The New Mestiza of the 21st Century: From Gloria Anzaldúa to Vianney Harelly

Abstract

One of the most culturally relevant phenomena of our time is globalisation. A state of permanent connection that increasingly fades away the barriers that separate us from each other. However, there are still certain unbreakable limits that profoundly affect people’s identities, these being the borders. The present dissertation will focus on the case of the border that separates the countries of Mexico and the United States through two female authors: Gloria Anzaldúa and Vianney Harelly. A comparison will be established between Harelly’s poetry, which is contemporary writing, and Anzaldúa’s autobiographical, essayistic and poetic work titled Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Both are included within Chicana literature, as due to their experience and ancestry they portray the struggles of those Mexican-Americans who remain in a cultural limbo. Accordingly, the initial hypothesis is that Harelly’s poetry depicts the ‘new mestiza’ of the 21st century as a reinterpretation of the concept coined by Anzaldúa in the 20th century. The differences and similarities in the figure of the ‘new mestiza’ will be observed through their thinking on issues such as identity, race, gender and language.