Google Features Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Your Google Doodle of the day is none other than Gloria E. Anzaldúa, on the occasion of her 75th birthday. The award-winning poet, teacher, and theorist died in 2004. At the Washington Post, Michael Cavna writes:

GLORIA E. ANZALDÚA did not abide border walls of the mind and map, but rather strode into those culturally fertile places that we cannot simply wall off.

Anzaldúa traveled where true scholars do not fear to tread: into the intellectual lands that seek not division, but common understanding.

So today, Google celebrates the late author on what would have been her 75th birthday, with a Doodle that places her squarely at the middle of the cultural river, where her ideas on Chicana cultural studies and queer and feminist theories could flow, undammed and enriching.

Not that living along dividing lines both physical and psychological was not harrowing. “It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions,” said Anzaldúa, a daughter of the Rio Grande Valley who sprang from South Texas and lived in a string of rural towns along the Mexican American border.

Keep on reading at the Washington Post, head to Google to check out the Doodle, and browse through our U.S. Latinx Voices in Poetry sampler here.