Decolonizing the "normal"

Borders are made to create a divide. Borders in physical form or virtual form seek to bifurcate people. They aim to distinguish one set of people from another set of people. Borders in our heads formulate and articulate our thinking process. They push us to think in a certain way about people who are on either side of the border. Borders are always in transition; they keep on changing. No matter what one is, once they cross over, they are not considered normal again. “A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants”. Gloria Andaluza seeks to explain how the mind is colonized by such boundaries and borders. Whatever is on the other side is thought of as profane and unholy. Furthermore, if the border is sought to be breached and crossed, then there are consequences. The queers, blacks, and other borderland people are persecuted, shot, gassed, and beaten up with impunity. “The only legitimate inhabitants are those in power, the whites, and those who align themselves with whites.” History is written by those who are on the winning side of the war. That history then formulates our ways of understanding and knowing things. It creates the aforementioned ways of creating boundaries. The illegal invasion of Texas is one such example quoted by Gloria. When the illegal invasion happened, and the Mexicans tried to thwart and push back the invaders they were labeled as cowards. The whites became legitimate rulers in no time. “It became a symbol that legitimized the white imperialist takeover. With the capture of Santa Anna later in 1836, Texas became a republic. Tejanos lost their land and, overnight, became the foreigners”. The whites became legitimate rulers because they were on the winning side and they now had the power to write history books and tell the world who was right and who was wrong. Their narrative was able to create boundaries, and whoever fell on the wrong side of the boundary was alien, and someone not normal, and they could punish and persecute with impunity. Such narratives, with time, swelled and took a life of their own. The colonial narrative spread and formulated our ways of knowing the world. One side became developed, progressive, liberal, cultured, white, straight, and the other side became the third world, underdeveloped, conservative, uncultured, blacks, queers, and so on. The world was to be known in terms of such boundaries and divisions created. Furthermore, Gloria dives into how a large chunk of land was usurped by US from Mexico. The southern front and Texas belonged to Mexico. That land was usurped, annexed, and taken away. The people on those lands were forced to displace, and their livelihood was taken away from them. “By the end of the nineteenth century, powerful landowners in Mexico, in partnership with US colonizing companies, had dispossessed millions of Indians of their lands”. That meant that the indigenous people had nowhere to go and no livelihood. In such a situation, a large chunk of the population became dependent on the colonial masters. They had no other option but to turn back to the same usurpers who had taken away their land and livelihoods. The fact that their lands and their autonomy was taken away became totally irrelevant. With time Mexicans coming on now American soil to look for employment and opportunity became foreigners coming to the land of opportunity. To this day and age, they are seen as outsiders, leeches and parasites sucking on the great American economy owing their lives to US. That is evident from the kind of narrative being perpetrated nowadays. The Mexicans live on the other side of the border. They are the outsiders, the usurpers, eating up jobs of the great American people. This is how colonized our ways of thinking and knowledge has become. Everything that is not us, everything that is not normal as per our standards, should be pushed outside the boundary. We define the normal.