Sunggyung Jo (Inha University)[i]
In a 2024 New York Times article, the topic of American borders was discussed in relation to the increasing use of biometric technology for screening travelers entering the United States. At the American borders, biometric screening such as fingerprint mapping and facial recognition is currently mandatory for foreign nationals, while it is optional for U.S. citizens. The experience of walking towards a kiosk and facing a camera that scans their faces to retrieve information stored in a government database is becoming normal. Some may welcome these changes because they enable faster crossings at national borders, while others find them frustrating or intimidating because they believe there is little opportunity to explain themselves if necessary. Not surprisingly, critics have highlighted the potential for racial and gender discrimination caused by the automatic screening. This concern has led to a proposed congressional bill in November 2023 to end the “T.S.A.’s ongoing facial recognition program” due to the potential danger of “perpetuating racial and gender discrimination” (Chung).
This is what is happening at American borders today. The human body is being turned into data, and that decisions about a person’s “rightful” place to be are made quickly and efficiently, as if there is no gray area. For some fortunate, property-owning individuals, it is easier to comply with these processes. But for those without proper “homes” and/or jobs, these processes can feel like moments of negation, helplessness, and powerlessness. In both cases, borders force us to examine whether we are rooted in a land “properly,” rooted “enough” to have the right to cross the borders. There is no tolerance for ambiguity—you either belong here or there. The concept of an in-between state is entirely disregarded. What we call “data” is grounded in an invisible value system that assumes all people are tied to a land or a nation in some way, having a proper “home” to return to. This assumption does not hold true for many individuals who cross American borders. While this system of placing people in their “rightful” places is neither surprising nor entirely new, the significant change is that machines now replace human labor, doing the job much faster and without moral or emotional complexities.
The ideological backbones of contemporary biometric technology can be traced back to the discourse and history of modernity. According to John Muthyala, the United States experienced European modernity in an abrupt and sudden manner during the history of settlement, conquest, and cultural collisions in the New Continent. Muthyala invokes Édouard Glissant’s concept of the “irruption of modernity” in the context of American nationality and “lived modernity” to highlight the difference between “a ‘maturing’ European modernity as a slow and organic process and a ‘living’ American modernity” as an abrupt and disjunctive one characterized by conquest and settlement (108). Here, he highlights the drastic gap between the past before modernity and the present of the Americas as a modern nation, both produced and experienced, especially near the boundaries of America (in both the north and the south). Muthyala further adds that “the revision of history and the discovery of culture in the Americas are thus possible only from within the sites of chiasmus of these modernities” (109), highlighting the collision and contestation between modernity as a sum of lived experiences and as an ideological, historical, and symbolic process.
Cormac McCarthy and Gloria Anzaldúa capture precisely these processes of American modernity and its “eruptive” (rather than slow and organic) history of establishing a coherent identity, no matter how fictional, through the “collisions” of “societies and cultures.” The Crossing and Borderlands/La Frontera also examine how this historical juncture has affected and shaped the bodily experiences at the “sites of chiasmus of these modernities,” particularly at American borders. By considering Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera together, we can understand the inner workings of American modernity on the bordered subjects and the bodies (both human and non-human) that inhabit these borders.
Each of these authors has been studied in relation to themes of the border, the body, and modernity.[ii] Studying them again now is crucial, as it provides a timely and fresh understanding of the lived experiences of crossing and living at the American borders through their shared and differing experiences and visions—especially at a time when the latest technology threatens to flatten and bypass the irreducible multiplicity of bordered lives. This essay aims to demonstrate how a close, comparative reading of the two authors can shed light on their shared yet contesting positions, as well as a range of conceptions of the American borders, homelands, belonging, and the corporeal realities of bordered beings.
In defining “anticolonial feminist storytelling,” Pavithra Vasudevan et al. emphasize the “centering [of] the relationship between body and land” (1728). They argue that while “the White, cis male, bourgeois, and propertied figure of the human… normalizes the racialization of people and ecologies, gendered domination, and extractivism,” “anticolonial feminist storytelling” challenges this norm by mobilizing “a relational network of human and nonhuman kin” (1728). Vasudevan et al.’s comparison between the colonial white male consciousness toward other races and species and the indigenous feminist consciousness, where networks of relationships among humans, land, and other species are cherished, offers a useful framework for understanding the different novelistic aims of McCarthy and Anzaldúa. If McCarthy’s work critiques the colonial consciousness embodied by Billy Paraham, Anzaldúa’s work represents an example of “anticolonial feminist storytelling” where the “lived geographies” of the U.S.-Mexico border are actively explored through the perspective of a mestiza (Vasudevan et al., 1728). Following Vasudevan et al.’s insight, this work proposes a narrative arc to acquire a broader perspective on the lived experiences of crossing or living at/near the U.S.-Mexico border, examining these issues through the tension between the bordered subjectivity from a white, male, American viewpoint in McCarthy and a non-white, female, mestiza consciousness in Anzaldúa—along with the gender, ethnic, and stylistic differences between the two authors’ works.
BODIES IN PAIN
Since Paul Gilroy’s metaphor of the ship was introduced in the postcolonial context, the significance of cultural encounters, collisions, coloniality, and hybridization, as well as of “an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (Gilroy 15), has been widely explored and reconsidered. This exploration is accompanied by a heightened awareness of the performativity of the concepts Gilroy uses, such as “travel” and “navigation.” Gilroy proposes the Black Atlantic not only as a theoretical space for multiculturalism but also as a nexus for representing the “half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialization and modernization” (16-17). The metaphor of travel, both as a binding and deconstructive practice of modernity, has conceptually helped many of us to carefully examine various historical and cultural dynamics, as well as the effects of crossing national borders and territories. Gilroy’s conception of cultural hybridization, seen in the history of hemispheric “voyages” within the context of colonization, also points to the deconstructive and destructive power of hybridization when applied to the history of American modernization. The modernity experienced in the Americas, especially in the early twentieth century where capitalization was combined with the modernization process, is often marked by the pains and sufferings of lived bodies at the borders.
From the perspective of ordinary individuals who live in the harsh regions near the U.S.-Mexico border, crossing and living at the border means their corporeal experiences are shaped by ideological discourses and changing laws that reflect those national discourses. In both McCarthy’s and Anzaldúa’s works, the body plays a central role in border crossing, both literally and symbolically. In both cases, the body endures physical and mental suffering to reinforce modernist notions of national identities, specifically to determine what is American and what is not—identities that depend on the existence of the U.S.-Mexico borders. The authors also explore the productivity and creativity of the female body. In McCarthy’s work, the female body of a pregnant she-wolf is sacrificed to maintain the patriarchal orders of the old and new Americas. In Anzaldúa’s work, the dream of a fluid, productive, and creative female body is imagined in the linguistic space of narrative, characterized by its openness to the natural world, albeit not without the body’s suffering.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, the second novel in the Border Trilogy, explicitly explores, revisits, and interrogates the multidimensional aspects of America’s “lived modernity” through the personal journey of its protagonist, who undertakes several crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border. The novel reflects the abrupt social changes that have permeated personal and communal spaces during the process of America’s nation-building. It portrays the estranged and decentered American subjectivity resulting from the character’ physical and psychological losses. The narrative navigates spaces near the border and involves repetitive encounters between cultures in an almost compulsive manner. This is depicted through the American boy who repeatedly and compulsively crosses the border, resembling a tragic hero succumbing to the fate of a wandering nomad, much like Odysseus, searching for a permanent home to return to but centuries too late to be a heroic protagonist in a modern America in the post-heroic era following the age of cowboys and the legends of the Old West.
McCarthy’s work illustrates the challenges faced by those living on the border when trying to adjust to the new ideological norms and rules of modern America, which often conflict with the desire to maintain a sense of original identity (in this case, as an American cowboy). This resistance to embracing a new identity contributes to the character’s sense of dislocation and frustration with the emerging world order. The Crossing repeatedly highlights the gap between the deconstructive potential of traveling and experiencing new orders and the protagonist’s resistance to this deconstruction, which ultimately leaves the character feeling out of place and deeply frustrated with the New World.
McCarthy’s novel traces how cultural and racial relations initiated by travel can threaten the traditional American values of honor, integrity, and individualism rooted in the American West. In The Crossing, Billy, the novel’s hero, is both a cowboy in the wilderness, largely unaware of social changes, and a romantic traveler exploring various cultural sites near the border. Throughout his journey, Billy glides over the surface of the New World, keeping his preconceptions intact. He is essentially an idealist in a rapidly changing America, holding onto the “[o]ld protocols” (McCarthy 25)—that is, the traditional codes of conduct, values, and unwritten rules that only work in the world of American cowboys. Billy’s romantic vision of the world as an American cowboy is shattered as he experiences several significant losses—including the loss of a she-wolf, his parents, his brother, his home, and ultimately his identity. Although he barely keeps pace with the changing circumstances, he attempts to hold onto the “old protocols” and orders of the past as he crosses back and forth between the state of New Mexico (a territory of the United States) and Mexico.
While the young white boy’s fixation on the old order leads to psychological afflictions, McCarthy’s exploration of pain becomes more complex due to the interlocking dynamics of the male body and the colonization of another female body, exemplified by the pregnant she-wolf. In Billy’s first crossing of the border with the she-wolf, he is unaware of what awaits them in Mexico, driven only by his idealistic worldview in which all, including animals, have permanent homes. However, in Mexico, Billy encounters a corrupt society where the wolf is seen merely as entertainment, akin to a fighting dog. This highlights the recklessness and naivety of Billy’s plan to bring the wolf back “home” to Mexico. Billy’s overarching problem is encapsulated in his conversation with a young hacendado (farmer) in a bodega (winery). The hacendado questions, “You think that this country is some place where you can come and do as you like,” to which Billy replies, “I never thought that. I never thought about this country one way or the other,” before adding that he “had not realized he would be required to pay in order to pass through the country” (McCarthy 119). Billy’s fatal mistake lies in his ignorance not only of the world outside his pastoral home but also of “the question of exactly what might have forced this particular wolf up out of Mexico” and the possibility that the wolf may have crossed the border instinctively in search of a new “home” (Sickels and Oxoby 352). His naive belief that the wolf has a single “genuine” home in Mexico ultimately leads to its demise.
The process of taking the she-wolf across the border is filled with violence: Billy tries to tame the wolf using violent methods, such as traps and harnesses, to bring her back to where he believes she originally came from. As Robert Sickels and Marc Oxoby point out, he does this without any understanding of why she crossed the border in the first place. Billy doesn’t care about the wolf’s desires or needs; he simply restrains her, “gagging and forc[ing] her lower jaw to the ground with a stick” (McCarthy 55). Even when an indigenous girl and an older woman inform him that he “[d]ebe quitar el bosal (must remove the muzzle)” because if the wolf “should have her puppies in the night, she should lick them” (McCarthy 87), he remains indifferent. The girl also notes that “all the world knew this,” but not Billy (88). McCarthy illustrates Billy’s arrogance and disregard for others’ knowledge and wisdom by noting, “The boy touched his hat [after hearing this.] He wished them a good day” (88). In this colonial dynamic between Billy and the she-wolf, the animal becomes an instrument for Billy’s symbolic recovery of a sense of belonging and an imaginary homeland. After suffering the loss of the she-wolf, Billy
squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and ground vole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. (McCarthy 127)
In Billy’s imagination, the she-wolf represents a nostalgic object that has finally reached her permanent home, appearing “fearfully marvelous” to him. This final scene, with the dead wolf, serves as the climax of Billy’s romantic pursuit of the ideals of “rootedness” and stability, even at the expense of the death and suffering of other species. It is significant that Billy kills the wolf himself; this act can be read as both Billy’s rejection of the new social orders and his “deep desire for a stable, knowable identity” (Bourne 113), an identity that he expects the land and nature to provide for him. In this dynamic, it is the animal that endures physical suffering due to Billy’s vein attempts to recover a stable identity and a sense of belonging. The wolf’s death encapsulates Billy’s frustrated desire to maintain the old orders in a world where overwhelming “contemporary violence in the form of technological progress and economic change” creates an irrecoverable distance between the past and the present (Bourne 112). Billy’s vision of the she-wolf “running in the mountains, running in the starlight” becomes almost masturbatory in his appropriation of the other species, both in life and death, to gratify his desire and pleasure in recovering the old World—and, by extension, his romantic subjectivity.
In Anzaldúa’s work, too, the body, especially the female body, is significant as the central point for performing crossings, changes, transformations, and living, as well as suffering, at the border. A perfect symbol for this performative, bordered body in Anzaldua’s work is Coatlicue, an Aztec goddess and a serpent, which represents bordered identity, as well as Anzaldúa’s linguistic approach to seeking freedom from racialized and human-centered discourses about who we are and where we (should) belong. Coatlicue is compared to a woman’s “womb,” a bodily space that contains contradictions and ambiguities, with the potential for productivity:
Coatl. In pre-Columbian America the most notable symbol was the serpent. … They considered it the most sacred place on earth, a place of refuge, the creative womb from which all things were born and to which all things returned. Snake people had holes, entrances to the body of the Earth Serpent they followed the Serpent’s way, identified with the Serpent deity, with the mouth, both the eater and the eaten. The destiny of humankind is to be devoured by the Serpent. (56; emphasis added)
Here, the serpent is first considered a “place” whose sacred locality functions as a “refuge” for all on Earth; that peculiar locality then becomes associated with the symbol of “the creative womb,” a living home for those coming into life and those returning home again. In this transformation from serpent to womb, Coatlicue represents another body within a body, or simply the multiplicity of its “bodyness,” making it a resilient and transformative space that can reconcile various dualisms, such as the dualism of animal (the serpent) and human, that of the sacred and the earthly body, and even that of life and death.
As Muthyala rightly points out, “it is the very production of America as a narrative strategy that marks the process of modernization, or, rather, the entry point of modernity in the Americas” (107). The birth of America is the modernizing “project” of Europeans to divide the civilized from the primitive people of the Americas. This delineation reveals the coloniality of power from which various modes of dualism have been imposed upon racial others, creating cognitive, economic, socio-political, and racial hierarchies at the borders. Anzaldúa’s serpent body of “pre-Columbian America” functions, firstly, as a form of resistance to the historical formation of Americanity by reclaiming the intact, indigenous body that existed before Americanity. It then replaces it with the mythic (rather than rational), indigenous, female body of other species.
For Anzaldúa, the female body is also central to formulating and enacting bordered consciousness. Anzaldúa’s representation of the female body reflects the knowledge and experience of pain and suffering. In Anzaldúa, too, the U.S.-Mexican border is depicted as a place of bodily pain, where “trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, [or] shot” (Anzaldúa 25). Here, Anzaldúa introduces the concept of la facultad (the faculty; a special ability or an intuitive skill), which she describes as “the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities” and as a means for “an instant ‘sensing’” (60). La facultad is what makes one “excruciatingly alive to the world” through its heightened sensitivity to hidden feelings (60). Anzaldúa explains that one is “forced to develop this faculty” when experiencing extreme oppression, and it is no surprise that those with this faculty are particularly attuned to pain or the threat of pain. In her words, those with la facultad “will know when the next person is going to slap [them] or lock [them] away. [They] will sense the rapist when he’s five blocks down the street. Pain makes [them] acutely anxious to avoid more of it, so we hone the radar” (61). The types of violence that bordered subjects experience include being raped, slapped across the face in public, or locked away when least expected. This realistic depiction of everyday violence at the border in Anzaldúa deeply problematizes Billy’s version of border crossing as a mode of romantic tourism. The mestiza body, as portrayed by Anzaldúa, has neither the option nor the luxury of choosing to remain impervious to the normalized violence wielded under the guise of the laws and nationhood of modern America.
Equally compelling in Anzaldúa’s portrayal of the everyday pain is her vision to transform the negative into powerful means to live fully and creatively. As Anzaldúa describes, through la facultad, “the sense become so acute and piercing that we can see through things, view events in depth…As we plunge vertically, the break, with its accompanying new seeing, makes us pay attention to the soul” (61 my emphasis). Here, Anzaldúa connects the body’s sensitivity to pain and other related feelings to the capacity for “new seeing” and to perceive “the soul” beneath the surface. Unlike in McCarthy, the body in pain carries the potential to be transformed into a sensient body: while “something is taken from [them from the pain and violence…that is,] [their] innocence, [their] knowing ways, [their] safe and easy ignorance” (61), those painful experiences of the body open the eyes of the marginalized wide to the immaterial dimensions of the human soul, especially to the souls of the people in the borderland and to the realities and beauties of their marginalized lives.
BORDERLESS NATURE
In their explorations of the varied lived experiences and relationships at the border, Anzaldúa and McCarthy explore and endorse, to different degrees, the view that the earth is seamless. For McCarthy, this view, as upheld by Billy, is seen as naive and anachronistic, whereas for Anzaldúa, it is used strategically as a means of protest and resistance to the “bordered” and “propertied” perspectives of white men. While the two authors share a similar perspective that nature knows no bounds, McCarthy’s protagonist enforces this idea through the control of nature, while Anzaldúa explores it through linguistic and symbolic imagination, using a mestiza consciousness. The romantic sense of the self in connection with nature and borderlands looms large in both works. Border crossing in both novels is a means for the characters to recover, discover, and rediscover their essence—namely, their national and ethnic identities. In both narratives, the connection with nature offers alternative visions to the characters’ frustrating realities, with nature providing a sense of permanence that they cannot find in human society. However, the level of tolerance towards in-between states of being at the American border varies. While McCarthy’s sense of tolerance is, at best, troubled by both white American subjects and those outside the border, the tolerance Anzaldúa describes at the border becomes a source of artistic creativity.
The Crossing portrays how the concept of Americanness is shaped and reshaped at the border, where one’s connection to and perceived “ownership” of the land, as well as the Other’s position across the borders, are believed to be established. The novel underscores the fictitious nature of turning land (nature) into property (an economic entity), and identity tied to that ownership, whether real or imagined. It also affirms the power of storytelling from the borders as a way of determining where one’s body belongs. Billy crosses the U.S.-Mexican border several times, and these crossings are portrayed as ritualistic acts to recover one’s center and the pre-modern order of the American West for both humans and nature. In this context, crossing the border is almost synonymous with reaffirming the American colonial narrative in a metaphorical sense.
One of the conundrums in the novel is why Billy repeatedly crosses the border despite the traumatic first experience with the she-wolf. In McCarthy’s story, the journeys create an in-between space of transcultural and interracial relations and mixtures on the U.S.-Mexico border, similar to Gilroy’s perspective of the Atlantic Ocean as a space of cultural exchange and intersection. This poses a strong tension with Billy’s quest for the same old identity through his knowledge of, and belonging to, the borderlands as natural entities. What’s more problematic is that Billy does not seem willing to change throughout the process, unless he is forced to change by external circumstances. His interactions with the locals do not affect him because he maintains a romantic distance from the locals, using it as a defense mechanism to preserve his allegiance to the values of the American Old West. This distance underscores his resistance to the evolving cultural dynamics at the border.
On his way home from Mexico during the first crossing, Billy meets an old Indian man who advises him that “the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men, it was, in reality, a place contained within them. Therefore, to know it, one must look there and come to know those hearts, and to do this, one must live with men and not simply pass among them” (McCarthy 135). The old man’s words here highlight Billy’s overall refusal to engage deeply with people and their lives, while remaining aloof. The old man points out to Billy that “[e]res huérfano” (“you are an orphan”), but Billy simply “rode on” without truly learning to “know [men’s] hearts” and “live with men” (McCarthy 134). The old man advises that Billy needs to engage with human networks and relationships, however uncomfortable that might be. This is an appropriate comment on Billy, who travels with a she-wolf that is silent and easily tameable. The contrast between Billy’s superficial way of traveling and the inevitable influences of the world of capitalism and modern body politics culminates in a later scene, where Billy tries to bury Boyd’s dead body in America. His attempt to bury his brother is thwarted by the new world’s legal constraints: a sheriff warns Billy, “[y]ou caint just travel around the country buryin’ people. Let me go see the judge and see if I can get him to issue a death certificate. I ain’t even sure whose property that is you’re digging in” (McCarthy 422).
Billy’s last effort to restore his brother’s body to his homeland, much like when he tried to return the wolf to Mexico, is frustrated and shattered by the administrative and economic terms of modern America. Despite numerous opportunities to learn about the new world during his journeys, Billy repeats the same pattern of romantic obsession with the ideology of the Old West, rooted in the colonial dynamics between humans and nature. His consistent avoidance of the new, man-made orders reflects his refusal to adapt to the changing landscape. Billy’s losses in The Crossing demonstrate how the nostalgic past of America, which holds on to the ideals of strong American masculinity and subjectivity, is undermined and eroded by the “protocols” of social change and the rapid development of modern society. In modernized America, the shifting laws are most acutely felt at the periphery, near the American West’s border, where they threaten the old values of the West, as represented by Billy’s loss of home and family. No matter how hard he tries to avoid these changing forces, Billy neither finds a rooted place for his identity nor escapes the deterritorializing effects of society.
By the end of his journey, Billy realizes that he has been an involuntary nomad with no stable ground for identity. His fate is to keep traveling and embracing multiple identities through that travel, regardless of his desire to resist the new social orders. Billy’s agony doesn’t easily earn justification or empathy from the reader or McCarthy’s implied narrator because his desires have been regressive all along—a regression into a romanticized past and a convenient stance that exploits non-human agents to justify his privileged position as a conquering and rooted cowboy from the West. Billy’s dream strangely mirrors the ideological underpinnings of biometric technology at the American borders in 2024—though Billy’s version is an anachronistic interpretation, suggesting that everyone should have a home, if not property, in one form or another.
For Anzaldúa, the borderlessness of nature is crucial to her literary project of envisioning a new bordered consciousness. However, unlike McCarthy’s cynical perspective on Billy’s idealization and colonization of nature, Anzaldúa’s work and her “anticolonial feminist writing” transform nature into a source of artistic inspiration and creative imagination, leading to flexible identity models for those who live at or near borders. In Borderlands/La Frontera, she equates the seamlessness of “the earth” and “the sea” with that of the borderlands: “the skin of the earth is seamless./ The sea cannot be fenced” (Anzaldúa 25). In Anzaldúa’s work, nature offers an alternative to the ideological and arrogant practices of the white-centered system at the borders, symbolizing a constant home: “This is my home/ this thin edge of/ barbwire” (25). Additionally, the romantic sense of the self in harmony with nature and the borderlands is actively embraced in Anzaldúa’s storytelling to imagine that alternative. Nature is idealized as a source of grounding and permanence for the mestiza body and consciousness, elements that human society lacks: “el mar [the sea] does not stop at borders./ To show the white man what she thought of his arrogance,/ Yemaya [the goddess of the sea] blew that wire fence down” (25). In Anzaldúa’s narrative, border crossing seems to be associated with experiencing this boundless nature all over again, turning it into a journey to explore and reaffirm newer and more fluid national and ethnic identities.
One might argue that this type of resistance—using energy from nature that stores memories of the past and the strategic use of the indigenous body—is a form of narrow-minded regionalism, as it mystifies the region as a locus for the identity of people specific to the American border. However, Anzaldúa’s vision is arguably broader and more realistic: the mestiza body is inseparable from its performative potential, rather than being a static concept or a literary trope. Neil Campbell’s notion of “reframed regionalism” is an ideal model for explaining Anzaldúa’s project (44):
The reframed region/regionalism I intend to extend here is an international, living mix of voice, uncontained, problematic, contradictory – a series of “border discourses” that articulates the contemporary West as it “works” inward and outward. This is a redefinition of regionalism that refuses to get to the border (of region or nation) and turn back, to simply close up on itself in some homely and familiar act of territorialization, as if protecting itself from the wider world beyond, but one that also deterritorializes and directs us simultaneously outside itself to the postregional and the postwestern. (Capmbell 44)
Campbell invokes Deleuze’s concept of the “body without organs,” a loosely structured social body that allows both “territorialization” and “deterritorialization,” to explain the outward-bound movements and expansive nature of “reframed regionalism.” Campbell’s concept of reframed regionalism encapsulates the very operation of Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue (the Aztec goddess, serpent). In Anzaldúa’s representation, Coatlicue is not just a place for preservation (“a refuge”) of indigenous people; it opens itself up to “all things” in the universe by being a universal womb for birth and death (“the creative womb from which all things were born and to which all things returned”). As Campbell points out, critical regionalism “‘works’ inward and outward,” much like a womb, allowing both “inward” movement of returning and “outward” movement of giving birth.
As Anzaldúa emphasizes, “The Coatlicue State Is a Prelude to Crossing” (70), and “[e]very increment of consciousness, every step forward is a travesía, a crossing” (70). The body, as a corporeal and conceptual structure for racialized subjects, inherently implies limits, yet its “holes” and “entrances” prevent it from “closing upon itself” (Campbell 70), and instead allow it to be “forever open” (Anzaldúa 73), becoming “a center, a nucleus” of life for “a crossing” (73). Thus, it is a loose and resilient body whose principle is transformation. As Anzaldúa describes, “after ‘it’ [a crossing] happens, I can’t stay in the same place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before” (70). This simultaneous existence of territorializing and deterritorializing flows in the body of indigeneity and the automatic operations of these opposites leads to Anzaldúa’s emphasis on the “smart” body: “But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to ‘real’ events” (59-60). Anzaldúa’s “visceral” body represents real-life movements, where the “real” is based on the simultaneous operations of territorialization and deterritorialization. Anzaldúa’s vision for the body centers on its very “visceral-ness,” which defies duality by producing both opposites (territorialization and deterritorialization) rather than becoming a space of either-or.
Anzaldúa’s “smart” body, due to its indifference to a single intent or simply because of its “visceral-ness,” does not readily present itself as an overwhelming center of power. The passage about the serpent, the “creative womb,” represents the Earth Serpent’s body as both “the eater and the eaten.” This coexistence of the victimizer and the victim, or the powerful and the powerless, complicates any attempt to view the body solely as a superior locus of power meant only for the marginalized. Although Coatlicue can be empowering for border subjects coping with the harsh realities of border life, it does not overpower or overwhelm the lives of others—lives that are not “ours”—because it operates on the principles of transformation from one (the powerful) to the other (the powerless) and acknowledges the contingency and temporality of positions.
Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue embraces both the principle of cognitive and linguistic “resistance” and that of “abiding” in actual life and reality, based on constant processes of self-expansion and self-transformation. In other words, it does not compel border subjects to revolt or resist indefinitely against the existing hierarchy; instead, it allows marginalized subjects to resist both their own provincialism and the hegemonic ideologies of their society while living their lives. Anzaldúa’s body politics aligns with valuing life over ideology or theory, as described by Debra A. Castillo’s statement: “Anzaldúa was always more about activism than academics” (264). As Castillo observes, Anzaldúa’s text might have been “systematically underread” due to academia’s obsession with universal theory (264). However, Anzaldúa’s text underscores the potential of the body and its relentless creative force, well represented by the symbol of the “womb.” The serpent body is inherently performative, with its “serpentine movement [representing] sexuality, creativity, and the basis of all energy and life” (57). It can be a theoretical body, but its creativity and energy exceed the confines of theory.
As Bhabha insightfully highlights the value of minority discourse “as a contentious performative space of the perplexity of living in the midst of the pedagogical representations of the fullness of life” (157), its performativity is not only represented in Anzaldúa’s text but also enacted by it. While readers of Borderlands/La Frontera engage with variously gendered, racialized, and animalistic bodies on the Mexican-U.S. border, there is another body that performs over these: Anzaldúa’s textual body, “crossroads” where all marginalized bodies can reveal themselves and serve as a productive source of border subjectivity (Anzaldúa 217). Anzaldúa’s text encompasses both representation and performativity, simultaneously representing and “becoming” the Coatlicue, the serpent, through its linguistic fragmentation and genre conflation. The significance of this textual performativity lies in its sincere effort to activate the Coatlicue state, facilitating real changes in her world. Her text becomes “the soil [which] prepare[s] again and again, impregnate[s], [and] work[s] on” through “[a] constant changing of forms” (113). By becoming the “creative womb” for all bodily performances within her text, it invites and expects its readers to continue the process of bodily performance without cessation.
In a section titled “A Tolerance for Ambiguity,” the word “tolerance” offers further insight into Anzaldúa’s performative body. Anzaldúa states, “[t]he new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality; she operates in a pluralistic mode” (101). Here, the “new mestiza” is a new consciousness in Anzaldúa that emerges from living at the borders of different cultures, identities, and experiences. This “new mestiza” embodies “tolerance,” enabling “ambiguous,” hybrid, and bordered subjectivities to fully materialize. She recognizes that rigid categories and boundaries are limiting, and only through a new consciousness that operates on tolerance can the uncertainty and multiplicity of border cultures be fully embraced in the dominant discourse. Therefore, tolerance for ambiguity is crucial to Anzaldúa’s literary project, allowing for and accommodating greater flexibility and adaptability by embodying the “new mestiza.”
There is a genuine subversiveness in the mediation between being and doing in Anzaldúa’s way of representing the I, particularly in relation to the concept of identity. Identity is such a loaded term in cultural studies, as it is in theoretical terrains like regionalism and critical regionalism. It seems that identity tends to be defined in spatial terms, as a state or a particular condition of an individual or a community, based on physical and emotional experiences of the I. It also readily aligns with other spatial concepts like root, region, gender, nation, and race. Even though Anzaldúa’s I does not exclude these territorial boundaries, it chooses to negotiate rather than settle within a single territory, thereby embracing the tensions that arise from this choice. By virtue of tolerance, this new I resists stasis and remains open to ongoing processes, which might entail pain but are also highly productive.
CONCLUSION
In both McCarthy and Anzaldúa, the new I for a new world at the American border must learn to be plural and tolerant. To become this genuine I, one must make significant effort and show tolerance for new orders and cultures. In other words, achieving this new subjectivity requires a pluralistic mode of consciousness. McCarthy shows us how a white, male perspective that buttresses the ideological system and behavioral codes of the American West and its colonial past fails to accommodate this pluralistic perspective, as it does not tolerate the process where one’s old self is deconstructed in its encounter with others’ lives and cultures. As a counter-narrative, Anzaldúa’s non-white, female consciousness anticipates the future of a new bordered subjectivity that undoes such a colonial consciousness. In a sense, the new I in Anzaldúa’s sense is a privileged agent for performing hybridity and plurality, privileged in that it demands a willingness to challenge and change oneself and others to a point where that state of constant transformation becomes the I’s normative way of life. This demand, however, risks turning into a romanticized concept or rhetorical device, as Castillo notes, suggesting that being multiple could lead to an idealized sense of identity. Yet, the word “tolerance” takes us back to the familiar, the bodily, and everyday life, emphasizing the practicality of adopting the new borderland consciousness. Being and performing a new bordered subjectivity, along with the topic of tolerance, are worth pursuing and contemplating, especially now, as a way to undo, or at least slow down, the overly convenient and fast-paced process of defining where one belongs at the American borders.
Works Cited
Alber, Catherine. “Monster Bodies, Monster Space: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the Demythologization of the American Frontier.” Southwestern American Literature 40.2 (2015): 7-19.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2006.
Bourne, Ashley. “Plenty of Signs and Wonders to Make a Landscape: Space, Place, and Identity in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Western American Literature 44.2 (2009): 108-25.
Bhaba, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Campbell, Neil. “Rhizomatic West, Towards an Expanded Critical Regionalism,” The Cultures of the American New West. Ed. Neil Campbell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. 41-74.
Castillo, A. Debra. “Anzaldua and Transnational American Studies,” PMLA 121.1 (2006): 260-65.
Chung, Christine. “Facial Recognition: Coming Soon to an Airport Near You.” The New York Times, 18 Feb. 2024.
Deleuze, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Eaton, Mark A. “Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 49.1 (2003): 155-80.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.
Glissant, Edouard. Carribean Discourse: Selected Essays. Ed. And Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1989.
Kafai, Shayda. “The Mad Border Body: A Political In-Betweeness.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.1 (2013)
McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York: Random House, 1994.
Monk, Nicholas. True and Living Prophet of Destruction: Cormac McCarthy and Modernity. 1st ed. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2016.
Morton, Adam David. “The Warp of the World: Geographies of Space and Time in the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy.” Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space 33.5 (2015): 831-49.
Muthyala, John. “Reworlding America: The Globalization of Amerian Studies.” Cultural Critique 47 (2001): 91-119.
Ramlow, Todd R. “Bodies in the Borderlands: Gloria Anzaldúa’s and David Wojnarowicz’s Mobility Machines.” MELUS 31.3 (2006): 169-87.
Riebová, Markéta. “Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Opening up Space at the Border.” Centers and Peripheries in Romance Language Literatures in the Americas and Africa. Ed. Petr Kylousek. Leiden: Brill, 2024. 511-27.
Sickels, C. Robert and Oxoby, Marc. “In Search of a Further Frontier: Cormac
McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Critique 43.4 (2002): 347-59.
Vasudevan, Pavithra, et al. “Storytelling Earth and Body.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113.7 (2023): 1-17.
Zygadlo, Grazyna. Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Feminist Body Writing and Borderlands. New York: Routledge, 2024.
Crossing Borders:
Bodies, Tolerance, and Modernity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera
Abstract
In 2024, biometric screening such as fingerprint mapping and facial recognition are becoming norms for foreign nationals entering the United States, while U.S. citizens are given the option to opt out. The use of biometric data has broader implications for the concept of belonging and rootedness. The ideological roots of biometric technology trace back to European modernity and its sudden impact on the Americas during colonization and settlement. This sudden imposition of modernity resulted in a chasm between pre-modern traditions and contemporary societal expectations. These themes are explored in the works of notable American writers like Cormac McCarthy and Gloria Anzaldúa. Comparative studies of these two authors help rethink the complexities of bordered subjectivities and experiences, exploring their shared and differing views on American borders, identity, and modernity. This essay conducts a close reading of both authors, highlighting common and contrasting themes, especially in relation to crossing and living at the U.S.-Mexico border. By examining the borders through McCarthy’s white, male perspective and Anzaldúa’s non-white, female, mestiza viewpoint, the essay delves into the complex interplay of identity, belonging, and bodily experiences. Both McCarthy and Anzaldúa suggest that to be part of the new world at the American border, one must learn from the body’s flexibility and tolerance for painful transformation.
Key Words
U.S.-Mexico border, modernity, bodies, tolerance, McCarthy, Anzaldúa
조성경
인하대학교 영어영문학과 조교수
[i]* This work was supported by Inha University Research Grant.
[ii] For scholarship on Anzaldúa, see Todd R. Ramlow (on lived experiences in the borderlands), Shayda Kafai (on “mad border bodies” as a source of transformative power), and, most recently, Grazyna Zygadlo (on Anzaldúa’s contributions to feminist and postcolonial studies) and Markéta Riebová (on Anzaldúa’s style of writing to give voice to border experiences), just to name a few. For McCarthy scholarship, see Mark A. Eaton (on the themes of dismemberment and reconstitution of bodies in McCarthy’s works), Nicholas Monk (on McCarthy’s engagement with modernity through themes of apocalypse and redemption), Adam D. Morton (on the political production of space and the role of borders in shaping history in McCarthy’s novels), and Catherine Alber (on how McCarthy deconstructs the romanticized myth of the American West through extreme violence and grotesque imagery).
영미문학연구
Journal of English Studies in Korea
46 (2024): -113
영미문학연구회 블로그 
Leave a comment