There is no one Chicano experience

Gloria Anzaldua takes us on a journey of unlearning and unseeing, she makes it a point to make us aware of the colonial lens through which we view the world and she emphasizes on the need to get rid of this lens, to truly open our eyes and see the world as a world of possibilities, a world of choices, a world which isn't stuck between colonial binaries. 

The general discourse on decolonization and even somewhat of what we have discussed in class has been on the damage colonialism did, and the onus it places on the perpetrators to make up for it. This obviously is a completely valid stance; formerly colonized nations are still dealing with the after effects of colonization, they are still trying to pull themselves out of the underdevelopment they were pushed into. So the need for reparations is valid. 

However, how do you heal from the damage that reparations cannot fix? How does Saidiya Hartman locate herself in a past that doesn't even exist? How do you find a place for yourself in the world, when you can't even be yourself in it, “He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.” (Du Bois)

“What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other”

The colonial mind operated on a black and white mindset. It was obsessed with putting everything it came into contact with in certain predefined categories, a set labelled box. The concept of a borderland did not exist for the colonial mind. You are either on one side of the line, or the other, you cannot be in between. And even after colonization formally ended, this way of thinking, seeing and understanding the world did not disappear. It informed our way of knowing, which is what Gloria Anzaldua challenges by presenting us with a third choice, the choice to stand on the line rather than on either side of it. 

She flits through time, taking us further and further back till a time when colonization hadn't happened, and then she starts our journey of unseeing and unlearning from there. She doesn't just reject what her colonial past has handed her, she also questions and rejects what her indigenous past has handed to her. Her path to healing is not to find solace in a past untainted by colonization, rather, it is to find a completely new way of being which doesn't owe its existence to only one strand of her inheritance. 

"There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience."

"What I want is an accounting with all three cultures-white,. Mexican,. Indian..."

I think that while yes, this text opens us up to more divergent ways of being and thinking, it also talks about a convergence. For me at least, Gloria’s journey into the past is to look for a point of divergence, the point when all these different aspects of her identity ‘Anglo’, ‘Mexican’ and ‘Indian’ separated and to lead them to a convergence—a third way of being, a new culture 'una cultura mesitza' , which is all of these identities and more. Like the words of her book which jump from one language to the other, from poetry to prose, all converging on one page.