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Article Excerpt
With awe and wonder you look around, recognizing the preciousness of the earth, the sanctity of every human being on the planet, the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings-somos todos un pais. Love swells in your chest and shoots out of your heart chakra, linking you to everyone/everything .... You share a category of identity wider than any social position or racial label. This conocimiento motivates you to work actively to see that no harm comes to people, animals, ocean-to take up spiritual activism and the work of healing.
--Gloria E. Anzaldua,
"now let us shift ... the path of conocimiento ... inner work, public acts"
IN THIS PASSAGE, drawn from one of her final essays, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua describes a radically inclusionary politics, or what she calls "spiritual activism." At first glance, the phrase "spiritual activism" might seem like a contradiction in terms, yoking together two opposing concepts: Although the word "spiritual" implies an other-worldly, inward-looking perspective that invites escape from and at times even denial of social injustices, the word "activism" implies outward-directed interaction with the material world-the very world that spirituality seems to deny or downplay. Yet for Anzaldua, these very different worlds and worldviews are inseparable (although not identical). She embraces the apparent contradiction and insists that the spiritual/material, inner/outer, individual/collective dimensions of life are parts of a larger whole, joined in a complex, interwoven pattern. Anzaldua's spiritual activism offers a visionary yet experientially based epistemology and ethics. Spiritual activism is spirituality for social change, spirituality that posits a relational worldview and uses this holistic worldview to transform one's self and one's worlds. (1) Throughout her career, from her earliest publications to her last writings, Anzaldua worked to develop, refine, and enact her own unique version of spiritual activism.
All too often, however, scholars avoid Anzaldua's politics of spirit. Although they celebrate her groundbreaking contributions to feminist theory and her innovative formulations of the Borderlands and the new mestiza, they rarely examine the important roles Anzaldua's spiritual activism plays in developing these theories and many others. In some ways, this avoidance of Anzaldua's politics of spirit probably seems like common sense. After all, those of us working in academic settings are trained to rely almost exclusively on rational thought, anti-spiritual forms of logical reasoning, and empirical demonstrations. As Irene Lara notes, "Within a western framework, writing about spirit and spirituality, as well as writing from a spiritual epistemology that is embodied and ensouled in a woman of color consciousness, is cause for silencing and marginalization." (2) Laura E. Perez makes a similar point:
Beliefs and practices consciously making reference to the s/Spirit as the common life force within and between all beings are largely marginalized from serious intellectual discourse as superstition, folk belief, or New Age delusion, when they are not relegated to the socially controlled spaces of the orientalist study of "primitive animism" or of "respectable" religion within dominant culture. Even in invoking the spiritual as a field articulated through cultural differences, and in so doing attempting to displace dominant Christian notions of the spiritual while addressing the fear of politically regressive essentialisms, to speak about the s/Spirit and the spiritual in U.S. culture is risky business that raises anxieties of different sorts. (3)
In short, references to spirit, souls, the sacred, and other such spiritually inflected topics are often condemned as essentialist, escapist, naive, or in other ways apolitical and backward thinking. Similarly, M. Jacqui Alexander observes that despite recent scholarship linking spirituality with socio-political change, "there is a tacit understanding that no self-respecting postmodernist would want to align herself (at least in public) with a category such as the spiritual, which appears so fixed, so unchanging, so redolent of tradition." (4)
This academic spirit-phobia has affected Anzalduan scholarship in several interrelated ways: We might admire Anzaldua's bold spirit vision yet fear that if we explore it in our work, we will harm our careers. Not only will our colleagues scoff at us, but we will have difficulty publishing such explorations. As Lara suggests, these fears can be intensified for Chicanas and other women of colors who are often already viewed as interlopers in the academy. (5) Or, we might appreciate Anzaldua's spiritual activism yet worry that if we try to discuss it in print, our colleagues will re-evaluate her writings in negative ways and reject her theoretical contributions as "New Age," (6) escapist ramblings. Or, we might be suspicious of Anzaldua's references to spirits and souls, question her discussions of precolonial traditions, and discredit her theoretical and philosophical achievements. Thus, for example, one reader interprets Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza as Anzaldua's attempt "[t]o return to the 'traditional' spiritualities that were in place before the arrival of Cortes." According to this scholar, "Anzaldua's language, her grammar, her talk are ultimately completely mortgaged to a nostalgia that I find unacceptable. The resurrection of the old gods (be they 'white' or 'indigenous') is a futile and impossible task. To invoke old gods as a tool against oppression and capitalism is to choose the wrong weapon." (7)
I want to address this objection at length because it reflects such a typical reaction to Anzaldua's spiritualized politics. To be sure, in several passages in Borderlands/La Frontera Anzaldua does seem to romanticize indigeneity. However, a more thorough reading of this text, coupled with an investigation of her later writings, offers a very different interpretation. Although revisionist mythmaking does play...
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