It was an unexpectedly chilly day in May 2004 when the news flashed across various electronic mailing lists that Gloria Anzaldúa had died from complications related to diabetes. I was in the midst of teaching a course on contemporary issues in feminism to a formidable group of undergraduate women and men, in which we were reading “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” and “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” These are my favorite essays from Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a text published in 1987 and still crucial to any understanding of identity and politics in feminism today. The announcement, made by Anzaldúa's coeditor and compañera, Cherrie Moraga, requested that we construct homemade shrines to honor Anzaldúa's presence and aid her passing. My classroom was in Dartmouth Hall, a venerable eighteenth-century building only a stone's throw from Baker Library, whose tower sports a weathervane with the image of Dartmouth's founder, Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, teaching a crosslegged, befeathered, and pipe-smoking Indian, Samson Occom, his most famous student, beneath the symbolic lone pine. Into the graywalled room, I brought objects that seemed out of place there and incendiary: candles, flowers, incense, and books—an armful of wellthumbed volumes containing the nearly talismanic words, her own and those of others, that Anzaldúa struggled to bring into print.

Where are human rights when more than 200 Muslims are rotting for months in your prisons in a 4x5-meter room, without any of them finding a place even to sit down? Where are human rights when every day prisoners are tortured at the hands of drunken pagans? Where are human rights when Muslims are killed as a result of the torture of your executioners, and their bodies are thrown out in the open? (“Jaish Ansar al-Sunnah”)

Knowing of Gloria Anzaldúa's work from her 1981 coedited volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color when I came across Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) at a gay and lesbian bookstore, I immediately picked it up. It would not be altogether hyperbolic to say that amid the contingencies of life and reading, that was one of my luckiest finds.

Many of us say with a smug surprise: “the Law is founded on its own transgressions.” This may be a convenient aphorism that carries within it the memory—in most cases a textual memory not necessarily elaborated by the user—of Lacan's explanations of the Law of the Father, or of Derrida's meditations on perjury, or, rather, par-jure because ultimately Derrida carefully stopped short at the irreducibility of idioms, the limits of the translatability of philosophies.

Many liberals endorse an ideal of neutrality for the state when it comes to its relations with people of distinct identities. One model in the United States has been a certain understanding of the First Amendment, with its careful balancing of free exercise, on the one hand, and nonestablishment, on the other. In recent work I have defended such a liberal conception, which I call “neutrality as equal respect.” The basic idea is simple: state acts shouldn't disadvantage individuals because of their identities. This notion of neutrality might help flesh out what happens when we try to generalize the First Amendment paradigm from religious groups to identity groups more generally. One obvious test for such an analysis is to ask what help it offers us in thinking about how liberal states should treat language minorities.