“But the skin of the earth is seamless”: Liberating Symbols of Nature in "Borderlands/The New Mestiza" by Gloria Anzaldúa

“Build bridges, not walls!” Recently, this old slogan has boldly resounded in the streets of America. One of the greatest advocates of that belief was certainly Gloria Anzaldúa, author of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and co-author of This Bridge We Call Home (2002), among others. In Borderlands she offered a dramatic and revolutionary view on the life in the borderlands, nourishing with new life-blood the Latino, Feminist e Post-colonial studies. Being herself a Chicana grown up in the Texas-Mexico border area, Anzaldúa denounces the “terrorism” practiced by the U.S. government but also shows a possible path to follow in order to positively re-think the complex border identity: “I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (81). Anzaldúa goes beyond the rationally cold, artificially created citizenship identity, towards a conception of the self more linked to the truth of being simply humans living on a planet whose surface is “seamless”. Nature is indeed central in her “new value system” and an endless source of symbols for her discourse. The aim of this article is to bring out the meanings attributed to Nature by Anzaldúa, proposing a close-reading of three poems included in Borderlands, where Nature (concreted in both natural space and animal life), becomes a symbol of the fight for liberation. “Horse”, “Wind tugging at my sleeve”, and “Dead”, are representative of the three main meanings we believe Anzaldúa ascribed to Nature: Nature as the strength we should – but frequently don’t - find in ourselves to fight oppression; Nature as the rebellion to the untruthful duality imposed by the border; Nature as the possibility of rebirth in a new identity.