divided i/we stand

Anzaldua doesn’t tell, she shows. While reading her interview with Lunsford, I felt like she was grabbing me by the hand and pouring me the same potion she must’ve guzzled to reach what she described as her “heightened state” (55) before sitting down to write. In other words, she truly put me there.

Consider her rich use of imagery: The us/them nosostras concept, the compustura seamstress idea, and the metaphor of the Trojan burra within the university walls. Through this symbolism, Anzaldua exposed the “both/and” realities of multiplicity that our traditional social constructions don’t allow us to see.

But I think what I appreciate most about Anzaldua is that she lived in the otherness, she was the colonized, and her internal response to such painful realities marches on her pages like an activist in an anti-war protest. I read somewhere that she used to tell her students to "get their shit out” on paper (sounds kinda like “putting one’s business on Front Street”). She pushed for academic writing to break out of its tidy, formulaic structure and into the dangerous, the personal, the transformative.

But, as usual, I rave on and on about a theory, and then find myself stumped when faced with its application. I might become a broken record on this one, but how in the world can such liberatory pedagogy be lived out in the classroom? Lately, I’ve been feeling a huge contradiction - a disconnect - between the theory I’m reading and how I’m “supposed to” teach. I even see contradictions within my own head about the possibilities of gate keeping vs. gate opening. In many ways, I think our role is to be gatekeeper -- to prepare students for the performance aspect they’ll need to endure as humans within a system that maintains its clench-fisted dogma regarding traditional language usage.

While my idealistic self gets swept away by Anzaldua’s notions of writing as an emancipatory project, as a way of “freeing yourself up” (70), I can’t begin to fathom how that looks within a university writing program that requires every ‘i’ to be dotted and ‘t’ to be crossed.

Is there a model in existence that shows more than one revolutionary teacher pushing for systemic change? What kind of savvy rhetoric would it take to convince a resistant Detroit school administration that street culture can and should be “productively appropriated in the English classroom” (Monroe 65)? How can we allow our students “permission to demonstrate linguistic competencies of their home languages” in our classes when other WSU departments hold us responsible for supplying the by-the-book, “standard,” MLA-style foundation?

I don't wanna play gatekeeper anymore! But is that even the job we’ve been given? Some say "of course!" Others say "no way!" Whatever the case, it sure feels like too much pressure to me today. The gate looks massive, and instead of skillfully scaling it with my students at my side, I feel like tearing it down altogether. Revolucion, anyone?