Gloria Anzaldua’s Aztlan: the Homeland

In her probe La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua provides a detailed storey of the persecution of the Chicano settlers of the U. S. Southwest at the hands of their Anglo oppressors. Anzaldua refers to the Aztlan, the border earthly concerns amongst the United States and Mexico encompassing parts of Texas, red-hot Mexico, azimuth, and California, as a vague and unsolved place created by the emotional balance wheel of an unnatural boundarythe prohibited and nix are its inhabitantsthe squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome.I run into the germs utilization of the phrase queer to describe the Aztlan peoples particularly interesting, as it draws a recognizable parallel among the historical struggles of Chicanos with the enduring tribulations of the LGBTQ community in modern America. Anzaldua accuses The Gringothe fiction of white transcendency of seizing complete power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it and even goes so far as to make mention of Anglo terrorism.The authors characterizations of the dictatorial actions of the political-ruling white separate towards the Chicano people can just as easily be applied to youthful legislation crafted by several right-leaning politicians that serves plainly to strip LGBTQ individuals of their elegant rights and to designate state persons as second class citizens.These statutes overwhelm the recently invalidated Proposition 8 here in California as well as the Federal excuse of Marriage Act, which would have forbidden funny couples from enjoying the same sum benefits as heterosexual spouses, live state laws or built-in amendments in 35 states that define marriage as being exclusively between a man and a woman, and current anti-sodomy laws aimed squarely at gay couples in 13 states that remain on the books scorn such laws being outlawed by the US Supreme Court 10 years ago.Such anti-gay legislation is homogeneous in prejudicial and persecutory scope as recent anti-immigration legislation enacted in Arizona and Alabama that seeks to intrude on the obliging rights of Latin Americans in those states, who face gyves and deportation for non-compliance. As described by Anzaldua, the continuous berating of the Chicano people, faceless, nameless, invisible, taunted with hey cucaracho and mojado is ll too kindred to the constant torment faced by members of the LGBTQ community by intolerant members of the oppressive majority, such as being verbally assaulted as fags, queers, homos, and much worse. Gloria Anzaldua eloquently equates the Chicano struggles with their Anglo imperial masters in the Aztlan with the LGBTQ struggle for civil rights in modern American society, and unfortunately, these fights leave have to both continue to be waged will into the foreseeable future.