Making Oppositional Culture, Making Standpoint: a Journey into Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands

The theory of oppositional culture, as discussed by Bonnie Mitchell and Joe Feagin (1995), suggests that African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans draw on their own cultural resources to resist domination. Patricia Hill Collins suggests that Black women develop a unique vision of the social world based on their position within a matrix of domination that organizes intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender, among others. Expression of this unique vision or standpoint, however, is rendered problematic within a matrix of domination organized via four domains of power—the structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal (Collins 2000). This article suggests that Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing—her storytelling, narratives, and poetry—is a significant form of oppositional culture and contributes to the achievement of a Chicana feminist standpoint within a matrix of domination as Anzaldúa shares tales of living in the borderlands. The paper provides a brief analysis of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands=La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987).