Nepantla, inbetween.

We/I/they/you want to know the world, a larger, more complete reality, bigger than conflict and the things that hold us back. We/I/you/they desire to find ourselves in relation to the world around us, the people, objects, sounds, and atmospheres we encounter, to raise consciousness. To do this, I/we/you/they must identify the unstable ground and find the paths still unfolding. Walking with the mapped, objective and rational leads back to the same places, habits, and patterns already known. This journey requires skills and procedures that call on the felt, the creative, the personal. While transforming, the path is often obscured. As guides, we turn to ourselves, the sensations, experiences, and intuition as guides⁹Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘Now Let Us Shift . . . Conocimiento . . . Inner Work, Public Acts’, in Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise), ed. Analouise Keating and Gloria Anzaldúa (United States, 2001; London: Duke University Press Books, 2015), 119.p  

In the late 1990s and early 00’s, Gloria Anzaldúa was a PhD student at the University of California Santa Cruz. She was already a celebrated author and speaker. Her seminal 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza was entering its second printing and had become standard reading in many cultural studies programmes.The collection of essays she edited alongside Cherie Moraga in the early 80s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and its follow-up were handbooks on emerging methods of knowledge production. The writing demonstrated a hybridity of styles and cultures that reflected the complexity and diversity of America in the last quarter of the 20^th century. Anzaldúa’s writing is guided by what she calls ‘spiritual activism’ – an ethics that refuses the separation of inner transformation from outer change. There is a clear demonstration of accountability to the subject, self, and Others. There is a clear demonstration of accountability to the subject, self, and Others.

Gloria Anzaldúa, 16 September 1942 – 15 May 2004

On a California coastline Gloria Anzaldúa goes for a walk – lighthouse in view

a bird, a tree, the wind catches my attention and awakens me to another reality¹⁰Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘Flights of the Imagination: Rereading / Rewriting Realities’, in Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise), ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating (London: Duke University Press, 2015), 26.

Conocimiento, Mestiza Crossroads

A chasm indicates where the earth shifted, split apart, and crumbled into the sea. A woman is trapped. A call with bad news is received. The ordinary order of daily life is disrupted, and the small routines we take for granted are no longer straightforward. It is uncomfortable. During these encounters, the sensations evoked by the multidirectional world unfolding are amplified. The distinction between thoughts and feelings intermingle. Patterns appear where they were once the background. Her/I/our/your mind shows options, each moment diverging into multitudinous possibility¹¹Woolf explores this in her BBC broadcast on the English language Woolf speech; Du Maurier speaks to this in Flight of the Falcon pp13, even if undesirable. The quotidian is no longer a singularity or a single life. An aja moment begins.

She/we/I/they speak/s of catalysts – an earthquake, a terrorist attack, and the disease that ended her life early. Catalysts mark a moment in the process of transformation. Each is unique to both space-time and the individual. The ambivalence from the clash of voices results in a mental and emotional state of perplexity¹²Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘La Conciencia de La Mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness’, in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987; repr., San Francisco: aunt lute books, 2007), 100.. It is an invitation to Nepantla. Nepantla is “the space between two bodies of water, the space between two worlds”. It is a Nahuatl word – Aztec, spoken in central Mexican lands and in pockets of the United States. A hybrid of ancestral and imported. A catalyst, a fissure, or a merger of worlds raises the desire for meaning, connection, and symmetry. Nepantla is the shifting kaleidoscope –bits of lore you can patch together to create a new narrative articulating your personal reality.

Nepantla is the land of spiritual activism – a path to grow, transform, and activate. Conocimiento. Consciousness. A journey home. Home is transition and movement. Home requires acts of love and perseverance¹³Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘La Conciencia de La Mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness’, in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987; repr., San Francisco: aunt lute books, 2007), 100.. Home is interlinked with yourself. She/you/we/they are in a constant state of becoming, it is not a single location or state. Matter and energy are in constant movement and shifts. The universe is never in a singular state; home is not a singularity. Spiritual activism speaks from the knowledge of this fluidity. It is the catalyst that makes clear “mondo nuevo” is coming, work drawn from a desire to find a way to navigate unstable ground. Though many “yearn for solutions to our shared problems” the path of conocimiento is individualised – each starting in our own position. It is impossible to align all voices, all designs of home. It is impossible for an/Other to establish the routes towards her/our/their desires and dreams. To facilitate and give space for conocimiento means allowing wasson contr bys to unfold. Mondo/Bys/World is konvedhes, experienced as interconnected, patterned in temporal-spatial specifics that extend multi directionally from your own, very mobile, location.

Anzaldúa presents a way of knowing and being that links our spiritual well-being and consciousness:  to know and understand the world, we must put in conversation our spirit, the undescribed but recognised by way of sensations and intuition that is yet to be named or described, with the mind’s abilities and instincts towards rationality and logic. These attempts to observe and link the elements occupy a liminal space between the self and exterior world, which by habit (precariously) locates us in relation to an/Other. This limits agency and weakens the skills needed to navigate the ordinary instability of what we know as ‘a life’. She/I/we/they lean towards mindfulness of how you/I/we/her/they brought our own experience, journey, and knowledge first to feel your way and, when it emerges procreatively, represent what this phenomenon and dynamic are. Spiritual consciousness is a state of being that is not an achievement but a learning process in a constant state of becoming.

She/I/you/they recognise that spiritual and consciousness carry connotations in English that nod to the esoteric and metaphysical on one end and to religious and neurological on the other. The words may not resonate with everyone. Anzaldúa blends multiple languages in her writing, not only to invoke words that better represent the processes she describes. It is the act of reading words that one may recognise, be able to translate, or pronounce correctly. As a reader, you are presented with choices: to slow down, to keep reading to place the word in context, or to stop and pick up a dictionary. What was intended is more challenging to name. No singular literal or direct translation is possible, there is no equivalence. Wasson contr bys – “what is going on in the world” in Cornish. Kondvedhes, ‘understood’. Mondo world. A concept, a fractured piece conocimiento in one language, is a completed and whole entity in another. Combining reveals the spaces in between when we intuit something but may not know with certainty. Conocimiento.

I with my own affinities and my people with theirs can live together and transform the planet¹⁴Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘La Prieta’, in This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981; repr., New York: KITCHEN TABLE: Women of Color Press, 2015), 209..

The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contractions, a tolerance for ambiguity¹⁵Anzaldúa, ‘La Conciencia de La Mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness’, 101..

We/I/you/they fear the ignorance, frustrations, self-destructiveness, betrayal and the subsequent poverty of imagination and spirit that appear when language and rituals are ‘not our own¹⁶Anzaldúa, ‘Now Let Us Shift . . . Conocimiento . . . Inner Work, Public Acts’, 154..’ She/we/you/them question our relationship to what resonates, asking what is respectable, allowed, expected. She/I/we/you ask at what point do we share a common language and history, a legacy, and a ‘rightful’ inheritance? Spiritual activism is the process of discovering accountable means to attend to this. This is a process of first recognising what resonates and, in turn, mindfully devising means to integrate them into this centred relationship with reality.State that this or that tool is directly borrowed from one entity or another and does not remain accountable to the multiverse of factors that manifested the ‘thing’ to which you identify and are drawn to.

Voicing the journey of your/our encounters is a start. This is work, it is uncomfortable, jarring, disruptive and never ‘straight-forward’. It is an act of love. I/you/we/she reveals our situatedness and trajectory, a problematic location. To hide parts of this, to dismiss the encounters and unique journey, is to dismiss “spirit and imagination.” There is no knowledge without devising this narrative, telling this story. We are not the sum of our parts, nor are we nothing. We are irreducible to one moment, world, or statement. The encounters that resonate, the tools, rituals, and creative practices require a tolerance for disruptions, redirections and encounters that reveal how patterns and habits make consciousness rigid. Our ‘homes’ – cultures – genders – families – people – are a composition of the tangential lines between points. The more connections and patterns revealed, the more conocimiento, wasson. Spiritual activism means (be)coming home.

Citations

Anzaldúa, Gloria. ‘Flights of the Imagination: Rereading / Rewriting Realities’. In Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating, 23–46. London: Duke University Press, 2015.

———. ‘La Conciencia de La Mestiza / Towards a New Conciousness’. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 99–113. 1987. Reprint, San Francisco: aunt lute books, 2007.

———. ‘La Prieta’. In This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 198–209. 1981. Reprint, New York: KITCHEN TABLE: Women of Color Press, 2015.

———. ‘Now Let Us Shift . . . Conocimiento . . . Inner Work, Public Acts’. In Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise), edited by Analouise Keating and Gloria Anzaldúa, 118–59. United States, 2001. Reprint, London: Duke University Press Books, 2015.

Ikaz, Karin. ‘Interview with Gloria Anzaldùa’. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa, Forth., 267–84. 1999. Reprint, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.