Gender on the Borderlands: The Frontiers Reader

Gender on the Borderlands captures the intense, complex, and gendered experience of those living along the barbwire borderlands of Mexico and the United States. Through scholarship, testimonials, oral histories, songs, poetry, and art, the contributors reclaim the borderlands from the distortions and violence of “official” history and continue the recovery of a gendered Chicana/Chicano history begun by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera more than twenty years ago. 

Both noted and new scholars reweave the fabric of collective, family, and individual history with a legacy of agency and activism in the borderlands in these twenty-one original selections. Contributors explore themes of homeland, sexuality, language, violence, colonialism, and political resistance within the most recent frameworks of Chicana/Chicano inquiry. Art as social critique, culture as a human right, labor activism, racial plurality, Indigenous knowledge, and strategies of decolonization all vitalize these selections edited by one of the country’s most respected historians of the borderlands, Antonia Castañeda. From Aztec cosmology to globalization, Gender on the Borderlands unites the past with the present and the future to reclaim and transform the gendered, transnational domain along the Mexico-U.S. border.

The Americas

"Gender on the Borderlands offers excellent content for anyone interested in studying feminist, ethnic, cultural, critical, and border studies, and is a much-welcome and very necessary text that bridges these studies."

— T. Mark Montoya, The Americas

Antonia Castañeda, born in Texas and raised in the state of Washington, is an associate professor of history at Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. Susan H. Armitage is a professor of history at Washington State University and is the former faculty editor of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Patricia Hart teaches in the School of Journalism and Mass Media and is the coordinator of the American studies program at the University of Idaho. She is the former managing editor of Frontiers. Karen Weathermon, former assistant editor of Frontiers, directs Washington State University’s Writing Across the Curriculum program and serves as the book review editor of Issues in Writing.

Contributors include Katherine Benton-Cohen, María Antonietta Berriozábal, Yolanda Broyles-González, Gabriel S. Estrada, Priscilla Falcon, Deena J. González, Gabriela González, Virginia Grise, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Judith L. Huacja, Amy Kastely, Yolanda Chávez Leyva, Clara Lomas, Maria de la Luz Ibarra, Emma Perez, Anita Tijerina Revilla, Graciela I. Sánchez, Carmen Tafolla, Deborah R. Vargas, and Theresa A. Ybáñez.