Making History from the Borderlands: Towards ?historiografías mestizas"

MOIRA PÉREZ

LL Journal

CUNY

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2015 vol. 10

1930-1693

​This paper revisits the work of Gloria Anzaldúa in order to contribute to the debate on historical distance from a ?Global South? perspective. In particular, it addresses the imperative according to which a certain temporal gap between the historian and the past would be absolutely mandatory in order to achieve an ?objective? account of the latter. The paper questions the binary opposition between closeness and distance, which would force us to choose one or the other before embarking in any study of the past. It turns the focus to that counter-site that lies between both: halfway between what is close and what is distant, where we find Gloria Anzaldúa?s Borderlands/la Frontera. In our hybrid, postcolonial realities, holding on to the modern ideal of distance fails to acknowledge the multiplicity which makes us who we are ? and who we want to be. Instead, we can rethink our perspective by adopting the idea of Borderlands, understood as the home of mestizaje, hybridity, and of enrichments born out of difference.