JE #9

Personally, Entry Denied, was one of the most decolonizing (I desist from using "enlightening," due to its deno/connotation) historigraphical account of the United States' border. Understanding border security and patrolling from a feminist and gender critical lens has allowed me to further understand the mechanisms of power that operate on my hometown (Tijuana). After reading this book, I cease to feel or think of myself as a "crazy and obsessively critical" border-dweller that grew-up with and continues to carry the heteropatriarchal imposed borders in her body. Now I can assuringly state that the "light-post" that illuminates the border area next to the Pacific coast in Tijuana, is nothing more than a Foucauldian Panopticon.

La Facultad is an Anzalduan term that I almost innately identified (like mimesis), understand fully, and continuously appply in different aspects of mine and other's lives. Due to the fact that I am a lesbian Mexican (in America, or vice versa?) woman who has experienced her queer sexulaity in a lesbian homophobic space, and thus having to lead a semi-closeted lifestyle, has helped me attune and be in exact synchronicity with my facultad (faculty or ability to sense danger).   

I think that after reading Borderlands/La Frontera multiple times, and Anazlduan borderlands theory in different periods of her writing, and read the development of the theory through the different editions, I feel free to say that I more or less find no diffilucty in understanding Anzaldua's concepts. 

Like Anzaldua and Prof. Gaspar de Alba have explained, the process of la nueva mestiza is non-linear and follows a constantly cyclical rythm. That said, I think I have underwent many cycles of mestiza consciouness since my first encounter with Anzaldúa (in 2012), and in each cycle I am overcoming a new border. For this cycle, I have to say that the linguistic border has been the one I have been combating and painfully challenging. Thus, for my linguistic border cycle, I would have to say I am currently transitioning from the linguistic terrorism into the phase where I tell my story (hence). ¡Soy Pocha, y que! (Oh! how I longed to say that!!).