Nepantla: Writing (from) the In-Between

Abstract

The primary goal of this article is to find an interplay of concepts that will help us to write about the broad transformative potential of Gloria Anzaldúa's experiences of what she calls nepantla in her posthumously published Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015). We want to integrate these concepts into our reading of her account of nepantla and to allow her language to further animate the force and meaning of the concepts' interactive connections. The concepts are assemblage, occasion, lineages, sensibility, and temporality. The article concludes with her own culminating understanding of nepantla. The leading topics are Anzaldúa's world, the Coyolxauhqui process, rebirth, and cuerpoespíritu.

Diálogos Sur-Sur en torno al diseño centrado en el buen vivir

“…ancestry, identity, and ethnicity, together with my diasporic position, locate me in the in-between, the liminal, the borders, especially in academic spaces. I am an outsider-within as a person "caught between groups of unequal power" (Collins, 1999, p. 85), writing from the Nepantla (Anzaldúa, 1987(Anzaldúa, , 1993Scott & Tuana, 2017) as a border space in transformation, where writing is about being in your body, not your head. This shifting in-between spaces of intersected identities has led to constant reflections on how my power, privilege, politics, and access (3P-A) (Albarrán González, 2020a) Africa in his 30s with little knowledge of the complexities of the world he was entering.…”