Gloria Anzaldua's Identity

663 Words3 Pages
In Gloria Anzaldua’s “La Prieta,” we are able see a central concern regarding “identity.” This is a site of struggle that arises as a result of the different kinds of oppression. Therefore, in this paper I will articulate how this concern develops in the text and what Anzaldua’s vision for the future is. Since the start of the text we can see that that she has faced “shame” for being a woman of color. We can see this by the following phrase: “But it was too bad I was dark like an Indian” (Anzaldua 2002, 198). Because she was not fair skin, her “identity” has suffered from this kind of struggle. We can better understand this by concerting on the concept of La Prieta (i.e. dark hold the connotation of bad/evil). For example, when she was born, she was “inspected” for “the dark blotch, the sign of indo, or worse, of mulatto blood” (Anzaldua 2002, 198). Clearly, the idea or racism ideology of white being good/superior has been internalized by her family. It is through this internalization that we can see how the concept of La Prieta is at the heart of her notion of “identity.” More precisely, she was considered…show more content…
Let us now examine her vision called El Mundo Zurdo. In this vision, she describes how she would no longer be pulled into choosing where her loyalties lie. But rather, she would create her own universe in which she would be able to fit in and express herself as the embodiment of contradictions. For instance, she states “El Mundo Zurdo path the path of a two-way movement- a going deep into the self and an expanding out into the world, a simultaneous recreation of the self and a reconstruction of society” (Anzaldua 2002, 208). In other words, in this universe she would reconstruct herself by knowing that she can express herself to the world as an embodiment of contradictions. It then, by doing this, that she may help change society (i.e. address the different kinds and degrees of
Open Document