Muting gender in the borderlands

still a bio-geopolitical open wound

Abstract

In this essay I will explore how silencing of women’s voice has a tradition conforming a discourse of the Mexican identity, that comes from their unacknowledged history, their not coming to terms with a hurting past that needs to be addressed and foreclosed. In this instance, the feminization of a defeated people justified by Doña Marina as the tongue of the conquest, leaves a psychological imprint in which the Mexican feels at a loss and abandoned by the Mother who has born the first mestizo Mexican son. At this intersection of loss of a nation, abandonment by the mother and self hate, “the loss of a sense of dignity and respect in the macho breeds a false machismo which leads him to put down women and even to brutalize them. Coexisting with his sexist behaviour is a love for the mother which takes precedence over that of all others” (Anzandúa 1987c, 83). Reconciliation with that shameful ancestrality comes with the syncretic figuration of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a mestiza Christian given goddess. Linking this national identity and iconographic representation of women/nation, I will also make a bridge between this unacknowledged history and the psychological effect of the Spanish conquest and issues dealing with the borderline between Mexico and the USA, which makes for a double conquest and the subsequent negotiations of subjectivities.