Teaching Anzaldúa as an American Philosopher (original) (raw)

Anzald�a and Transnational American Studies

PMLA, 2006

For several years now, at least since the 2000 census, the United States has in one way or another told itself that it needs to come to terms with what it means to live in a country of over forty million Latinos/as. Latina actors grace the covers of People magazine, Latin beats percolate through the earbuds of iPods, and McDonald's serves up breakfast burritos alongside its McMuffins. In the academic world, the increasing consciousness of the Latino/a presence in the United States means that it is now unthinkable for any major university not to have a program of studies focusing on the histories and cultures of this ill-defined population; it means border theory is increasingly present on our syllabi; and it means that we all nod our heads wisely when the name “Gloria Anzaldúa” is mentioned. For years before her untimely death, Anzaldúa complained bitterly about being “repeatedly tokeni[zed]” (“Haciendo Caras” xvi), as one of the same half dozen women continually called on as a ...

La Mexicana en la Chicana: Sources of Anzaldúa’s Mexican Philosophy

El Mundo Zurdo 8: Selected Works from the 2019 Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, 2022

Our paper examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We demonstrate how Anzaldúa developed a transnational Philosophy of Mexicanness, effectively contributing to what has been recently characterized as the “multi-generational project to pursue philosophy from and about Mexican circumstances” (Vargas). More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting archival research using the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers from the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. The three sections of our paper: 1) define the terms Mexican and philosophy in conversation with Anzaldúa’s work, 2) examine the Mexican philosophical sources that Anzaldúa cites in Borderlands/La Frontera, and 3) present the other major Mexican philosophical influences on Anzaldúa that we have found in her archive. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we discuss here include: José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), and Jorge Carrión (1913-2005).

La Mexicana en la Chicana: The Mexican Sources of Gloria Anzalduá's Inter-American Philosophy

Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, 2020

This article examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We argue that Anzaldúa effectively contributed to la filosofía de lo mexicano by developing an Inter-American Philosophy of Mexicanness. More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting archival research using the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we examine and discuss here are: José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), and Jorge Carrión (1913-2005).

American Philosophy as a Way of Life: A Course in Self-Culture

American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy, 2023

This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to "revive" Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present "American Philosophy and Self-Culture" as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing

(Un)Leash the Self: Exploring Frontiers in (Re)writing America

2021

Introduction Upon reading Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991; henceforth referred to as García Girls) and Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1984; henceforth referred to as Mango Street) it becomes clear that both writers cross borders while representing their cultures from within a whole-white American environment. This provides a new perspective with which their attempt at formulating their identities can be seen; an outlook that stems from the fact that Alvarez and Cisneros stand the positionality of being American with a hyphenated identity, where their writings exhibit an illustration of the transnational dimension that literature assumes. The term transnationalism has been defined and discussed by many a scholar; for example, Donald E. Pease and Yuan Shu argue in their introduction to ReFraming the Transnational Turn in American Studies that “the term ‘transnational’ has replaced ‘multicultural,’ ‘postcolonial,’ and ‘postnational’ as the mos...