Light in the Dark is the culmination of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s mature thought and the most comprehensive presentation of her philosophy. Focusing on aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, it contains several developments in her many important theoretical contributions.

Born in the Río Grande Valley of south Texas, independent scholar and creative writer Gloria Anzaldúa was an internationally acclaimed cultural theorist. As the author of Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa played a major role in shaping contemporary Chicano/a and lesbian/queer theories and identities. As an editor of three anthologies, including the groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, she played an equally vital role in developing an inclusionary, multicultural feminist movement. A versatile author, Anzaldúa published poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, and children’s books. Her work, which has been included in more than 100 anthologies to date, has helped to transform academic fields including American, Chicano/a, composition, ethnic, literary, and women’s studies.

More than twenty years after the ground-breaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back called upon feminists to envision new forms of communities and practices, Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating have painstakingly assembled a new collection of over eighty original writings that offers a bold new vision of women-of-color consciousness for the twenty-first century. Written by women and men–both of color and white–this bridgewe call home will challenge readers to rethink existing categories and invent new individual and collective identities.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa, best known for her books Borderlands/La Frontera and This Bridge Called My Back, is one of the foremost feminist thinkers and activists of our time. As one of the first openly lesbian Chicana writers, Anzaldúa has played a major role in redefining queer, female, and Chicano/a identities, and in developing inclusionary movements for social justice.

In this memoir-like collection, Anzaldúa’s powerful voice speaks clearly and passionately. She recounts her life, explains many aspects of her thought, and explores the intersections between her writings and postcolonial theory. Each selection deepens our understanding of an important cultural theorist’s lifework. 

Bilingual English/Spanish. Gloria Anzaldúa a uniquely reinterprets the famous Mexican legend of la Llorona.

Ever since she can remember, Prietita has heard frightening stories about la Llorona-the legendary ghost woman who steals children at night. One day, when Prietita goes in search of the missing herb that can help cure her mother’s illness, she becomes lost in the woods. Suddenly she hears a distant crying sound and sees flashes of white in the trees. Could it be the ghost woman from her grandmother’s stories?

“Did you come from the other side? You know, from Mexico?” So begins the friendship between Prietita and Joaquín, the young boy who, with his mother, has crossed the Rio Grande River to Texas in search of a new life. Prietita, a brave young Mexican American girl, defends Joaquín from the neighborhood kids who taunt him with shouts of “mojado” or “wetback.” But what can she do to protect Joaquín and his mother from the Border Patrol as the van cruises slowly up the street toward their hiding place? Writer Gloria Anzaldúa is a major Mexican American literary voice. Illustrator Consuelo Méndez is a noted Latin American artist. Both grew up in South Texas.

From the co-editor of the award-winning This Bridge Called My Back comes a bold new collection of creative pieces and theoretical essays by women of color. New thought and new dialogue–a book that will teach in the most multiple sense of the word. A book that will be of lasting value to many diverse communities of women as well as to students from those communities.

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands / La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a “border” is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, the complex confluence of identities–race, class, gender, and sexuality–systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.

Reissued here, forty years after its inception, this anniversary edition contains a new preface by Moraga reflecting on Bridge‘s living legacy and the broader community of women of color activists, writers, and artists whose enduring contributions dovetail with its radical vision.