Anzaldua,"La conciencia de la mestiza: Toward a new conciseness."

Reflection
I am definitely not an "mestiza*" as the author Gloria Anzaldua descried herself, but by reading this text "La conciencia de la mestiza: Toward a new conciseness." She said, "the new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradiction, tolerance for ambiguity. she learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from Anglo point of view. She learns to juggles culture. she has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode-nothing is trust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradiction, she turns the ambivalence into something else.."

What I understood with this quote is, for every person living in this world (as we learn in class) fitting in is the most important thing. So to fit in we (as people) have to learn the "Norms" of the society we are in. Which bring me back to social class. To be accepted and welcome in any groups, culture, race,... we need to know the "book code." The book is a pass to all the doors in front of us. For the Mestiza, because of their past history, they have to make more effort, swallow their pain & pride to just fit in. They can not accept one culture and reject the other just because it will be easier and accepted for the "privileged" people, but they have to juggle both or multiple culture. At the end, I feel like, they become chameleon and most of the time lost without any knowledge of who you really are.

I am so tired of seeing people who are "different" making so much effort to just fit in; the LGBTQ community have to "come out" as if the straights even come out of something; the "culturally poor" have to work harder to be in the same circle as the "culturally rich," women has to constantly fight for their right ... YOU KNOW WHAT? BEING DIFFERENT IS A WONDERFUL PRIVILEGED...AT LEAST I DO NOT PUT MYSELF IN A SMALL BOX.
Even though, I will not accept John Frye idea of "Privileged" people as better than anybody else, I believe that those who only look up their nose at those who have less than them made the effort of braking that social class boxes, Mestiza and others will be much better.
If that never happened, I will patiently way for the idea of Gloria Anzaldua; "the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos- that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves and the ways we behave- la mestiza creates a consciousness."

         


*Metiza : a woman of racially mixed ancestry, especially, in Latin America, of mixed American Indian and European ancestry or, in the Philippines, of mixed native and foreign ancestry. 
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mestiza