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Essay On Border Identity

1240 Words5 Pages

I. Introduction
Throughout the time, the terms of borders and identities have always been connected to each other. Passing through the other side of a border usually means transforming of the personal identity and culture into something delicate. This situation is especially true when passing through the border of Mexican and United States. Living on the border or after passing through it, it is almost like each immigrant’s identity, although it should be limitless, is surrounded with borders. The existence of the borders that wraps around the identity comes from the other people’s prejudices and stereotypical thoughts. The subjects of identity and the borders are told Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza in …show more content…

What she meant with this definition is that the unsafe side of the border is United States and the safe side is Mexico. Because according to her, when you take the road and leave your own borders, you become “the prohibited and forbidden” (Anzaldua 25). In Sin Nombre, Sayra, her father and her uncle try to migrate from Honduras to New Jersey as undocumented immigrants. Their journey on the train is so difficult that sometimes they are exposed to the rain, robbers and villagers that throw rocks at them. At one point they have to get out of the train and hide from the policemen and run after the train again. Sayra’s father says “More than half of these people will die before we get to the United States” in a desperate manner (Fukunaga 2009). This desperation resembles to what Anzaldua tells about the illegal border crossing: “But I saw the shame pushing his head down, I saw the terrible weight of shame hunch his shoulders” (26). Both of these lines point out to the third world’s fear and timidity against the developed countries. Anzaldua’s concept of “border culture” and a sense of community culture are also displayed in the scenes where the immigrants on a break of their journeys and play some games and laugh together despite all of those poverty and poor conditions that surround them. The situation comes after passing the border illegally, as Anzaldua depicts as being in a place where its legitimate inhabitants

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