Gloria Anzaldúa: Place, Race, Language, and Sexuality in the Magic Valley

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The Rio Grande Valley, also known as the Magic Valley, is situated in the southeastern tip of Texas, circumscribed on the east by the Gulf of Mexico and on the south by the Rio Grande and the Mexican borderlands. Here, among the tall, green, swaying palm trees, the short, squatty mesquite trees, and the endless rows of verdant agricultural fields, Gloria Anzaldúa grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. The Magic Valley has produced a series of distinguished scholars, poets, and novelists, including Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, the Saldivar clan (Sonia Saldivar-Hull, Ramon Saldivar, and José Saldivar), Américo Paredes, and of course Anzaldúa. Although I do not claim the same stature as the above luminaries, I too grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1940s and 1950s, in a tiny town called Rio Hondo, population 701, which is but a few miles from Hargill, Texas, where Anzaldúa was born (1942) and raised. It is from this personal perspective, of one who grew up in the rich farmlands of the Magic Valley and experienced the economic and sociohistorical context of the era, that I propose to discuss Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Specifically, I focus on the sense of place, race, language, and sexuality that characterized the area and Anzaldúa's brilliant insights in the narrative she wove and reconfigured in the pages of Borderlands.