The best-loved bones: spirit and history in Anzaldua's "Entering into the Serpent".(Gloria Anzaldua)(Critical essay)

IN THE FOREWORD to the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Gloria Anzaldua exhorts her readers to make the world "luminosa y activa," luminous and active, through their own activity--and yet--she continues, "to act is not enough. Many of us are learning to sit perfectly still, to sense the presence of Soul and commune with Her." Anzaldua connects the stillness that leads to communion with the realization that victimization can be overcome, and old stereotypes of the passive, powerless woman, "the defeated images," can be left behind. Given her assertion of soul as a ground of feminist action, one would expect this aspect of her work to have been thoroughly examined by the feminist academy. This has not been the case. In her eulogy for Anzaldua, Linda Martin Alcoff offers thanks for "her unapologetic disclosures of her spiritual faith"; yet her faith has been largely ignored. Alcoff asserts that, although Anzaldua is "[o]ften cited, she remains undertheorized" in literary studies and political philosophy. Her religious thought is the most undertheorized of all. In interviews with AnaLouise Keating, Anzaldua expressed frustration with the secularized appropriations of Borderlands/la frontera. Keating argues that Anzaldua's spirit-work has been effaced because the spiritual is associated, in academia, with the irrational or illogical and because the spirit is understood as ahistorical, apolitical, and non-material. Anzaldua's method, however, makes the spiritual historical, political, and material. In this, she is hardly alone. The Chicana refusal to separate spirit from intellect is a critique of dominant Anglo-Protestant culture and its secular successors. Although Chicana studies is now a recognized discipline in many universities, we must be careful not to underestimate the resistance to a Chicana worldview as a norm of intellectual activity. If Alcoff is right, we must re-engage with Anzaldua at a deeper level to move her work beyond mere citation. (1)

It is time to assert a feminist critical hermeneutics (2) of religion in memory of Anzaldua because she is no longer able to offer her own corrective and because religion has taken a renewed position in the public sphere. With so many writers advocating rejection or embrace of spiritual politics, Anzaldua's both/nor, yes/but approach may serve as an alternative. In the spirit of soulful attention, I will call her a Catholic essayist. This description is meant to be provocative but serious: the scope of Catholicism as a worldview, especially as one element in a religious syncretism, is much larger than the world of orthodox Catholicism as such. If we hesitate to call Anzaldua herself a Catholic, we are still left with her writing, which contains Catholic symbols, narratives, concepts, figures, and images in its deepest structures. Rather than create an artificial distinction between a writer and her texts, I prefer to call both Catholic in a broad, anthropological sense.

We are in the borderlands, here, the land of the revolting Catholic, the Catholic pagan, moving beyond Christianity as an imperial monotheism. Anzaldua is not an orthodox believer or the servant of any magisterium: she is a heretic, dedicated to haeresis, choice beyond orthodoxy, by virtue of being an essayist discovering new knowledge of self and world. And yet, a citizen of the territory where "paganism" and Christianity dance the two-step under the aspect of eternity. In her analysis of the place of religion in Xicanisma, Ana Castillo says: "Although the Catholic Church as an institution cannot, for a number of reasons, guide us as Mexican Amerindian women into the twenty-first century, we cannot make a blanket dismissal of Catholicism, either." (3) Castillo is correct: the dismissal of Catholicism would obscure one of the real sources of Anzaldua's thought. Although it is easy to recognize her intellectual project as radical, it is important to see that one of its roots, one radix, is Mexican American Catholicism: the presence of Catholic elements in the alloy of La frontera cannot be explained otherwise. Anzaldua refracts the official version of things through the prism of her essays to reveal a spectrum of truths that were already there, but hidden in the whiteness of clerical discourse. As Anzaldua understood, the principle of mestizaje, or hybridity, is a theological principle, too. The combination of Aztec, Nahua, Catholic, and Neopagan spiritualities in her work is not a failure of orthodoxy--Christian, feminist, or otherwise--but a greater universalism that more accurately reflects the inner life of Xicanisma. Anzaldua's role as a transfron-terista, a woman with many countries and no country, should also be understood as a religious identity. (4)

My reading of "Entering into the Serpent," a chapter of Borderlands/lafrontera, is an attempt to map this transfrontier, to delineate a Chicana phenomenology of spirit. This project, a theory-of-the-way-spirit-manifests, is urgent because of institutional Roman Catholicism's colonial relationship with Mexican believers and because of the violence done to queer members of this tradition. As Carla Trujillo observes, "Many [Chicana lesbians] choose to alter, modify, or abandon religion, since it is difficult to advocate something which condemns our existence." (5) In "Serpent," Anzaldua transforms, but does not abandon, some of the central tropes of Catholic theology: the Trinity, the idea of the Fall, the role of the snake in the garden, and the notion of salvation. We might call these moments of "stealing the language," (6) which result in more than a subversion of traditional authority: "Serpent" is an account of a pneumatological frontier, a reconstruction of an indigenous otherworld through the process of fracturing itself.

Religion and spirituality now occupy a less ambiguous position in American feminisms than they did in 1970, when Gloria Anzaldua was not yet the Chicana cosmographer of record. Over thirty years later, after the ascent of the Religious Right to political power and the rhetoric of crusade and jihad after September 11, it is easy to assume that feminist politics must be secular politics. (7) However, the same period of time has seen the maturation of feminist theology, in and out of the academy, with a degree of acceptance of women as clerics, teachers, and lineage-holders in a variety of traditions. (8) The tension between "religion" as a conservative force that sponsors war and terror, versus "spirituality" as a source of progressive lifestyles and ideas, has become a shibboleth of the academy. (14) It serves to constrict more than clarify the possibilities of feminist soul-work. Anzaldua's philosophy is a case in point: in rebellion against a sexually repressive and colonial Catholicism transmitted through the church institution, it privileges spirit as a category of philosophical reflection and recuperates Our Lady of Guadalupe, a central Catholic figure, as the crux of Chicana cosmography. Anzaldua challenges us to move beyond conventional categories and concentrate on Chicana phenomena in the present, when spirituality and religion, feminism and father-rule, Spanish and English make appearances that do not fall into easy dualities. For this reason, I examine "Entering into the Serpent" to clarify its function as an instrument of nondualism and its interest in a universe in which all the elements of Chicana experience become visible.

In my account of this essay, I will distinguish between clerical, popular, and feminist religion and clerical, popular, and feminist spirituality in order to recognize that the dualism between religion and spirituality is not the distinction driving Anzaldua's work. "Religion" will denote belief-systems in their collective mode as builders of cultures and world-orders, transmitters of ethos and morality in symbolic form. From an anthropological perspective, Clifford Geertz explains religion as a vessel of symbolic meaning like this:

 
  meanings can only be "stored" in symbols: a cross, a crescent, or a 
  feathered serpent. Such religious symbols, dramatized in rituals or 
  related in myths, are felt somehow to sum up, for those for whom they 
  are resonant, what is known about the way the world is, the quality 
  of the emotional life it supports, and the way one ought to behave 
  while in it. Sacred symbols thus relate an ontology and cosmology to 
  an aesthetics and a morality: their peculiar power comes from their 
  presumed ability to identify fact with value at the most fundamental 
  level, to give to what is otherwise merely actual, a comprehensive 
  normative import. (10)