October 21, 2026

Be A Crossroads

To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads.

Anzaldúa wrote these lines to close Borderlands/La Frontera, her 1987 blend of poetry, theory, and memoir written from the Texas-Mexico border she called home. She was living in the tension of being Chicana, lesbian, feminist, and mestiza, never fully claimed by any single community, yet finding in that very displacement a new role to play. Rather than mourn her lack of a fixed home, she reframes it as a vocation: to become the meeting point where different worlds and languages and peoples can find each other. Her words speak to contribution today because service often looks less like belonging fully to one camp and more like standing where two camps can finally talk.