"I'm a citizen of the universe": Gloria Anzaldua's spiritual activism as catalyst for social change.(Critical essay)

With awe and wonder you look around, recognizing the preciousness of the earth, the sanctity of every human being on the planet, the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings-somos todos un pais. Love swells in your chest and shoots out of your heart chakra, linking you to everyone/everything .... You share a category of identity wider than any social position or racial label. This conocimiento motivates you to work actively to see that no harm comes to people, animals, ocean-to take up spiritual activism and the work of healing.

--Gloria E. Anzaldua,

"now let us shift ... the path of conocimiento ... inner work, public acts"

IN THIS PASSAGE, drawn from one of her final essays, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua describes a radically inclusionary politics, or what she calls "spiritual activism." At first glance, the phrase "spiritual activism" might seem like a contradiction in terms, yoking together two opposing concepts: Although the word "spiritual" implies an other-worldly, inward-looking perspective that invites escape from and at times even denial of social injustices, the word "activism" implies outward-directed interaction with the material world-the very world that spirituality seems to deny or downplay. Yet for Anzaldua, these very different worlds and worldviews are inseparable (although not identical). She embraces the apparent contradiction and insists that the spiritual/material, inner/outer, individual/collective dimensions of life are parts of a larger whole, joined in a complex, interwoven pattern. Anzaldua's spiritual activism offers a visionary yet experientially based epistemology and ethics. Spiritual activism is spirituality for social change, spirituality that posits a relational worldview and uses this holistic worldview to transform one's self and one's worlds. (1) Throughout her career, from her earliest publications to her last writings, Anzaldua worked to develop, refine, and enact her own unique version of spiritual activism.

All too often, however, scholars avoid Anzaldua's politics of spirit. Although they celebrate her groundbreaking contributions to feminist theory and her innovative formulations of the Borderlands and the new mestiza, they rarely examine the important roles Anzaldua's spiritual activism plays in developing these theories and many others. In some ways, this avoidance of Anzaldua's politics of spirit probably seems like common sense. After all, those of us working in academic settings are trained to rely almost exclusively on rational thought, anti-spiritual forms of logical reasoning, and empirical demonstrations. As Irene Lara notes, "Within a western framework, writing about spirit and spirituality, as well as writing from a spiritual epistemology that is embodied and ensouled in a woman of color consciousness, is cause for silencing and marginalization." (2) Laura E. Perez makes a similar point:

 
  Beliefs and practices consciously making reference to the s/Spirit 
  as the common life force within and between all beings are largely 
  marginalized from serious intellectual discourse as superstition, 
  folk belief, or New Age delusion, when they are not relegated to 
  the socially controlled spaces of the orientalist study of 
  "primitive animism" or of "respectable" religion within dominant 
  culture. Even in invoking the spiritual as a field articulated 
  through cultural differences, and in so doing attempting to 
  displace dominant Christian notions of the spiritual while 
  addressing the fear of politically regressive essentialisms, to 
  speak about the s/Spirit and the spiritual in U.S. culture is risky 
  business that raises anxieties of different sorts. (3) 

In short, references to spirit, souls, the sacred, and other such spiritually inflected topics are often condemned as essentialist, escapist, naive, or in other ways apolitical and backward thinking. Similarly, M. Jacqui Alexander observes that despite recent scholarship linking spirituality with socio-political change, "there is a tacit understanding that no self-respecting postmodernist would want to align herself (at least in public) with a category such as the spiritual, which appears so fixed, so unchanging, so redolent of tradition." (4)