For several years now, at least since the 2000 census, the United States has in one way or another told itself that it needs to come to terms with what it means to live in a country of over forty million Latinos/as. Latina actors grace the covers of People magazine, Latin beats percolate through the earbuds of iPods, and McDonald's serves up breakfast burritos alongside its McMuffins. In the academic world, the increasing consciousness of the Latino/a presence in the United States means that it is now unthinkable for any major university not to have a program of studies focusing on the histories and cultures of this ill-defined population; it means border theory is increasingly present on our syllabi; and it means that we all nod our heads wisely when the name “Gloria Anzaldúa” is mentioned. For years before her untimely death, Anzaldúa complained bitterly about being “repeatedly tokeni[zed]” (“Haciendo Caras” xvi), as one of the same half dozen women continually called on as a resource for academic collaboration. Being a token meant that she saw clearly how she was both overhyped and treated less than seriously; worse, she felt drained of the energy that would allow her to continue her literary and political work.

As the First “Total” War of the Twentieth century, World War I marked a turning point in the understanding of what Goya had called the disasters of war. The years 1914–18 witnessed a difficult struggle to recognize and defend civilian rights in wartime, rights that had primarily been defined as those of soldiers and prisoners of war, under the Taws and Customs of War on Tand, established at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. Wartime conditions that blurred lines between civilian and combatant unleashed violations of civilians' human rights that the conventions had not anticipated. The ensuing debate during the Great War exemplified the growing complexity of disputes about human rights. In particular, it revealed that competing claims of victimization could exacerbate reprisals in the confusion of combat. In a duel of countercharges, states published documentation carrying titles that denounced enemy indifference to the “law of nations,” such as Die volkerrechtswidrige Fuhrung des belgischen Volkskriegs (“The Conduct of the Belgian People's War in Violation of the Taw of Nations” [1915]) and Rapports… en vue de constater les actes commis par l'ennemi en violation du droit des gens (“Reports … to Record Enemy Actions in Violation of the Taw of Nations” [1915]). A “war of words” raged, as well as a war of dumdum bullets that spread on impact, poison gas, and aerial bombardment—all instruments of war that had been explicitly banned by the conventions of the preceding years.

The Rio Grande Valley, also known as the Magic Valley, is situated in the southeastern tip of Texas, circumscribed on the east by the Gulf of Mexico and on the south by the Rio Grande and the Mexican borderlands. Here, among the tall, green, swaying palm trees, the short, squatty mesquite trees, and the endless rows of verdant agricultural fields, Gloria Anzaldúa grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. The Magic Valley has produced a series of distinguished scholars, poets, and novelists, including Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, the Saldivar clan (Sonia Saldivar-Hull, Ramon Saldivar, and José Saldivar), Américo Paredes, and of course Anzaldúa. Although I do not claim the same stature as the above luminaries, I too grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1940s and 1950s, in a tiny town called Rio Hondo, population 701, which is but a few miles from Hargill, Texas, where Anzaldúa was born (1942) and raised. It is from this personal perspective, of one who grew up in the rich farmlands of the Magic Valley and experienced the economic and sociohistorical context of the era, that I propose to discuss Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Specifically, I focus on the sense of place, race, language, and sexuality that characterized the area and Anzaldúa's brilliant insights in the narrative she wove and reconfigured in the pages of Borderlands.

One of the most compelling criticisms to emerge during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings called attention to the fact that those who benefited from the everyday policies and practices of the apartheid regime were neither identified as complicit in perpetuating systemic violence nor called to account. Nor was their implicated position in the apartheid state extensively analyzed in the commission's report. Commenting at the time on the inadequacy of the TRC process to identify beneficiaries of the apartheid regime and expose its structural violence, Mahmood Mamdani wrote that the TRC “has been interested only in violations outside the law, in benefits which are corruptions, but not in the systematic benefit which was conferred on beneficiaries at the expense of the vast majority of people in this country” (“Reconciliation” 3; also qtd. in Young 149). Mamdani here asserts that the ethical concept of the beneficiary is central to truth telling, reconciliation, and transitional nation building. His trenchant critique implicitly questions whether the truth-and-reconciliation project, relying as it does on the management of justice through the juridical statuses of “victim” and “perpetrator,” can deliver on its promise of addressing injustice and the aftereffects of radical injury and harm. Those positioned neither as victims nor as perpetrators are not called to recognize the benefits to them of structural violence, through which power, privilege, and “corporeal vulnerability” are unevenly distributed (Butler, Precarious Life 30). Nor are they asked to “bear moral responsibility to redress” the consequences of injustice (Mamdani, “Diminished Truth” 183). In response to Mamdani's critique, we want to consider how the ethical stance of the beneficiary can become visible in relation to victim and perpetrator positions and to what effect.

In time, the Texas-born and California-rooted Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004) may be regarded as a key American writer of our late twentieth century. In the interim, she is a foundational figure for the fields, markets, and affects known as Latina/o—studies, literature, theory, and metaphysics. Her most traveled concepts, such as “borderlands,” have also made a good impression in more legitimized areas of intellectual inquiry, including postcolonial theory and cultural studies. This last achievement has led the critic Frances R. Aparicio to note that the notion of “border subject” elaborated by Anzaldúa and others has “been the most important concept that Latino studies has contributed to cultural studies in the United States, Europe, and Latin America” (13).

In August 2005, America's three major TV news networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS — refused to air a thirty-second advertisement that called them out for shirking their journalistic duty. Prepared by an activist group trying to bring attention to the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan, the ad uses clips from offending newscasts and admonishes the networks for devoting far more time to covering the so-called runaway bride, the Michael Jackson trial, and Tom Cruise's love life than the bloodshed in Sudan. A scolding, stentorian voice-over declares, “You can't stop a genocide if you don't know about it.” And it urges, “Genocide is news. Tell the media to be a witness” (BeAWitness.org). The networks didn't offer any excuses when they rejected the shaming ad, but a month earlier, in the industry magazine Editor and Publisher, newspaper top brass around the country defended their own neglect of the story: John Yearwood, the world editor of the Miami Herald, explained, “If we don't cover the Michael Jacksons, that will be our demise. That is what the public wants. But we ought to make the commitment to also give Darfur or Rwanda attention if we can.” Knight Ridder's foreign editor, Steve Butler, offered an only slightly more dignified justification. “We have been keeping our Iraq coverage going and that is a more important story,” he told Editor and Publisher. “It has US soldiers there, people are very interested in it, and it lends itself better to breaking news” (qtd. in Strupp).