Moving La Frontera Towards a Genuine Radical Democracy in Gloria Anzaldúa's Work

ABSTRACT This article situates Gloria Anzaldúa's work Borderlands/La Fronterain the context of staid, heterosexist academia and conventional readings of the Latin American mestizaje to show how the book has subverted both. By examining how Borderlandshas been received and how it ironically anticipates these hierarchical readings, we can see the functioning of the elitist, exclusionary processes that manufacture subaltern identities within societies and within academia.