You have probably noticed that this Monday's reading is pretty theoretically dense and challenging. Given this, I'd like to take a little different approach to helping you think about them. 

Please post questions and/or observations to the comments section below. I'll try to answer them before Monday, or at the very least use them to structure our conversation.

Here are some basic reading tips:

Read the texts in the following order: 

This Bridge Called my Back

"Mestizaje as Method"

"The Theoretical Subjects of the Bridge Called my Back"

To understand these texts, you'll have to know something about their context. First of all, they come from a later moment in the development of Chicana Feminist praxis. Some ten years after the work of Chicanas described by Blackwell and anthologized in Alma Garcia's book (which you read from in the middle of the term, its on ctools). As such, these authors are engaging academic feminist theory and their texts are more reflective of debates about feminism (its exclusions, limitations, biases) than they are with strategies for transformational change. What does this suggest about the way Chicana feminist praxis developed from the 1960s to the 1980s/1990s (when these articles were written)?

Second, Sandoval's "Mestizaje" essay is deeply influenced by Gloria Anzaldúa's foundational creative non-fiction/theory mash-up, Borderlands/La Frontera. This book was written in 1987, some 5 years after This Bridge Called my Back, and its theoretical legacy is just as important, especially to the fields of literary study, feminist theory, and ethnic studies. Anzaldúa posited a theory of identity that deployed the analogy of the US/Mexico borderlands to describe a theoretical subject who existed at the intersection of multiple oppressions, nations, languages, sexualities, races, and ideologies: a borderlands subject. 

From Borderlands:

The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture. Borders are set upto define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed,the halfdead; in short, those who cross over, pass over,or go through the confines of the "normal." - See more at: http://www.warscapes.com/retrospectives/uncertain-borders/excerpts-borderlandsla-frontera#sthash.0GIFANBE.dpuf