Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004

Biographical Sketch

Internationally recognized cultural theorist, creative writer, and independent scholar Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was born on September 26, 1942 in Raymondville, Texas, to Urbano and Amalia Anzaldúa. She worked in a wide variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, anthologies, and children’s books. One of the first openly lesbian Chicana writers, Anzaldúa played a major role in redefining Chicana/o, queer, feminist, and female identities, and in developing inclusionary movements for social justice. Her theories of mestizaje, the borderlands, and the new mestiza, as well as her code-switching, have had an impact far beyond the field of Chicano/a studies. Her insistence on community and coalition-building united feminist concerns with issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, health, and spirituality. Anzaldúa also played a formative role in the development of Queer Theory.

The eldest child of four, Anzaldúa was raised in South Texas. She spent her earliest years on Jesus María, a ranch settlement in the Rio Grande Valley. During this time, her family lived on the various ranches on Jesus María, and one year traveled to West Texas, where they worked as migrant farmers. When she was eleven, the family moved to Hargill, Texas in order to provide the children with greater educational opportunities. Anzaldúa’s intimate knowledge of the South Texas landscape, gained through working on various farms and ranches in order to help with expenses, coupled with her awareness from an early age of the Valley’s legacy of racial discrimination and Tejano land dispossession, influenced her work profoundly. An avid reader as a child, Gloria began experimenting with writing through journal entries, poetry, and short fiction while still in high school. She graduated from Edinburg High School in 1962, and enrolled in Texas Woman’s University that fall. Unable to pay tuition beyond the first year, she withdrew, worked for two years, and began attending Pan-American University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English in 1969.

Anzaldúa taught pre-school, special education classes, and high school for several years in the Valley, while also attending summer graduate classes at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her master’s degree in English and Education in 1972. She then served as a liaison between migrant camps and school officials in Indiana, and it was during her time there that she began her writing in earnest. In 1974, Anzaldúa decided to return to the University of Texas at Austin to continue her graduate studies at the doctoral level in literature. During these years, Anzaldúa also worked with a variety of political groups, including MECHA, farm worker protests, and feminist organizations and consciousness-raising groups. While at UTA, Anzaldúa taught a course called “La Mujer Chicana” and realized the profound lack of published materials by and about U.S. women of color. This awareness was the first step in her decision to edit the anthology which would later become This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Resolving to dedicate herself and her life to her writing, she moved to San Francisco, where she juggled a number of temporary jobs in order to devote time to her writing. Two years later, after experiencing discrimination at a writing workshop, Anzaldúa formulated the call for papers for her groundbreaking anthology of women-of-color writing. She had also recently met Cherríe Moraga at a Feminist Writer's Guild meeting held at Old Wives Tales Bookstore; a few months later, she asked Moraga to co-edit the anthology.

The 1980s were a prolific period for Anzaldúa’s poetry and fiction, as she moved from San Francisco to New York and attended various writers’ retreats and workshops. She also began to travel around the country doing her “gigs,” or speaking engagements, as recognition of her work mounted after the release of This Bridge Called My Back. Much of her writing between 1984 to 1986, including a small portion of her extensive poetry and a parts of a manuscript entitled "La serpiente que se come su cola," ultimately found its way into Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which was published in 1987.

In 1988 Anzaldúa was accepted into the Ph.D. program in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While teaching a women’s studies class at UCSC, she assembled a course reader that became the basis for the anthology Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras, published in 1990. In 1991, she began work on her dissertation. Tentatively titled “Lloronas--Women Who Wail: (Self)Representation and the Production of Writing, Knowledge, and Identity,” this dissertation focused on consciousness, writing, knowledge production, identity, resistance and agency, especially as these issues impact Chicana/mestizas and other “post-colonial cultural” women. However, the demands of her professional life as a writer and speaker, together with the diagnosis of Type I diabetes in the early 1990s, compelled her to put aside her graduate work for the time being. During the mid 1990s, she published two children’s books, Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del Otro Lado and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/Prietita y la llorona, and drafted several others. Throughout her life, Anzaldúa gave approximately 100 interviews. Noting that interviews were, like writing, an important part of communicating, she published in 2000 with AnaLouise Keating the collection Interviews/Entrevistas, which included selected interviews from 1982 to 1999. In 2001, Anzaldúa returned to her doctoral work. Rather than continue with the dissertation she had drafted in the early 1990s, she entirely revised her dissertation project, incorporating previously published essays and writing several new chapters. Again collaborating with Keating, she published the highly anticipated anthology, this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation, in 2002.

Throughout her successful career as a writer, theorist, and activist, Anzaldúa continued to teach, which she loved to do. She taught formally through Vermont College’s Adult Degree Program in the 1980s, several writer-in-residence and visiting professor appointments, and through Women’s Voices, a creative writing workshop at UC Santa Cruz. She also taught and collaborated more informally, organizing writing groups for women of color. Her book on the writing process was one of many projects she was working on when she passed away.

Anzaldúa received many honors and awards during her lifetime, including the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for This Bridge Called My Back, the Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award, the Lesbian Rights Award, the Sappho Award of Distinction, and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Borderlands was named one of the 38 best books of 1987 by the Library Journal, and was selected by the Utne Reader for inclusion in their Loose Canon, a list of 150 works that “broaden, deepen, or define the experience of being alive.” The Utne Reader also featured her as one of their Utne Visionaries of 1996. She was awarded her Ph.D. in literature, posthumously, by the University of California Santa Cruz.

Gloria Anzaldúa died on 15 May 2004 at her home in Santa Cruz, California, due to diabetes-related complications.

Works Referenced:

• Anzaldua, Gloria. Interview with Karin Ikas. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1987. By Gloria Anzaldua. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. 227-246.
• - - -. Interviews/Entrevistas. Ed. AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• - - -. Introduction. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 1990.. xv-xxviii.
• Keating, AnaLouise. “Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa.” ColorLines (Fall 2004): 42.
• Keating, AnaLouise, and Randy Conner. “Rest in Peace, Gloria.” Making Face, Making Soul: a Chicana feminist homepage. 16 Oct. 2004. 30 Aug. 2006. http://gloria.chicanas.com/keatingobit.html.

Photograph by Annie F. Valva.

Scope and Contents Note

Personal and biographical materials, correspondence, written works, research materials, photographs, audiovisual materials, and artifacts document the life and career of Chicana scholar, writer, teacher, and activist Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa. The papers are arranged following as closely as possible Anzaldúa’s original organization, in nine series: Personal and Biographical, Correspondence, Written Works, Gigs and Teaching, Phone Logs, Calendars and Address Books, Photographs and Audiovisual Materials, Collected Materials, Oversized Materials and Artifacts, and the Gloria Anzaldúa Library. Researchers should note that some materials are temporarily restricted at the request of the Anzaldúa Literary Trust.

Series one,    Personal and Biographical, is a small series that contains Anzaldúa’s birth certificate, diplomas and awards, high school and college yearbooks, materials relating to her interest in spirituality and the occult, information relating to diabetes, and a collection of her obituaries, memorials, and tributes. Anzaldúa's personal journals also make up part of this series, but at in keeping with Anzaldúa's wishes they are closed to researchers for a period of 20 years.

Series two,    Correspondence, contains letters written to and by Anzaldúa. The files are arranged primarily alphabetically by individual or organization name, though there is a subseries of correspondence arranged by subject, such as her writing and reprint correspondence, or letters relating to projects such as the Mundo Zurdo reading series or the Third World Women Speakers List. Included among the many correspondents are Norma Alarcon, Ruth Behar, Beth Brant, Norma Cantú, Chrystos, Jamie Lee Evans, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, AnaLouise Keating, Cherrie Moraga, Elana Nachman/Dykewomon, Emma Perez, Adrienne Rich, Chela Sandoval, and Luisah Teish, and organizations the National Association of Chicano/Chicana Studies, the Smithsonian Institution, the journal Sinister Wisdom, PEN American Center, and the National Women’s Studies Association. Other noted names present in the collection are Rudolfo Anaya, Joan Baez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and the White House.

Series three,    Written Works, includes manuscripts, production materials, and correspondence relating to Anzaldúa’s poetry, fiction, books, essays, and articles, both published and unpublished. The works are arranged alphabetically by title. Anzaldúa's larger published works--Borderlands/La Frontera, Interviews/Entrevistas, Making Face, Making Soul, This Bridge Called My Back, and this bridge we call home--are listed first. Other works, both published and unpublished, are then listed alphabetically in Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, and Editorial categories. Anzaldúa's dissertation and other graduate student work is next, followed by Writing Notes, Speeches, Interviews, and Works (by others) About Anzaldúa. The section of interviews, an especially rich part of the collection, contains transcripts and other related documentation for some of the many interviews Anzaldúa participate in during her lifetime; copies of interview recordings can be found below in Series 6: Photographs and Audiovisual Materials. At the request of the Anzaldúa Literary Trust some manuscripts in this series are temporarily closed to researchers until publication plans can be finalized.

Series four,    Gigs and Teaching, contains correspondence, publicity, administrative materials, and some written works related to her speaking engagements. This series is arranged chronologically. This series also includes material related to Anzaldúa's teaching engagements.

Series five,    Phone logs, Calendars, and Address Books, is arranged chronologically within each format of material.

Series six,    Photographs and Audiovisual Materials, contains many professional portraits of Anzaldúa, grade- and highschool photographs, as well as black and white and color snapshots, and various photos of other individuals, meetings, or related subjects. Audiotapes include recording of interviews, lectures and readings, tarot and other psychic readings, and other recordings collected by Anzaldúa. A small collection of video recordings consist primarily of Anzaldúa's readings and lectures. This series also includes sketches by Anzaldúa, and some collected artwork by others. The detailed description of this series is located on Part 2 of this guide.

Series seven,    Collected Materials, consists of articles and clippings collected by Anzaldúa over the course of her professional career. These are arranged in four sub-series: Subject Files, Reference Files, Course packets, and Clippings. Many are scholarly journal articles that appear to have been used for her graduate studies, and other articles, clipped out of popular magazines and newspapers, are of more general interest. Anzaldúa’s interest in immigration and border issues, feminist studies, human rights, the environment, queer studies, and the occult is reflected in this collection. The Subject Files in particular include a number of original notes written by Anzaldúa. This series also documents the cultural, social, and political climate of the 1980s and 1990s, with clippings on California’s Proposition 187, the controversy over the Columbus quincentennial, the Hopwood vs. Texas anti-affirmative action case, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Also included in this series are manuscripts sent to Anzaldúa by friends and professional acquaintances for her feedback. Manuscripts of note include Sandra Cisneros’s "Loose Woman," Ruth Behar’s "Translated Woman," and Norma Alarcon’s essay “Tradditora, Traddutora.” The detailed description of this series is located on Part 2 of this guide.

Series eight,    Oversized Materials and Artifacts, contains primarily large format photographs, gig posters, and other posters and artwork, as well as Anzaldúa's collection of t-shirts. The detailed description of this series is located on Part 2 of this guide.

The Benson Collection is also composing a complete bibliographic list of Anzaldúa's personal library of more than 5000 books. This is an ongoing project, and interested researchers should contact the rare books reading room for this information. The list will be located on Part 2 of this guide.

Restrictions

Access Restrictions

Some materials in the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers are restricted for a period of time due to concerns about privacy and confidentiality, publication rights, and as requested by Ms. Anzaldúa.

Use Restrictions

The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Literary Trust retains full copyright and publication control over all materials written or produced by Gloria Anzaldúa. Some of the material in this collection may not be photocopied, and permission of the Trust is required before publication, in whole or in part, of any materials written or produced by Ms. Anzaldúa.

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

Cite as: Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

Box and Folder Inventory