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Tales from the borderlands masks3/31/2023 ![]() ![]() From what I recall, what really prompted Anzaldua was from seeing “tex-mex” and “chicano” literature. The first step of resistance would be to escape what authors described as psychic or psychological alienation. They wrote how individuals have first, take a psychological step of self-acceptance prior to the collective social step of anglo-suspicion. To answer your question, how I understood resistance in these two pieces was how for both authors, resistance is achieved in steps. ![]() How colored bodies and accented tongues could escape an imposed foreign judgment of “inferiority” by “bleaching” or ridding oneself of an accent or blackness. This idea that “bleaching” was a possible solvent to racism. Hi Rachel, I also found it interesting how Fanon and Anzaldua began their pieces describing how there was a strong sense that assimilation was a necessary or worse, destined, path for ascendency or admittance into anglo-male dominated culture. What do you think of these two uses of the word bleach in these two texts? How do you see understandings of assimilation and resistance in the two pieces? Together, these two texts and these two uses of the word bleach show the psychology of the different paths non-white people have within a white-dominated society. Anzaldua continues to express resistance to assimilation when she says “I seek an exoneration, a seeing through the fictions of white supremacy, a seeing of ourselves in our true guises and not as the false racial personality that has been given to us and that we have given to ourselves.” In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza Gloria Anzaldua writes “We count the days the weeks the year the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they’ve created, lie bleached… yet we, the mestizas will remain.” Anzaldua uses the term bleached to empower mestiza identity and show that a white, bleached identity leads nowhere and to an ultimate end. Through this example, Fanon shows how cultural assimilation is racist because colonial subjects needed to forfeit their own culture to take on a colonial identity. Bleach is used to remove identity to fit it. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon describes Mayotte who loves a white man and sees her as demanding nothing “except a bit of whiteness in her life.” Fanon continues to say “since she could no longer try to blacken, to negrify the world, she was going to try, in her own body and in her own mind, to bleach it.” He describes her motives as whiteness at any price to win admittance to the white world. What struck me in both readings was the use of the word bleach. Written more than thirty years apart, Black Skin, White Masks and Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza both wrestle with what is means to be opposite to white society through the lens of a black man and a queer Latinx woman.
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