Borderlands La Frontera

Chapter 3 opens with lyrics from a song by Silvio Rodriguez, titled “Sueño con Serpientes.” Anzaldúa describes her mother’s warnings about snakes: “A snake will crawl into your nalgas, make you pregnant” (47). She describes an encounter with a rattlesnake while chopping cotton as a young girl with her mother: It bit her boot, and her mother killed it. In the morning she felt the venom coursing through her blood, but she was “forever immune.” Since that day, Anzaldúa has been deeply connected to the serpent, attempting to assimilate her animal body into her soul.

She describes Coatlalopeuh, la Virgen de Guadalupe’s Indigenous name. Coatlalopeuh is descended from fertility goddesses, with the earliest known as Coatlicue, “Serpent Skirt.” The male-dominated Aztec culture divided Coatlicue’s light and dark powers. After the conquest of Mexico, the Spaniards further desexed Guadalupe, creating a divide between the Catholic deities as pious virgins and the Indigenous deities as beastly “putas”—“whores.”

Anzaldúa goes on to describe the rise of the Virgin of Guadalupe as the most important religious figure for the Chicano. Embraced by the Mexican revolutionaries, striking farmworkers, and the Zoot Suiters, she is more venerated than Jesus in Texas and Mexico.