Preface.(Editorial)

FEMINIST STUDIES IS PROUD TO PRESENT its first double issue in over three decades of publication with this volume devoted to contemporary Chicana studies. The essays in this issue mark significant new developments in Chicana studies and in feminist studies more generally. Gathered from emerging experts as well as prominent senior scholars, the essays and creative work included here describe a diverse array of Chicana experiences as musicians, artists, philosophers, lawyers, immigrants, and scholars as well as friends, lovers, mothers, and aunts. Together they set forth three fundamental themes: first, the interconnections of spirituality and sexuality, body, and language in Chicana writing and experience; second, an interactive conception of borders as more than geographical lines dividing nation states or disciplines, but rather as dynamic processes deployed for specific purposes--fluctuating, permeable, and rife with possibilities and consequences; and, third, the interrogation and exploration of multiple-subject positions and subjectivities that are critical to much of the work of Chicana cultural activists and theorists in the twenty-first century. Throughout this volume, as feminist scholars have long advised but less often practiced, simple binaries are contested and superseded. Furthermore, this issue is both inter- and transdisciplinary, presenting visual art and original creative writing in addition to scholarly essays.

The volume begins with Leisa D. Meyer's interview with Chicana historian Vicki L. Ruiz, "'Ongoing Missionary Labor': Building, Maintaining, and Expanding Chicana Studies/History." Along with Meyer's annotations, the interview traces the development not only of Ruiz's career, but also of the field of Chicana studies/history itself. From graduate school through her early professional career to today, Ruiz reflects on the personal and professional obstacles she encountered, the supports (especially her companeras) she cherished, and the continuing challenges and new possibilities she sees as critical to the field of Chicana studies/ history. Offering comments both on the state of the field of Chicana studies/history and what it has meant to live it, Ruiz speaks of intraethnic trials and solidarity, her admiration for colleagues who were on the "frontlines" of movement work, her work with Patricia Zavella to invent new methodologies for excavating the lives of Chicanas, and the energy she derived from sharing this early journey with other Chicana studies scholars and students. In articulating the state of the field, Ruiz sees the current move away from simple binaries to an interrogation and unpacking of conventional dialectics as critical to Chicana studies/history and Chicana feminist theory and activism. Ruiz also speaks passionately of the need for historians to expand their source base by looking to literature, folklore, cultural studies, and ethnography as means not just to "integrate," but rather to make central the voices and perspectives of the individuals we study from the "standpoint of the people themselves." Ruiz further welcomes the move in current Chicana studies scholarship to a more transnational approach, noting that "transnationalism doesn't require travel across vast oceans"; the "Americas" are transnational spaces. In the end she speaks with optimism and hope of the vibrancy and interdisciplinarity of work by emerging scholars and the increasing numbers of Chicanas entering the profession, while also urging the continuation of the "ongoing missionary labor" of engaging and educating to make "where we work a more compassionate, decent place for everyone."

Inspiring the authors of the early section of this volume is pioneering Chicana theorist and poet Gloria Anzaldua, whose untimely death in 2004 cut short her evolving philosophy and holistic lesbian feminism. We are privileged to be able to publish several articles explicating her writings that draw from unpublished interviews and manuscripts as well as on her published work.

AnaLouise Keating, Anzaldua's long-time friend, collaborator, and editor, begins this section with her essay, "'I'm a citizen of the universe': Gloria Anzaldua's Spiritual Activism as Catalyst for Social Change." According to Keating, this activism "offers a visionary yet experientially based epistemology and ethics ... that posits a relational worldview and uses this holistic worldview to transform one's self and one's worlds." Like other scholars in this volume, Keating critiques those academic traditions that marginalize the spiritual as "essentialist, escapist, naive, or in other ways apolitical and backward thinking." On the contrary, she sees these academic views as themselves shortsighted and imprecise, particularly with regard to their limited understanding of Anzaldua's transformative rhetoric. As Keating explains, Anzaldua develops a number of concepts useful for all feminists who wish to transform the world, some much discussed in prior scholarship like the "borderlands" and "mestiza consciousness," but others previously neglected. For example, Anzaldua's concept of "ElMundo Zurdo," the left-handed world, describes a marginality that becomes a center through which lesbians, women of color, and other queer or outcast persons can work for genuine social transformation.

Although Keating admits that some passages in Borderlands/La Frontera "seem to romanticize indigeneity," a deeper analysis indicates Anzaldua's current revisions of old myths. Citing an e-mail interview with Anzaldua from 2004, Keating quotes her as saying, "the past cannot be captured, but it must be remembered." This is not nostalgia, Keating suggests, but a new, more activist interpretation of memory as a tool for contemporary activism. Anzaldua's "metaphysics of interconnectedness," according to Keating, is indeed paradoxical, with the writer fully inhabiting all sides of the contradictions she poses between "personal agency and structural determinacy." Anzaldua s "flexible, context-specific perspectives" allow her to work toward coalitions based on common goals and interests, ones that can avoid the traps of identity politics, whereas such identity politics can only reinstate existing histories and support unjust social frameworks. Even more damaging, "these tainted categories restrict our imaginations and thus limit our visions of social change."

One chapter of Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, entitled "Entering into the Serpent," is the focus of Anthony Lioi's essay, "The Best-Loved Bones: Spirit and History in Anzaldua's 'Entering into the Serpent,'" dedicated to delineating her "Chicana phenomenology of spirit." Lioi holds that Anzaldua uses "a logic of spectral analysis" that can understand spirits and ghosts as well as the Mesoamerican goddesses incorporated into Mexican Catholicism. Rather than emphasizing the indigenous elements of Anzaldua's spirituality, however, Lioi argues for understanding Anzaldua as a Catholic author, albeit a heretical one, whose work demands a serious engagement with her spiritual faith. Her synthesis of languages, he claims, mirrors her synthesis of spiritual traditions in efforts at "cultural repair." In particular, he shows how her stories featuring snakes--even from such lowly places as the outhouse of her childhood--insert themselves into a long tradition that includes pagan, Christian, and Freudian symbols as well as Jungian archetypes. According to Lioi, the very forms of Anzaldua's writing reflect "the conflict and syncretism she finds" in the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which evokes pre-Christian religious traditions from the ancient Near East as well as from Mesoamerica. Not all these evocations are positive: Anzaldua represents the splits within Chicana culture that her writings seek to mend, splits between "public pride and defiance, private self-hatred, and the quest to find the lost and the future." Unlike most Second Wave feminists, Lioi asserts, Anzaldua makes "the political depend squarely on the spiritual" rather than the reverse. Paradoxically, her writings thus allow the apparently negative characteristics of "fragmentation and marginality" to mark the Chicana as both powerful and normative.

Like other authors in this journal issue, Irene Lara, in "Goddess of the Americas in the Decolonial Imaginary: Beyond the Virtuous Virgen/ Pagan Puta Dichotomy," demonstrates that the virgen/puta dichotomy has been superseded in the work of contemporary Chicana creative writers by more nuanced, non-dualistic models of spirituality. Indicating a close community of Chicana scholars, Lara, like Keating, references personal conversations with Anzaldua as among her sources, but she also discusses parallel themes in the work of other contemporary Chicana writers, including Liliana Valenzuela, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherrie Moraga, all of whom deploy variations on the story of the "Goddess of the Americas." Lara argues that contemporary Chicana authors "advance a non-dichotomizing 'decolonial imaginary'" that rejects a sexual divide between virtue and sinfulness and rejects the Catholic church's "disciplining of sexuality" and isolation of sexuality from spirituality. One example Lara gives of Church misogyny is the "friction-loving vulva," an authority attributed to powerful native women by colonial officials. This maligning of indigenous spiritual figures, Lara contends, "transposes to the maligning of actual Nahua women, particularly healers, midwives, and 'harlots'"--a process that, while recalling the misogyny of European witchcraft persecutions, was in the New World always racialized as well as gendered.