On Changing Identity

an interview with Gloria Anzaldúa

Editor's Note:

This interview took place in 1991, while I was working on an oral history project, under the direction of Maria Herrera-Sobek, at Stanford University. I met with Gloria at her home in Santa Cruz. All interviews I conducted for this project were recorded on tape; I later transcribed each woman's narrative into an oral history. Signed release forms were given from every woman interviewed for publication. It is with both a sense of honor and sorrow that I publish Gloria's powerful words now, after her passing on 15 May 2004, of diabetes-related complications. We at STANDARDS move forward with the certainty that all works by Gloria Anzaldúa will continue to touch readers throughout the world: her legacy is in her words.

Canéla Analucinda Jaramillo

On Changing Identity

Gloria Anzaldúa

I really value my solitude, and I need the solitude, just to survive. I've gotten clear of a lot of oppressions through just meditating, and being by myself, and processing things. Going inward. The writing is something I'm really committed to. The writing is my lover.

We can change identity. By "identity," I mean the part of me that says I have to not go and tell this sales clerk that he sold me a shitty watch. That I have to learn to tap the guy who just got in front of me in line at the theatre, and say, "Hey, you, the line is back there." That identity that says: No, don't go; don't make any trouble.

We can change that. So your identity keeps enhancing; different ingredients get added, but nothing gets subtracted. We'll always be Mexicanas, we'll always be Chicanas, we'll always be Indias - but now with a sense of, What are my rights, living in the late twentieth century? The changes that we want in the women's community, we can name them, and say: we want women to feel good about their bodies; we want women to be allowed the space to let their potential out, to unravel - so that, if they want to be artists, if they want to be businesspeople, they can. We're adding characteristics to what it is to be a woman, and the things we're adding are the positive stuff, because we already have the negative stuff. You know: "Mujeres son chismosas." So I have taken that "mujeres son chismosas" into "women speak and write." You take the "chisme" and you make it into an art form.

For me to be told that I couldn't do this because I was a girl, or that I couldn't behave a certain way because I was a girl, was psychologically painful. I was made to feel a lesser person, psychologically and mentally - and that, to me, was a kind of violence. It's a kind of violence that my whole life I have tried to overcome.

If you are aspiring to education and another level of economic stability, "Te crees muy grande" - you're "above" the tribe, the tribal family. You escape from that; they try to contain you, to "stabilize" the community. The other thing they do is they want to "protect" you: "If you strive for too high a goal, you'll never reach it, and you'll suffer." You have these cultural expectations laid on you that you can only aspire to this much; you can only accept this much money. The hardest thing for me to overcome is this thing, is the cultural injunction of where I have exceeded the culture's expectations. It's pushing against these subliminal messages that "rich people abuse their power, so what's to be rich"; that "girls don't travel; they don't leave their families; they don't leave Texas."

The thing about pleasure: as a campesina - an ex-campesina - it was like work, work, work, work. My mother, all the time working. All of us, so that pleasure and leisure were something very alien to the class that I grew up with. So I had to constantly fight not only the dominant culture, who wants to push me back into my "place," but my culture, who wants to keep me in "my place"! It was not even okay for me to go to high school, because nobody went to high school, from my little town.

It's only been recently, in the last year, that my mother has accepted me. And part of it has been because I've been able to send money home. That's the other class thing: that the parents support you, and then when the parents get old, you support them.

One way women have had of coping is to withdraw - to go into your own space, to be depressed. Instead of attacking and venting anger, you turn it inward, against yourself, so that you get to feeling really depressed: You're not good enough; you fucked up . . . You say all these bad things to yourself. It's like beating, self-abuse. You're beating on yourself with these words and these messages that there's something wrong with you, because you didn't complete this or that task; and look at you, you don't have a relationship; or, look at you, you messed up on your relationship. Whatever it is that brings the depression, you use those things to hit yourself over the head and your body, so that if you're depressed two weeks or three weeks or six months or six years, it's a constant abuse of self, a violence against the self. Some days, it's easier to take than somebody else abusing you, so what you do is you jump in and abuse yourself, before somebody else can do it.

When you get to enough of them, you kind of hit a bottom. There's nowhere else to go. You have to figure out, okay, I have to save myself; I have to survive. How can I get out from under? Then you start taking apart this depression. What caused it? Why am I under stress? You kind of deconstruct it, to use the current jargon term. You pull it apart and unravel it, and figure it out. That's when you start with the affirmations. There's nowhere else to go.

I had gotten so down on myself, I mixed pills with alcohol. I almost suicided. I came very close to dying. This crisis brought me to the realization that to kill yourself, that's the ultimate mutilation, the ultimate abuse. There was an abuser inside of me, who was trying to kill the victim inside of me.

I started this kind of self-therapy, through the writing, because I couldn't afford therapy. I have a lot of doubts and questions about the therapeutic system in this country. So I had to evolve my own, and I did it through lighting candles and meditating; and sitting with myself and doing the deep breathing; and writing anything that would come to mind. A lot of this hate would spew out. I had to hear these voices in my head that were abusing the victim voices, so that there would be a dialogue going on between the victim voice and the abusing voice. I would just cough them out on paper. I would figure out what was causing these voices to speak in the way they were doing it.

I would say: okay, this is what I want to change. I want to change the victim into a not-victim; and I want to change the abuser/authority figure into a non-abuser. I would do the affirmations. Whenever I would get stressed out, or get into depressive periods again, I would play some music, I would alter my mood. All I needed was to get into another state, out of the depressive state. Usually, the writing would help. I would cough out all these things, and there would be anger, and there would be rebellion, and there would be this stuff. It would come out as poems, or stories, or I would take the journal entries I had coughed out, and I would shape them into some sort of art form.

Now, every day in the morning, when I wake up, I give myself these little pep talks: It's okay to take some time off, to have some breaks; I don't have to be super-woman; it's alright to get recognition in the community for the work that I've done; it's okay to get money for the work that I've done; I should put a higher value on my services. That sort of thing. Then, at night, the same thing. In between, I have different kinds of tapes. I'll play those chants, and I'll do the deep breathing. That's my therapy.