s the problem of English vs. Comparative Literature — to be a comparativist, you must know what you are comparing, but people from the English department only do scholarship on things in English, otherwise they just appropriate the texts.)

If Anzaldúa is the perfect subaltern, the perfect transnational decolonizing subject, and her borderlands are a universalization of the U.S. borderlands, how does “transnational” mean anything except a U.S. takeover?

Then there is this piece that explains Aztlán but doesn’t think mestizaje or transculturation or the appropriation of gods are problematic at all. And this is that 1991 book, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.

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(Also: Cornejo Polar. Irwin cites him as well. Everyone likes that piece. It burns me that he wrote that piece for our LASA panel, after talking to me about what was needed, and nobody knows it. Perhaps I will start saying it. I can prove it and I even have the post-it note in his handwriting that came with the original manuscript.)

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Quoi d’autre? Ah yes — documentation of work and home tasks. If I included art and activism as categories, I would look much more flourishing, but it is with work and home tasks I struggle, so I will document there.

Saturday

8:30A-6P professional meeting.

Sunday

10A-5P followup on professional meeting, very slow because I was so tired.
10P-2A research/writing, slow because I was tired.

Monday

10A-2P combination of research/writing and followup on professional meeting, slow but steady.
2P is when my break started and I am coming back at 3:15.
3:15-4P research
4-5:15P lecture
6:15-12:15A research/writing but also reading other things … I would only count 3 of these hours, and probably shouldn’t count as much but I like to relax when I work. This means I spent 12 hours working, but 15 at work, and I’d discount 3-5 of those.

So: what did I do on this Monday, a weekday? Research and writing, I have a full draft of the paper now although it still needs some fixing. And a little professional service.

Axé.