Author: Bunbun

In The Mountain, Eli Clare describes the steep and difficult climb faced by those of us with marginalized identities. That metaphor felt deeply familiar. Every step we take, every opportunity we earn, feels like a struggle, and yet, even on this climb, we must remain mindful of who we’re helping up and who we might be leaving behind.

At a school like Dickinson, where only about 7.46% of students identify as Latinx or Caribbean, I often find myself questioning whether my voice or input even matters. That’s why reading the work of a strong and confident Mestiza figure like Gloria Anzaldúa, someone who expresses herself with such certainty in academic spaces makes me feel inspired. It reminds me that I do belong here.

Honestly, I felt like I was being called out throughout most of the reading. Too many times I’ve known the answer in class but didn’t have the confidence to speak up, afraid of sounding wrong. Even when I lacked the right words or felt like I wasn’t eloquent enough, what really matters is having the courage to speak not just for myself, but for my community who can’t. While I’m actively working on this, the imaginary binds around my throat still feel strong.

The metaphor of climbing the mountain to reach success in America made me reflect on which identities are seen as most ‘equipped’ to succeed: whiteness, wealth, heterosexuality. What Anzaldúa opened my eyes to was how, sometimes, within marginalized communities, we end up pitting ourselves against each other. We measure our worth and our success by how high we’ve climbed in comparison to others from our own communities. Gloria Anzaldúa writes:

“I can write this and yet I realize that many of us women of color who have strung degrees, credentials and published books around our necks like pearls that we hang onto for dear life are in danger of contributing to the invisibility of our sister writers. ‘La Vendida,’ the sell-out.”

This line hit me hard. It felt like both a warning and a plea. Yes, we face immense obstacles from systems that were never built for us, but we also need to reflect on how we might unintentionally uphold those same systems for women in more vulnerable positions. We need to uplift one another, not compete for scraps of validation on this mountain that was never meant to welcome any of us.

In my own experience, I’m motivated to earn my degree not only for myself, my family, and my community, but also partly to prove something to the outside world, to those who see us as criminals, dirty, or unintelligent. I want to show that if I can succeed in higher education, then the narratives they push about us hold no weight. But I had never truly considered how, as women of color, we also carry a responsibility to not let our degrees or credentials make us believe we are better or more adequate than other third world women who Anzaldua addresses.

I thought about this especially in the context of recent political shifts. Within Latinx spaces, there has been a lot of finger-pointing when it comes to political preferences. Especially after the surprising number of Latinos who voted for Trump, a man who has repeatedly disrespected and dehumanized our communities. In the aftermath of the election, people were scared and fired up, and I remember how quickly the blame started flying. Many Latinos began calling their own community members ignorant, unintelligent, mindless. In doing so, we were echoing the same harmful narratives that outsiders have used to shame us for generations.

And I’ll be real. I participated in some of that blame too. I felt frustrated with my own community, trying to understand how so many of us could vote for someone who sees us as less than human. But the truth is, this reaction speaks to a deeper issue. These choices don’t come out of nowhere, they’re shaped by real barriers: poverty, lack of access to education, limited resources, systemic neglect.

“By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it… I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you… To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy.”
—Gloria Anzaldúa, Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers

It is undeniable that Mala endures deeply horrible experiences throughout her life. Like many of my classmates, I wept while listening to her story. Throughout her childhood she is denied personal agency, and her entire life, she fights to reclaim who she is. However, through her coping mechanisms, which are often misinterpreted or dismissed by outsiders of Paradise, we witness her gradual reconstruction of the self in the face of ongoing trauma and chaos. 

 Immediately after reading Cereus Blooms at night, I had a hard time soaking in the general message of the book and the relationship Paradise has with queer individuals because of the intensity of Mala’s story. But reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers helped me see Mala’s small, everyday acts not as strange behaviors, but as intentional, protective resistance for herself. Now, it is clear that maybe the whole point was the recognition that small acts of defiance and coping mechanisms make this ultimate change for ourselves and others. Anzaldúa frames writing as a vital tool of resistance for herself. One that allows her to define herself on her own terms, rather than be shaped by the limited narratives imposed on Chicana and women of color. Although Mala is a fictional character, she is an example of the intended audience Anzaldúa writes to: women of color, 3rd world women, and all those who survive by carving out space for their truth. Mala and Popoh, as a dark-skinned girl navigating an abusive household, embodies that struggle. Through her fight to survive, she asserts fragments of autonomy and selfhood, even when the Paradise community refuses to recognize them. 

At face value it was easy for me to dismiss the coping mechanisms of Mala when they are first introduced, for example, the way she builds a wall of her furniture each night. At first I was confused by what the reason was but I didn’t necessarily try to understand immediately. Yet we are thrown back into her past when in fighting for her reclamation against her father she did this to protect herself. In sake of fear and self preservation she is working hard to protect that little girl inside of her. Just like when she makes a necklace out of snail shells, there’s always a part of her that’s holding on to what Aunt Lavinia told her about protecting snails. “Protect a living snail and when it dies, it doesn’t forget. Snails, like most things in nature, have long memories.” In a way, Popoh does this not just for the sake of nature, but also with the hope that it will bring her good fortune. By valuing the life of something as small as a snail, she’s holding on to the belief that these small acts might help change her life for the better.

In class, we debated whether Cereus Blooms at Night ends happily. For me, it does. I felt an immense sense of relief for Mala. She is no longer alone out of necessity. She is no longer feared, but loved by Ambrose, Otoh, and Tyler, who braids her hair. She is now surrounded by safety with those who love her. Though the relationship between Mala and her sister is not explicitly resolved, there is resolution in Mala’s newfound peace. She is no longer fighting for survival. She is at home with people who love her. And while I haven’t previously touched on Tyler and Otoh’s bond, it felt comforting to witness the possibility of a new beginning of a queer love and community, now rooted in safety and care. That, too, felt like a kind of reclamation.

In Alejandro Heredia’s You’re the Only Friend I Need, two young boys navigate the tension and social pressures surrounding gender expression and fluidity. When they meet Ren, who embraces femininity in their dress, their eyes sparkle with a sense of comfort, as well as a sense of fear. Which includes the very real threat of punishment from authorities who deem their gender expression unnatural and in need of policing. Heredia captures this fear,“Noel does not think it, refuses to turn his feeling into thought for fear that will paralyze him. He feels it. The body responding to danger, to the possibility of meeting the baton of some cop, dressed as they are” (39). The novel also highlights the lingering impact of colonialism, particularly through the reference to Parque Colón, where a statue of Christopher Columbus towers over the square, “At the center, a statue of the colonizer looms over the square…He stands in all of his power. As if to say, ‘If I found you, I can lead you.’ As if he were the center of the whole universe…” (33). This imagery serves as a stark reminder of how Spanish colonization reshaped cultural and social structures, imposing rigid ideals of gender and morality. Within Mestizo circles, I have heard discussions about how, before colonization, Indigenous communities had a more fluid understanding of sex and gender beliefs that the Spanish deemed unholy and sought to suppress through forced conversion and cultural erasure. It’s striking how those colonial ideals continue to shape societal norms today.

This struggle for self definition and acceptance also resonates with Eli Clare’s The Mountain, where people across various identities are forced to climb the brutal slope of “normalcy” and “success.” The mountain demands assimilation, offering no space for difference, no peace for those who refuse to conform. It is a reminder that, even now, systems of power work to constrain identity rather than allow it to flourish.

 

Winterson writes, “Louise, your nakedness was too complete for me, who had not learned the extent of your fingers. How could I cover this land? Did Columbus feel like this on sighting the Americas? I had no dreams to possess you, but I wanted you to possess me” (52).

I found it interesting how often Louise’s body and the protagonist’s romance were framed through possession and exploration. This isn’t surprising, given that in our culture, claiming a partner, or being claimed, is often equated with love. It also made me think about love as an act of reclamation, or at least what it’s supposed to be. In Mexican culture, love is deeply tied to the idea of belonging to one another, which in turn reminds me of the not so distant echoes of colonization. The Spanish imposed their God on Indigenous peoples, declaring conversion or death; they imposed marriage, declaring anything outside of it sinful. Love then becomes a cycle of possession.

Love it isn’t about control, certainty, or ownership. It has no place for angst or insecure attachment; those are illusions that only distort our perception of what love truly is. Love also isn’t about making decisions for your partner as if they were a child, assuming you know what’s best for them without giving them the chance to express their own desires. That isn’t love, it’s fear disguised as protection. As Gail says, “She wasn’t a child, you didn’t give her the chance to say what she wanted. You left” (Winterson 159).

I recently took a course on critical utopias and the human instinct to search beyond borders for a better land, a better reality. In many ways, love can feel utopian, an escape from one’s own limitations. But for Louise’s lover, no matter where they went, despair followed. There was no “elsewhere” where they could be different or where they could be free from their own cycles of longing and  suffering. Did they truly want happiness, or were they more comfortable in longing? At times, it seems as if the protagonist convinces themself that their despair is okay, that the pain of love is its proof. If love is possession, then maybe loss is the ultimate confirmation of love’s existence. Which leads up back to how Winterson begins this novel, “Why is the measure of love loss” (Winterson 9).