Anzaldúa, Gloria (Evanjelina) 1942-2004

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ANZALDÚA, Gloria (Evanjelina) 1942-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born September 26, 1942, in Jesus Maria of the Valley, TX; died of complications from diabetes, May 15 (some sources say May 16), 2004, in Santa Cruz, CA. Educator and author. Anzaldúa was best known as a feminist writer and educator who first gained attention for coediting This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) with Cherrie Moraga before writing her masterpiece, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). As a lesbian feminist Chicana who grew up in poverty, Anzaldúa possessed a unique eye for writing about the marginalized people of society. Her parents were poor farmers in Texas, but even as a child she wished to exceed her parents' expectations by learning how to read English and get a college education. Hard times made this difficult for her, especially when her father died when she was fifteen and she had to work the fields. Still, she managed to graduate from high school, and this was followed by a B.A. in art and secondary education from Pan American University. She then became a preschool teacher, while also teaching migrant workers, before earning a master's in 1973 from the University of Texas at Austin. When the university turned down her dissertation, she moved to Santa Cruz to attend the University of California. It was here that her interest in feminism blossomed, and it was in Santa Cruz, too, that she met Moraga. Their book This Bridge Called My Back spurred great interest in the writings of feminists, Chicanas, and Latinas. Anzaldúa began her college teaching career in 1979, lecturing at San Francisco State University for a year before teaching creative writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz during the early 1980s and at Norwich University in Vermont from 1984 to 1986. While in Vermont, her enhanced awareness of being a minority in a virtually all-white population helped conceive Borderlands, a unique multi-genre composition that combines fiction, history, biography, poetry, and prose in what some critics described as a creative autobiography. It earned the author an American Book Award in 1986. Anzaldúa went on to publish a wide range of books, including the novel La Prieta (1997), children's books such as Prietita Has a Friend/Prietita tiene un amigo (1991) and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/Prietita y la llorona (1996), and edited collections such as Making Face, Making Soul/Hacieno caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (1990), and The Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002). She was the recipient of other honors, as well, such as a fiction award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lambda Lesbian Small Press Book Award, the Lesbian Rights Award, the Sappho Award, and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award. At the time of her tragically early death, Anzaldúa had just completed her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Santa Cruz, where she had returned to teach in 1998 as the Distinguished Visiting Professor in Women's Studies.