The Wound as Bridge: The Path of "Conocimiento" in Gloria Anzaldua's Work

This article examines the role that pain and vulnerability played in shaping Gloria Anzaldua's poetics. Her approach to wounding and pain and her proposals for healing and transformation are discussed at various stages along the path of conocimiento. The latter is an epistemology she developed in the post-Borderlands years, by which she meant a form of spiritual inquiry/activism reached via creative acts. What emerges from this analysis is a vision in which the personal and the social are closely connected and in which various traditions (the Aztec and the Catholic) converge and mix to provide a conception of pain not as privatizing, meaningless, and world-destroying, but as significant and transformative. Even in the last part of her career, when the feeling of personal and social vulnerability became stronger due to her diabetes and to the 9/11 attacks, she invited readers to overcome the temptation to victimhood and to use pain as a conduit to recognizing another's suffering, opening the possibility of an ethical encounter.