Gloria Anzaldua’s Aztlan: the Homeland

In her essay La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua provides a luxuriant history of the persecution of the Chicano settlers of the U. S. Southwest at the hands of their Anglo oppressors. Anzaldua refers to the Aztlan, the border make fors between the United States and Mexico cover parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, as a vague and undetermined holding created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundarythe prohibited and disallow are its inhabitantsthe squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome.I find the authors function of the word queer to describe the Aztlan peoples particularly interesting, as it draws a recognizable parallel between the historical struggles of Chicanos with the enduring tribulations of the LGBTQ community in mod America. Anzaldua accuses The Gringothe fiction of white superiority of seizing complete power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it and even goes so off the beaten track(pr edicate) as to make mention of Anglo terrorism.The authors characterizations of the authoritarian actions of the political-ruling white assort towards the Chicano people can just as slow be applied to recent regulation crafted by several right-leaning politicians that serves tho to strip LGBTQ individuals of their civil rights and to designate said persons as second class citizens.These statutes include the recently invalidated Proposition 8 here in California as well as the Federal Defense of marriage ceremony Act, which would have forbidden gay couples from enjoying the same marriage benefits as heterosexual person spouses, current state laws or constitutional amendments in 35 states that pay off marriage as being exclusively between a homosexual and a woman, and current anti-sodomy laws aimed squarely at gay couples in 13 states that remain on the books despite such laws being outlawed by the US Supreme Court 10 years ago.Such anti-gay code is similar in prejudicial and persecutory scope as recent anti-immigration legislation enacted in Arizona and Alabama that seeks to intrude on the civil rights of Latin Americans in those states, who face imprisonment and deportation for non-compliance. As described by Anzaldua, the continuous berating of the Chicano people, faceless, nameless, invisible, taunted with hey cucaracho and mojado is ll too similar to the constant torment go about by members of the LGBTQ community by intolerant members of the oppressive majority, such as being verbally assaulted as fags, queers, homos, and much worse. Gloria Anzaldua eloquently equates the Chicano struggles with their Anglo imperial master in the Aztlan with the LGBTQ struggle for civil rights in modern American society, and unfortunately, these fights result have to both continue to be waged will into the foreseeable future.