“We are all healers”: Romantic Curanderismo in the Poems of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera—The New Mestiza

• Published in: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg no. 54; pp. 131 - 149
• Main Author: Guibert, Pascale
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines 08.07.2021
• Subjects: Wordsworth; Anzaldúa; healing; anthropocène; soin; paysage; anthropocene; landscape
• ISSN: 0557-6989; 3000-4411
• DOI: 10.4000/ranam.852

The present chapter consists in a reflection on the poetic landscapes of our modernity, seen as possible soft healing agents to an environment which humans have altered so much, leaving ineradicable traces, that a new name was required for this new era: the Anthropocene. Four voices, equally listened to, will support this reflection: French philosopher François Jullien’s, who, in his Living Off Landscape poses the necessity to think anew western landscape, choked from its very origins; anthropologist-cum-curandera Elizabeth de la Portilla’s, from San Antonio, TX, who retraces what it means to be a curandera today, what healing consists in; Chicana poetess-cum-curandera from the Rio Grande Valley, Gloria Anzaldúa’s, who, in the poetic gestures which are also healing techniques manifested in her Borderlands poems, encounters and prolongs the modes of relation which, at the end of the 18th century, in England, William Wordsworth, sometimes seen as the father of modern landscapes, initiated through his poetry. We will see how, in the parallel effacement of an almighty subject and consumable object which these four texts stage, landscape offers itself as the locus of love.