The Chicana Identity

Diana

I read Gloria Anzaldua’s chapters two and three, Movimientos de Rebeldia y Las Culturas Que Traicionan and Entering into the Serpent. I really loved the way Gloria words her ideas and the way she expresses herself with the imagery of the shadow-beast and this serpent. She brought the things that culture imposes on us to life.

As I was reading about her shadow beast inside her, I couldn’t help connect it to the ID inside all of us. This ID, by Sigmund Freud, sounds very much like the shadow beast when she was describing the way homosexuals react to the rejection of their families. She explains that people take different routes when confronting the shadow beast, some repress those parts deep down and conform to what their culture wants, others face it and see how the “heterosexual males  reign on our beast” and other people wake up the beast inside of us. Gloria did wake her beast, at the very beginning she tells us that she “had to leave home… so she could find her intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on her.” She was never what her culture wanted, valued and taught in women.

In the beginning, when Gloria told us about the way the women of the Mexican culture are told to act, I related it to Daniel Bergner’s book The Other Side of Desire. In Bergner’s book we explored the lifestyle of The Baroness, a true and rare female sadist. The women in the Mexican culture “are made to feel like total failures if they don’t marry and have children.” She also explains to us that the men made the laws and the women are expected to transmit the rules, have children and commit to the Mexican values more so than men. I feel like there could be a possible connection between the two; more female masochists and the repression of women’s power in culture. Though, the Baroness and Gloria came from different societies. In the Mexican culture, the women are humiliated if they aren’t fulfilling what was expected; selflessness and submission. “Woman is carnal, animal, and closer to the undevine, they must be protected… man’s nightmarish pieces, one rung above the deviants, and his shadow beast.” Maybe it is a stretch to link the two. However a masochist takes the submissive, slave position and accepts punishments. It sounds as though her culture expects the same from their women. A woman’s sexuality is controlled by the society along with all else in her life. Gloria made a point that she left the restriction but like a turtle, wherever she goes, she carries home on her back.