ABSTRACT
The persistence into the 1990s of discourses and practices that reinscribe the margin and the center indicates the problems inherent in theorizing 'difference'. Cultural studies would appear to provide ideal terrain for the mapping of this new paradigm, with its 'commitment to examining cultural practices from the point of view of relations of power' and its understanding of culture as both 'object of study and site of political critique and intervention'. Borderlands juxtaposes essays and poetry, political theory and cultural practice, not separating one from the other but producing a fusion of the two, a 'theory in the flesh'. A contextualized reading of both Parts One and Two locates mestiza consciousness and the indigenous, particularly Coatlicue, within a textual movement that replicates the movement of border consciousness itself. This process, constantly 'breaking down the unitary aspect' of each previous textual moment, leaves no home but the discursive production of consciousness itself, a consciousness linked with political activity.
