Messy Archives and Materials That Matter: Making Knowledge with the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua Papers

When Gloria Anzaldua died in 2004, she gave birth to an enormous archive; indeed, she left far more unpublished writings than works published in her lifetime. What's more, Anzaldua was a compulsive reviser, and her archive includes ten to twenty unique drafts of some works, along with doodles, ticket stubs, and other ephemera. This collection of material decenters what we previously thought constituted her literary corpus, knocking the presumed author of Borderlands / La Frontera off her axis. The process of sifting through these materials changed my thinking about authority, textuality, identity, and many other things. My obsession with this archive has led me to reexamine the ways in which we produce, reproduce, and coproduce knowledge in archival work. In this essay, I show how recognizing the multiple material actants at work in this archive transforms conventional thought about archives, in general, and Anzalduan studies, in particular.