Queer Chicana feminist theorist. Borderlands/La Frontera, nepantla, mestiza consciousness: identity and living between worlds.
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942–2004) grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas and wrote the book that gave a generation a vocabulary for the in-between. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza came out in 1987, switching between English, Spanish, Nahuatl and Tex-Mex on the same page, because the argument and the form had to match: a border is not only a line on a map, it is a condition you live inside.
Nepantla, the Nahuatl word for the space in the middle, is her term for that condition — not a stopover on the way to belonging somewhere, but a place you think from. Mestiza consciousness is what she calls the mind that develops there: one that can hold contradiction without resolving it. She also co-edited This Bridge Called My Back with Cherríe Moraga in 1981, which put women of colour feminism into print on its own terms rather than as a footnote to anyone else's.