THE POETIC ESSAY OF GLORIA ANZALDÚA AND THE CHICANO DIASPORA

Abstract

The following text was developed in parallel to the doctoral thesis research entitled The diaspora as identity and belonging in contemporary immigration. When I say that it is in a parallel way, it is because its development has been bearing witness to my reflections as a "foretaste of conclusions" so that I can now present it in full, at the end of the writing of the thesis, as my analysis of the importance of studying the complexity in the identity of women who belong to a diaspora.  as is the case of the Chicanas or the Afro-Mexicans. At first, I desired to focus my research on the life trajectories of Afro-Mexican women; Time, material, and the pandemic invited me to narrow down my field. However, my work has been cut but within the horizon in which I have been entering, which is to understand such identity from the hybridity or syncretism, which can be configured between two or more cultures. This work of understanding, or of comprehensive analysis, seemed to me increasingly fundamental because it provides foundations to provide feminist and decolonial research with a transversal axis of a critical hermeneutical nature (criticism, deconstruction, and analysis) that moves between different disciplines. My position has been shaped by the acceptance that when venturing into such a controversial issue, it has been necessary to see it from different areas of specialty and specificity. That is why I have started from the premise that immigrant women are pariahs, who live their daily lives in an environment of harassment, violence, rejection and social discrimination, and that to stop being invisible, there is a conscience that motivates them to seek their place in the world, without renouncing their cultural identities. To be heard and recognized through art, political activism, or incorporation into groups of women forming collectives. The importance of understanding this movement and the struggles it entails from the point of view of difference and social minorities lies in the fact that this understanding is necessary to deconstruct feminism and what it means to be a poor and immigrant woman – racialized and violated – within countries (both in national and regional universes) that sustain cultural hegemony and promote individuality among people. This generally breaks the social networks that many of them continue to weave and sustain internally through their families or with people close to them. My experience in this research has highlighted the importance of the comprehensive practices that emerge in these networks, providing elements to recognize themselves from their cultural roots —from the mother tongue, ethnicity or being part of one or more cultures—, and constitute a fundamental resource in the configuration of the critical thinking of these women. Since, the analysis they make of the patriarchal system (and of all the colonial and alienating variants that it implies), from their life experiences, creates in them a political-social consciousness, which incites them to fight for recognition, based on their difference; only that the manifestations of this understanding and its practices are not necessarily expressed in conventional languages and formats and challenge or summon, as the case may be, a philosophical openness that, as I have assumed, involves certain risks.