{"id":2859,"date":"2025-04-21T07:56:19","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T11:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=2859"},"modified":"2025-04-21T07:56:19","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T11:56:19","slug":"reflections-on-the-mountain-and-gloria-anzalduas-speaking-in-tongues-a-letter-to-3rd-world-women-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2025\/04\/21\/reflections-on-the-mountain-and-gloria-anzalduas-speaking-in-tongues-a-letter-to-3rd-world-women-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on The Mountain and Gloria Anzald\u00faa\u2019s \u201cSpeaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

In <\/span>The Mountain<\/span><\/i>, 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\u2019re helping up and who we might be leaving behind.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s why reading the work of a strong and confident Mestiza figure like Gloria Anzald\u00faa, someone who expresses herself with such certainty in academic spaces makes me feel inspired. It reminds me that I do belong here.<\/span><\/p>\n

Honestly, I felt like I was being called out throughout most of the reading. Too many times I\u2019ve known the answer in class but didn\u2019t have the confidence to speak up, afraid of sounding wrong. Even when I lacked the right words or felt like I wasn\u2019t eloquent enough, what really matters is having the courage to speak not just for myself, but for my community who can\u2019t. While I\u2019m actively working on this, the imaginary binds around my throat still feel strong.<\/span><\/p>\n

The metaphor of climbing the mountain to reach success in America made me reflect on which identities are seen as most \u2018equipped\u2019 to succeed: whiteness, wealth, heterosexuality. What Anzald\u00faa 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\u2019ve climbed in comparison to others from our own communities. Gloria Anzald\u00faa writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI 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. \u2018La Vendida,\u2019 the sell-out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my own experience, I\u2019m 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I\u2019ll 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\u2019t come out of nowhere, they\u2019re shaped by real barriers: poverty, lack of access to education, limited resources, systemic neglect. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019re helping up and who we might … Continue reading Reflections on The Mountain and Gloria Anzald\u00faa\u2019s \u201cSpeaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5466,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[346812],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-class-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5466"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}