Sooner in her introduction, Gloria Anzaldua (2001, p. 7) says she is committed to a writing that doesn’t respond to a dominant white structure and doesn’t reproduce the same structure that she rebels against. This spoke volumes to my academic journey, because I spend loads of my time responding to structures that don’t have anything with my territory, or my subject questions, or bring some enlightenment of a dominant perspective, on the contrary, I feel that I have to take a big detour just to be validated, and after that (if some space remains) I’m allowed to disserte about the real subject. Who put these pathetic boundaries on me, by the way?

Reading Gloria is such a freeing experience because she cuts to the chase and is unapologetic about it. The way she presents spiritual life, and the connections she forms to the artistic production as a form of healer/healing, is a way to create a reality. Better written, it’s a way to show us, readers, how part of reality works because her knowledge is here before we’ve noticed it.

Gloria is grounded on realities, as the bridge she says in the third chapter. It’s impossible not to mention a reality that’s happening right now between Israel and Palestine, not because we have a lack of wars globally, but this one has been printed over the US journals in the last few days. How could we talk about wounds, how could we still talk about the collective wound made by September 11th if we cannot problematize and allocate how the participation of the US over several contributes to this? As Anzaldua pointed out:

One hundred fifty thousand were killed and fifty thousand disappeared in Guatemala after the cia-sponsored coup in 1954. More than two million were killed in Vietnam. U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the apartheid regime in South Africa, Suharto’s dictatorship in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines, and Israel’s various occupations of Palestinian territories. (2001. p. 13)

Civilians. Civilians always pay the bill: Palestinians, Israelis, and North Americans. Civilians. What is shocking is how civilians, most specifically, academics, who have to build a critical logic over all aspects in their fields, how academics could not be thinking over it?

The debris of war – actual and past – changes the very center of collective cultural memory. In art, we can say (agreeing with Gloria) that it alters the aesthetics. When a border artist brings to the surface a trace of their own reality that is not on the aesthetics acceptable, usually, the status quo calls it “anti-aesthetics” (as if aesthetics wasn’t an identitary fiction itself). That place now seems to be a green sign, to go on and continue this exact artistic investigation, in a place where I can own my gender, my territory, and my identity at the same time that I can invent a new narrative of what was lost in war(s).