Anzaldua thinks that we should embrace every part of our heritage. Through a process, which she models, examining our heritage and reconstructing it, we can define ourselves on our own terms. Anzaldua tells this history because it is largely ignored in the U.S. American culture. I think it is an extremely difficult and heart aching journey, which ultimately reveals a past that still exists in the dark. However, Anzaldua had no choice but to liberate herself from silence by telling her story.

Anzaldua structures the paragraphs in this chapter with the headings, 'The other Mexico', 'The lost land,' and 'Illegal crossing.' Each of these begins with a poem in Spanish that describes the issue she is going to deal with in the following passage. These deal with the borderlands and Aztlan, stolen land, and forced illegal border crossing, respectively. Under the last heading she underlines two sub-headings, the crisis, and the travesia. These sum up the author’s message about the border. She feels the Mexicans have no alternatives but to cross illegally because Mexico dependency on the U.S. causes the peso to decline and Mexicans to come north for employment. She insists that the reader recognize that there has always been a dependency between North and South America.

Gloria Anzaldua directly tells the history of the Aztecs, her ancestors, in a serious strong voice. "The oldest evidence of human kind in the U.S.-the Chicanos ancient Indian ancestors-was found in Texas and has been dated back to 35000 B.C. "(p.4). She uses this quote to prove her identity and validate her place in the so-called New World. She explains that the ancient humans, who crossed the Bering land bridge were the first people to inhabit North America, and are related to the Aztecs through the descending bloodline of the Cochise Indians, one of the first known Indian cultures in the North American Southwest. She reports through her writing the reasons for her peoples return to the north which is to regain stolen power, land, and identity.

It is imperative for her history to be recognized because a person's identity is embedded in both social historical experiences, as well as current individual experiences. If these contexts are devalued and denied, then a person's identity is devalued and they are oppressed. This is what Anzaldua declares is happening in the U.S. The social historical facts of Mexican-American Indian presence in U.S history are ignored.

It is important for Anzaldua to tell the story of the Aztecs because she grew up on the Mexican-American border which divides her people, the Spanish and the Aztec. Her ethnicity is Mestiza (Spanish and Central Mexican Indian), and Chicano (Mexican and North American Indian) which means the cultures of North America and South America are both part of her. She refers to the combination of intermarriages along the borderlands as, creating a new 'mestizaje' (p.5). Mestizaje is a symbolic word that stands for her cultural layers and intermixing.

Anzaldua sees the borderland as a new land created through white man's arrogance. The reader feels the tones of anger and pain she uses to express her message. She uses metaphors about the sea and eagle to convey her feelings about the border. These metaphors express that a border is unnatural because the sea does not have a border, nor does the eagle, each go beyond borders in flight and fluid. They are boundless. She blames the white man for the pain she endures because he thinks he has divine right to control the earth, and people, with such a border. He cannot control the fact that she belongs to many cultures and it pains her that such an unnatural border splits her. She describes this pain as an 'open wound dividing a pueblo, a culture, running down the length of her body, with fence rods staked into her flesh (p.2). This is an emotionally strong point of view about an intense political issue, the U.S.- Mexican border; a border put up to keep undesired people out. Although she feels the border is excluding her from her multiple heritages, it is a site of integration that empowers her with the strength of resistance.

She is angered by audacity of the white man. He has taken her peoples land and political control, and as a result created an unsafe state of transition in her homeland. She is a stranger to her homeland. She reasons that the white man legitimizes these acts with symbols like, the Battle of the Alamo. Anzaldua points out that the Mexican victory at the Alamo has become a symbol of Mexican cowardess and villainous character for in the U.S. She feel this is a subconscious symbol embedded in society that justifies the white mans takeover following the Capture of Santa Anna. It is these kinds of stereotypes that perpetuate the concept of social strata, which Anzaldua resists.

Anzaldua uses the symbols of land and language to give the reader an understanding of her point of view. Anzaldua testifies that her people have been cheated out of their land and identity. She reports that a ‘gabacho’ lawyer had taken her mother’s land. During a drought year, her mother could not raise enough money to pay taxes, so her land was taken because she could not speak English to protest. Anzaldua also recounts the takeover by agribusiness corporations. She uses the imagery of barren land and drought to covey the disgust she feels by the take over of Mexican land. She also relates the loss of land to the loss of power, language and identity. Her father had to resort to sharecropping for a corporation. The corporations determined where Anzaldua ultimately spent her childhood. Her culture was created from these changes.

Additionally, her people have been locked out of their own land. Her grandmother, 'Mama Locha' lost six acres of ancestral cemetery lands to ranch owners. Her grandmother had wished to be buried next to her husband in the cemetery but, 'El cemeterio estaba cercado,'is fenced, chained and padlocked. Anzaldua could not visit gravesites nor bury her Mama Locha there. They remain powerless over their burial site. She states that the sign reads: ""Keep out. Trespassers will be shot""(p.8). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago, which was meant to protect her people, had not protected them. They lost their land; power and ultimately, they are not able to rise in social class because of the political injustices they endured.

The people of the borderlands live in an undefined space despite efforts by the Anglo culture to impose a defining line upon them. Anzaldua describes this with vivid imagery, a place where two worlds unite to form a third country-a border culture (p.3). Anzaldua rejects Anglo definitions, which have labeled borderlands people as transgressors and aliens, and asserts her own definition of these borderlands. She resists these identities because the borderland is her home which gives her the strength to resist culturally imposed definitions of identity.

I believe Anzaldua has a responsibility to give herself and her people an identity because they have not been recognized as a people in their homeland, the United States and Mexico. Anglo American culture has required her people to choose between one or the other, the north (American) or south (Mexican). Similarly, Mexican culture has not recognized the synthesis of the Chicano. She says, "Separated from Mexico, the Native Mexican-Texan no longer looked toward Mexico as home; the Southwest became our homeland once more"(7). I believe this is why she has strongly identified with a third perspective, her Aztec cultural heritage.

She emphasizes the power struggle between genders and finds strength in her Aztec heritage. She refers to an ancient story of how the Aztecs settled in present day Mexico City. "Huitzilopochtli, the God of War, guided them to the place where an eagle with a writhing serpent in it's beak perched on a cactus"(5). She uses this imagery to represent the struggle between the (spirit), patriarchal order, and the (soul), matriarchal order, and the collapse of matriarchal order in Pre-Columbian America. This sad imagery illustrates changes in gender equity in Anzaldua's cultural history. I think she finds power in knowing this history.

Anzaldua experiences forced changes in her identity, land, language, and power. However, she chooses to define these changes on her own terms. She will not disappear nor will her people. She speaks her history with a loud voice. Anzaldua's testimony represents her individual experiences, as well as the social experiences of Mexican American borderland people. She reconstructs her history and asserts a hybridized cultural identity. She affirms that a border culture has emerged, this culture is