This chapter argues that Western border thinking emerges concurrent with early formulations of conquest and labor management. Tracing an arc that begins with Spanish philosopher Juan Maldonado and concludes with African philosopher Achille Mbembe, the chapter discusses the utility of borders to the concepts of self, property, and freedom. It further argues that such conceptual work of borders has also been challenged and reconceptualized by contemporary poets and novelists including, most famously, Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as Sandra Cisneros, Alfredo Aguilar, and Eric Gansworth (Tuscarora). Each of these attend to the ways borders serve as generators of revenue for states and as abjection machines, but also as places of habitation, as processes, and as dense horizontalities, rather than as fixtures on a nested hierarchy of scales.

This chapter examines ideological underpinnings of the Spanish–Indian binary in Mexican and Mexican American indigenism and mestizaje. In a reassessment of Chicanx literary history, it looks at the life and writings of sixteenth-century Dominican cleric, Bartolomé de las Casas, and twentieth-century Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa. Las Casas has long been considered a literary precursor to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican American literature, as well as Latinx literature more broadly. Gloria Anzaldúa remains one of the most celebrated and influential late twentieth-century Chicana writers. More specifically, this analysis urges a reconsideration of las Casas’s founding influence, foregrounding his almost lifelong support for the enslavement of African people, as it also explores contemporary vestiges of the anti-Blackness strategically at the center of las Casas’s defense of Indigenous people of the Americas.

This chapter reads María Cristina Mena’s “The Birth of the God of War” (1914) alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the Coyolxauhqui imperative in Light in the Dark/Luz in lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015) to theorize brown modernism. Building on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, who theorizes a “sense of brown” that emerges from a felt community based on brownness,” I contend that Mena’s and Anzaldúa’s engagement with Aztec myths allows them to theorize brownness by centering indigeneity through a feminist lens. In this way, both authors illuminate the divergent modernities that attend their depictions and engagement with indigeneity. Focusing on brown modernism over white modernism illuminates how different modernisms have their own temporalities as brown modernism drags modernist aesthetics deeper into the twentieth century. Moreover, this chapter shows how, in taking up an explicit engagement with indigeneity, brown modernism stresses the importance of having such conversations, particularly when such engagements are uncomfortable and problematic. Doing so allows for a deeper accounting of the kinship between Chicanxs – and Latinxs more broadly – and indigeneity.

Edited by two Chicana lesbian feminists and formed through commitment to coalitional Third World feminist analysis and practice, This Bridge Called My Back urges us to attend to the conflicts and pleasures that emerge from the radical transformation of the self in relation to others as we struggle for liberation. In the forty years since the anthology’s original publication, we continue to bear witness to the destructive outcomes of neoliberalism and to those who are still consigned to disproportionately bear the brunt of modernity’s violence. We are compelled to address the betrayals of those spaces of solidarity and the use of violence to reclaim difference as an amenity of traditional power. Making domination “make sense” often occurs by recruiting representatives of subordinated populations into normative locations of institutional power. The tokenized investment in women of color as fixed symbols of progressive politics illustrates how even the celebration of racial difference can function as a technology of racist power. I argue that bridge building is also about place making or the radical vision of a space for new social relations and terms of recognition. Radical methodologies for creating art participate in this process of gathering political will to oppose racial power.

This chapter begins from a concern about the extent to which “diaspora” is one of a number of concepts that threatens to be swallowed up by the newly-dominant institutional category of “world literature,” and goes on to discuss what stands to be lost as a result, as well as how we might proceed differently. Forgetting diaspora, it argues, impoverishes our attempts to think literature in an internationalist framework; this contribution is thus an attempt to assist in the act of remembering. In particular, the chapter makes a case for reading Palestinian literature diasporically as a move toward a world literature that reads work not just “globally,” but with an eye toward internationalism.