The in-between

Gloria Anzaldúa was a writer who grew up on the Texas-Mexico border and in 1987 wrote Borderlands / La Frontera, a book that moves between English and Spanish, poetry and essay, and that gave a name to an experience many people have and few can describe. She called it nepantla, from a Nahuatl word for the space in between.

Nepantla is where you are when you belong fully to neither of two worlds. The daughter of immigrants who's too American at home and too foreign at school. The person who left the faith and hasn't found another. The one who left the small town for the city and goes back and no longer fits. The professional whose family doesn't understand the work. Anzaldúa's insight was that the in-between isn't a failure to arrive. It's a place, with its own knowledge, and the people who live there see things the people on either side can't.

She was specific that it hurts. The border, in her book, is a wound. But she also called it a place of transformation, where a new identity gets made that isn't either of the old ones and is larger than both.

For the Meaning chamber, this is the key for anyone who's ever felt they don't quite belong anywhere. Anzaldúa says: that's a location, not a defect, and it may be the most creative one there is. The people who build new things are almost always people from between.

It also sits well next to Cross from two days ago. His arc ends in internalization, a settled identity. Anzaldúa says some of us won't settle, and shouldn't, and that the unsettled place has its own gifts to offer.