Gender on the Borderlands captures the intense, complex, and gendered experience of those living along the barbwire borderlands of Mexico and the United States. Through scholarship, testimonials, oral histories, songs, poetry, and art, the contributors reclaim the borderlands from the distortions and violence of official history and continue the recovery of a gendered Chicana/Chicano history begun by Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera more than twenty years ago. Both noted and new scholars reweave the fabric of collective, family, and individual history with a legacy of agency and activism in the borderlands in these twenty-one original selections. Contributors explore themes of homeland, sexuality, language, violence, colonialism, and political resistance within the most recent frameworks of Chicana/Chicano inquiry. Art as social critique, culture as a human right, labor activism, racial plurality, Indigenous knowledge, and strategies of decolonization all vitalize these selections edited by one of the country's most respected historians of the borderlands, Antonia Castaneda.From Aztec cosmology to globalization, Gender on the Borderlands unites the past with the present and the future to reclaim and transform the gendered, transnational domain along the Mexico-U.S. border. Antonia Castaneda, born in Texas and raised in the state of Washington, is an associate professor of history at Saint Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas. Susan H. Armitage is a professor of history at Washington State University and is the former faculty editor of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Patricia Hart teaches in the School of Journalism and Mass Media and is the coordinator of the American studies program at the University of Idaho. She is the former managing editor of Frontiers. Karen Weathermon, former assistant editor of Frontiers, directs Washington State University's Writing Across the Curriculum program and serves as the book review editor of Issues in Writing. Contributors include Katherine Benton-Cohen, Maria Antonietta Berriozabal, Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez, Gabriel S. Estrada, Priscilla Falcon, Deena J. Gonzalez, Gabriela Gonzalez, Virginia Grise, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Judith L.Huacja, Amy Kastely, Yolanda Chavez Leyva, Clara Lomas, Maria de la Luz Ibarra, Emma Perez, Anita Tijerina Revilla, Graciela I. Sanchez, Carmen Tafolla, Deborah R. Vargas, and Theresa A. Ybanez.

Santa Barraza paints bold representations of Nepantla, the Land Between. Her work depicts the historical, emotional, and spiritual land between Mexico and Texas, between the familiar and the sacred, between present reality and the mythic world of the ancient Aztecs and Mayas. More than thirty of her most powerful and characteristic works are offered in full color and considered in this ground-breaking study of a nationally important Tejana artist. Over the last twenty-five years of her career as a visual artist, Barraza has explored what it is to be a Chicana and a mestiza in this country. Utilizing a variety of media, she has embarked on an artistic journey full of family portraits, watercolor dream scenes, mixed media artist books, and murals that harken back to a pre-Columbian past. By tapping into pre-conquest symbols, personal memories, and traditional sacred art forms such as the retablo and the Codices, she incorporates the value of Mexican artistic traditions and their power to nurture and sustain cultural identity on this side of the border. Barraza's art, which includes public art in the form of murals and children's workshops, has increasingly drawn on the colors and forms of Mesoamerica. Most recently, the Aztec Codices offer her a symbolic form to claim her roots and to invoke much of the cosmology of her ancestors. Within the form, however, she adapts by drawing on contemporary figures such as her own mother, or labor leader Ema Tenayucca, or Barraza's sister with a physical heart (representing a heart transplant she had received) in place of the Virgen de Guadalupe and the Immaculate Heart. Scholars Maria Herrera-Sobek, Antonia Castaneda, Shifra M. Goldman, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, and Dori Grace Udeagbor Lemeh contribute distinctive insights to the analysis of the forces that have shaped Barraza as a Chicana artist and the images and aesthetics that characterize the corpus of her work. Their perspectives also contribute to an understanding of the Chicano/a artists (including Barraza) who began their rise to prominence during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, the text invites readers to view the Chicano/a as the "New American artist," suggesting that the elements of Barraza's painting are important not only to Chicanos/as, but to all Americans in our increasingly bicultural and even mestizo society.