The legacy of feminist author Anzald\u00faa (1942-2004) looms large. Her groundbreaking book\u00a0Borderlands\/La Frontera\u00a0(1987) remains a touchstone for generations of scholars and activists. An editorial note explains that Anzald\u00faa had been developing her “Prieta stories” alongside nonfiction for her whole career. While a few came out during her lifetime, this book represents their first complete publication. Like her other work, it resists genre and other literary conventions. Anzald\u00faa mixes English and Spanish throughout (translations are provided at the end of each story) to tell the tale of a young girl\u2019s awakening into a queer identity. Some stories are sexually explicit while others veer into the supernatural. In each, Prieta confronts family and community members who both love her and expect her to conform to traditional notions of gender and sexuality. But Prieta cannot betray herself so easily. Over time and facing many obstacles, including homophobic lovers and crooked bosses, she cultivates a sense of embodied power. Others may go along to get along, but she\u2019s one with both the land she lives on and with the celestial\u2014so much that she finds it nearly impossible to be anything but her authentic self. The stories document Prieta\u2019s sensory experience in granular detail to the exclusion of character development and traditional elements of plot, though they do follow Prieta\u2019s arc from childhood to adulthood. Over decades, Anzald\u00faa labored to offer this painstaking, relentless exploration of the queer experience in all its richness as part of quotidian life. Prieta’s story is a foundational piece of the dam against erasure and marginalization Anzald\u00faa spent her life building. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The legacy of feminist author Anzald\u00faa (1942-2004) looms large. Her groundbreaking book\u00a0Borderlands\/La Frontera\u00a0(1987) remains a touchstone for generations of scholars and activists. An editorial note explains that Anzald\u00faa had been developing her “Prieta stories” alongside nonfiction for her whole career. While a few came out during her lifetime, this book represents their first complete publication. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}