Celebrating and honouring Gloria Anzaldúa

K Kendall CC BY 2 0 via Creative Commons

Today, the 26th of September, we celebrate the birthday of Gloria Anzaldúa. Born in 1942, she would have celebrated her 84th birthday this Saturday. With this in mind, I turn to this article as an opportunity to reflect on how we might aspire to carry forward her legacy.

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, best known for her work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, was a Chicana philosopher, scholar and an important figure in feminism, cultural theory and queer theory. Her inspiring translingual writing and poetry paved the way for decolonial approaches that embraced non-Western cultures, knowledges and languages. Ultimately, her writings provided a key contribution to a broader generation of “US Third World” feminist scholars and thinkers. However, beyond academic circles, Anzaldúa became a beacon of light for Mexican communities in the US, embracing and helping to cultivate a community of proud Chicanxs.

Her commitment to challenging exclusion was deeply rooted in her own experiences of displacement and marginalisation. Anzaldúa was born in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where her parents raised her on a ranch until White farmers acquired their family land and forced them to leave. This became central to her life and work as she often reflected on her grandparents’ experiences, her Mexican heritage, and the gradual displacement of her family from their land. Her own educational journey was similarly shaped by exclusion and financial hardship. She worked from an early age, dropped out of third-level education due to financial constraints, and repeatedly returned to education throughout her twenties. These experiences of marginalisation continued into her academic life, as her dissertation – which blended together creative writing, theory and personal narrative - was rejected by her university because it did not conform to traditional academic standards (Yamamoto, 2025).

Again and again, Anzaldúa encountered structures that told her that she did not fit within established social and academic boundaries. Consequently, she dedicated much of her life to challenging the structures that produced such exclusions. Anzaldúa combined activism with an academic carreer collaborating with movements such as the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MECHA), lecturing in Women’s Studies at San Francisco State University, while also producing influential works such as Borderlands/La Frontera and This Bridge Called My Back.

I was recently reminded of the lasting significance of her figure when I came across an article written by Erasmo Guerra titled “I Once Asked Tejana Author Gloria Anzaldúa for Advice. Nearly 30 Years Later, I Visited Her Grave to Thank Her”. Erasmo recounts how he first introduced himself to Anzaldúa in the 1990s, at a time when he felt lost and ‘she looked like family’ (Guerra, 2023). He was a queer man from a Mexican-American family who had recently dropped out of college and was struggling to push himself to pursue a career in storytelling - he was in need of direction. Almost serendipitously, Erasmo happened to attend a book fair at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts, where Anzaldúa’s performanceand words of encouragment inspired him to puruse his dreams. Ultiamtely, Anzaldúa was a caring, welcoming and positive familial figure in the lives of many that needed it.

Met with such an inspiring scholar like Gloria Anzaldúa, I was struggling to find ways to honour her work today. However, more than honouring her contirbutions I would like to engage critically with her work, reflecting on how her ideas might be extended, challenged and carried forward in the present. For this reason, I chose to question an aspect of her career that has increasingly troubled me in recent years. As mentioned before, Anzaldúa became part of a broader group of feminist thinkers called Third World feminists. Third World feminism is rooted in a resistance against Western imperial ways of knowing, specifically drawing from the lives of women from the Global South. In the 1960s and 70s, many feminists of colour in the US such as Anzaldúa began to identify with Third World feminism, and initiated the so-called movement of “US Third World feminism”.

While I do not intend to criticise the original movement, the emergence of a US-based Third World feminism does not sit entirely comfortably with me. In fact, looking back now and learning from scholars such as Anzaldúa, who take pride in their intersecting identities, deepens our understanding of how the experiences of people of colour in the US differ from people of colour in the Global South. In particular, when considering the privileged position that US academics often occupy within global academia.

For her work to be continued and honoured, we must resist the tendency to appropriate such particular lived experiences. Instead, as Anzaldúa did for so many, we must strive to create safe spaces where people are given the opportunity to share their differences. We must preserve spaces where people like Erasmo can continue to return to Anzaldúa. Spaces whereshame has no place and difference is celebrated - “I will not be shamed again, Nor will I shame myself” (Anzaldúa, 1987).

Bibliography

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Guerra, E. (2023). I once asked Tejana author Gloria Anzaldúa for advice. Nearly 30 years later, I visited her grave to thank her. [online] Texas Highways. Available at: https://texashighways.com/culture/i-once-asked-tejana-author-gloria-anzaldua-for-advice-nearly-30-years-later-i-visited-her-grave-to-thank-her/.

Yamamoto, A.R.-A. (2025). Gloria Anzaldúa. [online] National Women’s History Museum. Available at: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/gloria-anzaldua [Accessed 23 Sept. 2026].

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