ABSTRACT
Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was a Chicana lesbian, feminist, theoretician, poet, author of children’s books and fiction, as well as an activist. She was born as the eldest daughter of campesinos, subsistence farmers, in the Rio Grande Valley of Southern
Texas and only began to attend school regularly when she was eleven years old. Chicanos are a culturally hybrid population, the inhabitants of the border area of Mexico and the United States, featuring the mixed strands of Mexican, American Indian, and Anglo-American culture. Originally they are of Mexican descent, but Chicanos have lived in the United States for generations, since the time this imperialist power appropriated Northern Mexico in 1848.1
The children of the Anzaldúa family were supposed to help with work in the fields and together with her mother and sister, Gloria was engaged in collecting the eggs at a chicken farm (Anzaldúa, 1987). While her mother raised Gloria to become an obedient and docile wife, who would bear children and generally behave as a secondclass citizen, her father urged her to read and study. From her earliest childhood she created her own world by reading just about everything she could lay her hands on in the local library – encyclopaedias, dictionaries, Aesop’s fables, philosophy (Smuckler, 2000 [1982]: 25) – and failing that she would read the labels on food tins. At the time of her father’s death, when she was twelve years old, her mother began to rely on her to help raise and educate the younger children and she had to return to the fields again during weekends and summers. Her experiences as a Spanish speaking brown girl in a dominant culture preferring English speaking white or light coloured boys has been of lasting influence on her life and thought (Keating, 2000: 2). Still she managed to attend university to study English and pedagogics, meanwhile teaching Chicano children at primary and secondary school. Later she would teach creative writing, Chicano studies, and feminist studies at, among others, the University of Santa Cruz in California (Anzaldúa, 1987).
