La Mexicana en la Chicana: The Mexican Sources of Anzaldúa’s Inter-American Philosophy

This paper examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands. We demonstrate how Anzaldúa developed an Inter-American Philosophy of Mexicanness, effectively contributing to what Manuel Vargas has recently characterized as the “multi-generational project to pursue philosophy from and about Mexican circumstances.” More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting archival research using the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we discuss here are, in alphabetical order: Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Jorge Carrión (1913-2005), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Miguel León-Portilla (1926- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), and José Vasconcelos (1882-1959).