for Anzaldúa the transformation of self/world essentially involves the task of
healing/transcending/bridging a vast array of habitual dualisms deeply ingrained in our personal
and global landscapes. Comparatively contrasting Anzaldúa’s sociological imagination to that of
C. Wright Mills and drawing insights from the teachings of the Caucasian philosopher and
mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, I will try to provide a plausible answer to the question of what is so
publicly transformative and energizing in Anzaldúa’s often privately focused, reflexive writings.
I. A
NZALDÚA
T
HESIS
ON
T
HE
S
IMULTANEITY
OF
S
ELF
AND
G
LOBAL
T
RANSFORMATIONS
Anzaldúa’s thesis of global social change via radical selfknowledge and transformation is not
an anecdotal or passing episode in her work. It is a continuing and central hypothesis that
significantly inspired her Borderlands and later writings and informed much of her literary
laboratory and social praxis. She reminded her readers emphatically of this thesis in Borderlands:
My “awakened dreams” are about shifts. Thought shifts, reality shifts, gender shifts: one
person metamorphoses into another in a world where people fly through the air, heal
from mortal wounds. I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world’s soul, I am
the dialogue between my Self and el espíritu del mundo. I change myself, I change the
world. (1987: 71)
She further wrote:
The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant
Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches resemble the
bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner,
and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner
changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real”
world unless it first happens in the images in our heads. (Anzaldúa, 1987:87)
In order to understand the paradoxical nature of this simultaneous “work” on self and global
transformation, it is crucial to understand the paradigmatic significance Anzaldúa attributes to the
3
Convention