Culture
- “Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communication. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture” (38).
- “To separate from my culture (as from my family) I had to feel competent enough on the outside and secure enough inside to live life on my own” (43).
Language
- “Chicanas use nosotros whether we’re male or female. We are robbed of our female bing by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse” (76).
- “So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin in linguistic identity – I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself…[A]s long as I accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate” (81).
- “Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together – who we were, what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become” (85).
Modes
- “An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture languages precedes thinking in worlds; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness” (91).
Mestiza
- “characterized by movement away from set principles and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes” (101)
- “The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity…She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralist mode – nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (101)
- “In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. The third element is a new consciousness – a mestiza consciousness” (101-2).
- “The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (102).
- “The struggle of the mestiza is above all a feminist one” (106).
Knowledge/The Mind
- “In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence. Not only was the brain split in two functions but so was reality. Thus people who inhabit both realties are forced to live in the interface between the two, forced to become adept at switching modes” (59).
- “Knowledge makes me more aware, it makes me more conscious. ‘Knowing’ is painful because after ‘it’ happens I can’t stay in the same place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before” (70).
Key Term
- Borderlands: The Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (Preface)