Anzaldúa's "Borderlands/La Frontera" is informational, harrowing, dramatic, and sourlful. Remarkably, she is able to weave together essays and poems that inform the reader about her culture and how the modern understanding "Chicano" came to be. This book flows between Mexican, American, and Indigenous history into Anzaldúa's life, giving the writer a vivid picture of the foundation of her identity. To Anzaldúa, she is everything: an insider and outsider, indigenous and foreign, soft and strong.
This book has a lot of similarities to other female writers of color from this era: Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior" and Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" are the most recognizable. All three discuss culture, violence, gender and its expectations, whiteness, heritage, and Capitalism. For anyone who has read similar novels or collections, Anzaldúa's poetic, blunt yet purple language allows her to remain striking and individual. What emotions and images she doesn't have room to capture in her prose, she covers in the second half of the book with her poetry and lyrics, reminding the reader that her experiences are both individual and collective, reinforcing the theme of "everythingness" throughout the piece.
