Gloria Anzaldua’s Aztlan: the Homeland

In her testify La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua provides a detailed history of the persecution of the Chi cigareto settlers of the U. S. Southwest at the reach of their Anglo oppressors. Anzaldua refers to the Aztlan, the borderlands between the United States and Mexico encompassing parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, as a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundarythe prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitantsthe squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome.I prevail the authors utilization of the word queer to describe the Aztlan peoples oddly interesting, as it draws a recognizable parallel between the historical struggles of Chicanos with the allow tribulations of the LGBTQ community in modern America. Anzaldua accuses The Gringothe fiction of white superiority of clutch complete power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it and even goes so far as to make ment ion of Anglo act of terrorism.The authors characterizations of the oppressive actions of the political-ruling white class towards the Chicano people can just as easily be applied to recent command crafted by several right-leaning politicians that serves only to strip LGBTQ individuals of their civil rights and to designate express persons as second class citizens.These statutes include the recently invalidated proposal 8 here in California as well as the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, which would have forbidden gay couples from enjoying the identical marriage benefits as heterosexual spouses, current state laws or primitive amendments in 35 states that define marriage as being just between a man and a woman, and current anti-sodomy laws aimed squarely at gay couples in 13 states that remain on the books despite such laws being outlawed by the US Supreme Court 10 years ago.Such anti-gay legislation is identical in prejudicial and persecutory cooking stove as recent anti-im migration legislation enacted in Arizona and Alabama that seeks to nuzzle on the civil rights of Latin Americans in those states, who face imprisonment and exile for non-compliance. As described by Anzaldua, the continuous berating of the Chicano people, faceless, nameless, invisible, taunted with hey cucaracho and mojado is ll too similar to the constant torment faced by members of the LGBTQ community by bigoted members of the oppressive majority, such as being verbally assaulted as fags, queers, homos, and more worse. Gloria Anzaldua eloquently equates the Chicano struggles with their Anglo imperial masters in the Aztlan with the LGBTQ struggle for civil rights in modern American society, and unfortunately, these fights will have to both continue to be waged will into the foreseeable future.