Trans-border thinking and practice

After thirty years, Gloria Anzalduas theory keeps moving artistic, political and academic communities. Out of my own practice of reading and rereading Borderlands, and observing its impact in different discursive cirumstances, I have come to understand that the text's immediate and lasting success lies in its quality to touch, to disrupt, to stir up, and to move. In this essay, I will discuss how Anzaldua's border thought has changed since her first publications in the 1980s and her last texts, written shortly before her passing in 2004. Furthermore, I shall sound out how different practices have interpreted Anzaldua's theory, contributing to and reinforcing transborder thinking in diverse media and formats. Two Chicana artists dealing with (crossings of) borders in specific and metaphoric ways are the filmmaker Lourdes Portillo and the writer Norma Elia Cantu; two Latina artists conceiving borders materially and symbolically are the singer Lourdes Perez and the painter Liliana Wilson.