To Be at Borderlands is to Be at Home

 The colonized world had always entailed a reduction of possibilities; it bred a Manichean world, a compartmentalized world, in which you could either belong to the White compartment or the Black. Your inheritance was an unchangeable reality, and an undeniable fact of your existence. If this characterized a colonized world, then what does the decolonized world ought to be like? It simply cannot invert the compartments; sure black can be the new white but it is still indeed a compartment, secluding you, predefining you, and imprisoning you from imagining beyond. Then, to decolonize means to overcome these compartments, transcend the color boundaries, recognize a multitude of possibilities- the possibilities of inhabiting the Borderlands, the “alien” consciousness, or the “mestiza consciousness” - the possibilities of existing and belonging in isolation of the compartments. 

Borderlands are possibilities for a more divergent world. Anzaldua distinguishes between acting and reacting. To invert the compartments is to react. It is not enough to remain situated on the “opposite river bank” and challenge “White conventions,” as this constraints us into a “duel of oppressor and oppressed;” a cyclical combat which reduces both as a “common denominator of violence.”Everything is limited and dependent upon what one is reacting against. However, a new consciousness seeks to abandon the “opposite bank.” The possibilities are manifold once we decide to act and not react. The mestiza has to overcome her psychological borders; shift from convergent thinking to divergent thinking, which defies “set patterns and goals,” and approaches a more whole perspective, which includes rather than excludes. The mestiza fosters “tolerance for ambiguity.” She learns to be Mexican, Indian, and Anglo simultaneously. She has a “plural personality” – a personality which inhabits the world in more than one way.

Borderlands are possibilities to break from the compartmentalized consciousness and develop a new one. Anzaldua learns to uproot the dualistic or compartmentalized mode of thinking and embraces a collective. She is not just the “creature of light” or the “creature of darkness;” she is a creature who questions the definitions of light and dark and “gives them new meanings.” She questions what she inherited from her ancestors. She puts her inheritance through a sieve, reinterprets history and shapes new myths. She becomes more tolerant of ambiguity, makes herself vulnerable to foreign ways of knowing and thinking, and relinquishes the familiar. She deconstructs and constructs. She enters a new consciousness; a consciousness which “transforms the small into the Self.” The mestizo is indeed an example of how “all blood is intricately woven together,” and that we are all created of “similar souls.” It is a consciousness which accepts all and rejects none. It is a consciousness which has a room for all at the rendez-vous of victory.

To be at the Borderlands is therefore to be not at loss, but to be at the site of possibilities; possibilities which conceive of a new consciousness weaving into a different kind of a future. Possibilities which neither return to pages of history nor align with the future that Whiteness yearns for. Possibilities which respond to singularity with plurality, and convergence with divergence. Possibilities which are numerous once we decide to act and not react. Possibilities which emerge with our act of recognizing the loss, inhabiting the loss, and finding possibilities through the loss. Possibilities which when met with closure move towards decoloniality and decolonized futures. Possibilities which make the world kinder and more accommodating; possibilities which make the world home.