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I wrote this for my college-level English course and received a 4.0 on it, so I thought I might share the essay for those of you who care. My teacher told the students in my class to write the essay as if the reader knew exactly what we were writing about, so I will have to clarify a few things:

1.) The class started this unit by writing an essay about a man named Guaman Poma, who lived during the time of Spanish colonialism of Incan South America. Poma wrote a 1200 page essay to King Phillip the IV, in a language that supposedly had no written form. (The Incans were also supposed to be illiterate) We had to explain why this paper was a contact zone, why it reflected transculturation, and why it was an authethnography.

2.) A contact zone is the point at which two cultures meet, clash, and tangle with each other.

3.) Transculturation is the process in which subordinate cultures absorb only the parts of the dominate culture that they want. (Religious aspects, etc.)

4.) An autoethnography is a paper or essay written by someone, that addresses his/her own culture, and how it evolves and contrasts to other cultures from around the world.

5.) Gloria Anzaldua, the author of the essay, is a lesbian feminist, was raised near the Texas-Mexico border, and regularly lectures at several universities on the subject of the loss of identity that Mexican people often discover in themselves.

So, here it is...enjoy:

Life isnât easy growing up in a shanty town. Add connections to two completely different cultures, and the result isnât exactly a road to Easy Street. When the Spanish took over the area the world currently calls âMexico,â the conquistadors forced Catholicism onto the native residents, in hopes of completely abolishing their matriarchal, pagan rituals. The Virgin Guadalupe was created in hopes of attracting more indigenous people to Christianity, local gods and goddesses were transformed into evil, cruel deities, and many other offenses towards the Andean culture took place. Time passed, however, and this threatened territory was soon forgotten. Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicano woman familiar with this blending of cultures, describes this contact zone (A term coined by Mary Louise Pratt to describe the point at which two different and opposing cultures clash) in her essay âBorderlandsâ.
Becoming a well-recognized author with a limited education, while presenting the views of a minority people is no easy feat. To further add to Anzaldúaâs difficulties, she had to reconcile between her religious beliefs as well: those of traditional Catholicism, and those of the pagan Aztecs, which were frequently mixed with Christianity to form a religion unique to the area. âMy family, like most Chicanos, did not practice Roman Catholicism as a whole, but a folk Catholicism with many pagan elements,â (Anzaldúa 65). A moral obligation is held within every person on this planet, but when someone looks left and is told to act one way, then looks right and is told to act the opposite way, how is society supposed to function? This confusion and combining of cultures is a classic example of transculturation throughout the contact zone.
Some of this transculturation is still present in mainstream Chicano culture today. For example, the Virgin Guadalupe was created in order to draw connections between the Aztecâs pagan beliefs, and those of Catholicism, in an attempt to draw the native Aztec and Mexican people to convert. Some may even say that the Virgin Guadalupe has replaced Jesus Christ Himself in their views on religion. âToday, la Virgen de Guadalupe is the single most potent religious, political, and cultural image of the Chicano/mexicano. She, like my race, is a synthesis of the old world and the newâ¦,â (Anzaldúa 67). If not for the contact zone and the transculturation of Catholicism from the Spaniards, la Virgen de Guadalupe would not exist, or let alone be a huge icon for many modern Latinos.
It is said that some of Chicano heritage do not even practice this odd blend of religions; they simply worship the ancient Aztec deities under the illusion that they are praying to the more modern Christian saints. Anzaldúa writes, âIn the U.S. Southwestâ¦the indio and the mestizo continue to worship the old spirit entities and their supernatural power, under the guise of Christian saints,â (Anzaldúa 68). A property of transculturation, part of the contact zone, is that cultures can actively choose which parts of the dominant or invading culture to absorb. If citizens choose to recognize another cultureâs religion, but still which to practice their own beliefs, it is indeed a sign of the presence of a contact zone.
It is not just this strange combination of religions and superstitions that make this apparent contact zone stand out; segregation of the two cultures is also a sign of the struggle between races and ideas. âBack then, I, an unbeliever, scoffed at these Mexican superstitions as I was taught in Anglo school,â (Anzaldúa 72). Often, the dominant culture in society will attempt to further suppress the minorities by labeling the differing beliefs of such groups as âsuperstitionsâ or âevil.â The suppression of beliefs is a prominent trait of colonialism and occupation of foreign countries; not coincidentally, it is also a sign of the contact zone.
âBorderlands,â while not entirely centered on the religious aspect of Anzaldúaâs life, teases at the possibility of a contact zone. Through analyzing how the Spanish and Aztec cultures mingled and interacted through Anzaldúaâs writing, it was possible to prove that her experiences with religion while growing up were indeed a result of transculturation due to a contact zone.

Word Count: 704
Works Cited:

Anzaldúa, Gloria. âBorderlandsâ. Ways of Reading. David Barthlomae and Anthony Petrosky.
2005.