67Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 34:2  Fall 2009    © University of California Regents

Queering the Cosmic RaceEsotericism, Mestizaje, and Sexuality in the Work of Gabriela Mistral and Gloria Anzaldúa

Tace Hedrick

AbstrAct: Despite their differences in place and time, the woman-centered Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral and the Chicana lesbian feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa both looked to a transnational intellectual American history that frequently connected discourses of esotericism, indigenismo, and mestizaje. My comparative approach shows how both women used these discourses as a way to reconceptualize the subjectivity of the queer, indigenous-identified mestiza in a modern world. Notions of a new cosmic consciousness achieved via racial synthesis echo through twentieth-century Latin American and Chicana/o texts; theosophical ideas about race and spirit were deeply influential in Mistral’s writing and beliefs, and theosophy in turn informed the New Age feminist spirituality that helped shape Anzaldúa’s work. Outlining a history of the connections between these esoteric beliefs and those of mestizaje, and indigenismo, I show how Mistral and, later, Anzaldúa inherited and rewrote these notions by incorporating them into a queer sensibility.

As a lesbian I have no race . . . but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races. . . . I am participating in the creation of . . . Nuestra alma el trabajo, the opus, the great alchemical work; spiritual mestizaje.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

A mixture of races accomplished according to the laws of social well-being . . . will lead to the creation of a type infinitely superior to all that have previously existed  . . .  explained as  the  result of a beneficial  spiritual Mendelianism.

José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica

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The racial valence of the occult defines both its threat and its promise.

Susan Gillman, Blood Talk

Like many women writers assumed to be rara avis in their time and place, both the woman-centered Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) and the Chicana queer feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004) have often been read  in  isolation  from their particular  social and cultural milieux, as well as  from the history and context of  ideas that helped shape their work.1 Both women shared an interest in appropriating and queering the connections between discourses of esotericism (from theosophy to New Age beliefs) and those of mestizaje and indigenismo.2 Theosophy in particular was deeply influential in Mistral’s writing and beliefs, and it informed the New Age feminist spirituality that helped shape Anzaldúa’s work.

Both women’s work partook of what Judith Butler calls the “productive undecidability” of queer projects (2004, 142), keeping the complexities not just of sexuality but of race and religious feeling as well from resolving into too-easy categories. Scholars such as Licia Fiol-Matta, in her Queer Mother for a Nation (2002), have shown how such undecidability means that queer writing can be complicit with normative constraints as well as resistant to them. As we will see, certain basic assumptions, especially about  race—and particularly  in Latin America  in  the first part of  the twentieth century—were common to theosophy as well as to mestizaje and indigenismo. These assumptions in turn were conceptually dependent on a scientific racialism whose framework almost always included eugenicist ideas.3 Discourses of mestizaje in particular, despite efforts to assert their cultural  rather  than (biological)  racial  implications, have yet  to escape their dependence on the lexicons of the plant and animal sciences, still relying on physicalized metaphors  such as “hybridity” and “grafting.”  In places with large indigenous populations in the early twentieth century, like Peru and, especially, Mexico, this tendency was even stronger. Even important Boasian anthropologists like Manuel Gamio, Mexican minister of anthropology from 1920 to 1924, often conflated physical race mixing with cultural mixing.4 In the latter part of the twentieth century, esoteric language still borrows both metaphors and ideological discourses from the 

Tace Hedrick is an associate professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Florida. Her interests include U.S. (Afro) Latina/o and Chicana/o studies and feminist theory, especially examining the use of esotericism to rewrite race and sexuality. She is the author of “Mãe é para isso: Gender, Writing and English-Language Translation in Clarice Lispector,” published in Luso-Brazilian Review in 2005.

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sciences. Esoteric doctrine and discourses of science are both thought to be the discoverers of “hidden” truths, and the use of scientific metaphor often informs esoteric writing. Yet  such borrowings can carry over  ideological burdens of ideas about race, gender, and sexuality from scientific discourses. Thus, at  the same time as Mistral and Anzaldúa can be read as queerly resistant writers, their mix of mestizaje and esotericism nevertheless remains complicated by deeply embedded heteronormative and racialized concepts.

This essay illuminates the subtleties and meanings of some of Mistral’s and Anzaldúa’s thinking and writing by investigating how they used some-times startlingly similar language, imagery, and ideas. Just as not so long ago there existed virtually no academic readings of Mistral as a lesbian writer, scholars have been  reluctant  to  trace  the  references  in either woman’s writing to spiritual ideas and beliefs that seem irredeemably marginal or even slightly crazy (notions of cosmic consciousness and races, reincarna-tion, alien or  spirit possession,  shamanic or prophetic powers). Nor has the language of theosophy or New Age been connected with the history of discourses of mestizaje and indigenismo. Because these ideas and connec-tions were actually fundamental to the thinking of both women, ignoring or obscuring them means misunderstanding their writing. To understand their work and their thinking more fully, then, I read an intellectual and popular history of the confluence of Latin American and Chicana/o interest in esoteric ideas with discourses of mestizaje. More important, I show how Mistral and Anzaldúa queered such a history, itself a complex intellectual and popular transnational “web” across the Americas of conversations about race, spirituality, and sexuality for more than a century. I trace the weave of this fabric as its language and images have migrated back and forth across Latin American and United States borders, and in so doing, I continue the work of other scholars who theorize transnational links and discontinuities between Latin American, U.S., and U.S. Latina/o and Chicana/o intel-lectual histories and cultural productions.5 Using the history of esoteric discourse as a lens through which to view Anzaldúa’s and Mistral’s ideas about  sexuality and mestizaje  shows how certain strongly  residual—and strongly appealing—lexicons and images can accumulate, or become sedi-mented, over time and across borders. At the same time, we can see how images become retrofitted in accord with the needs of differing historical and national moments, showing some of the key differences in how each inflected a racialized subjectivity with a queered and spiritualized vision.

Although scholars of religion and sociology who attend to esoteric or alternative spiritual practices rarely address the place of race and sexuality 

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in esoteric  thought,  some of  the more coherent esoteric belief  systems stemming from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as theosophy, have indeed sought to provide a space for the material body in a spiritual cosmos. Across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, esoteric ideas have informed concerns about race and sexuality from well before the turn of the twentieth century.6 Theosophy was a particularly strong presence and influence in early-twentieth-century Latin America. As many readers will recognize, the “cosmic race” of my title comes from José Vasconcelos’s esoteric and particularly theosophist vision for the future of race in Latin America. This vision was set out in his 1925 book La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race), published the year after his four-year tenure as the stunningly influential Mexican minister of education. At that time Vas-concelos, who was a member of a theosophist lodge in Mexico City, followed the current enthusiasm for uses of the term cosmic, and like other important intellectuals of the time he used the term to apply to his interpretations of indigenismo and mestizaje. Calling mestizaje a “spiritual Mendelianism,” Vasconcelos put forth ideas that were directly influential on Gabriela Mistral, as he was one of her most important mentors outside of Chile (Vasconcelos 1997, 33). Albeit later and under different historical circumstances, some of the same ideas in La raza cósmica were also key to Anzaldúa’s writing, particularly in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). For both women, the Indian as despised (and/or disappearing) subject, the second-class status of women, and the state-sponsored nature of heteronormativity shaped their search for a more cosmic sense of racial and spiritual harmony, where gendered and racialized boundaries were more porous, less rigid.

Both women made conceptual connections between discourses of eso-tericism and mestizaje. Certain important ideas seemed to both women, as well as to many Latin Americans and to important Chicana/o writers, to be shared between esotericism and mestizaje. These included the notion of the unity of opposites, effected through racial, cultural, sexual, and/or spiritual means; the appeal to ancient or primitive knowledges as a foundation for the rebirth or renewal of the present; and a conceptual reliance on a notion of the static nature of the primitive as antidote to the sense that modernity’s emphasis on technology, science, and rationality had precipitated a spiritual crisis. Finally, it is safe to say that both women shared with Vasconcelos a vision of biological race mixture as an avenue to spiritual, racial, and cultural harmony, if not his suggested methods for achieving it; at the same time, they clearly  felt  it necessary  to  reorient  this vision toward a concept of spirituality that was both indigenist and woman-centered.

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Historical and cultural differences of course inflected these women’s treatments of the topics of race and sexuality, as well as their deployment of an esoterically inflected discourse of mestizaje. Mistral’s writing strove for a sense of a woman-centered, spiritual, and racial unity, motivated in large part by her increasingly pan–Latin American concerns about women, Indians, and modernization. Anzaldúa’s racial concerns as a Chicana in the United States were intertwined with her interest in New Age beliefs; these in turn were informed by Chicana/o and Mexican countercultural responses to a wide range of political and social issues in the 1960s and 1970s.

Anzaldúa imaginatively constructed a framework for answers to her concerns around feminist and New Age ideas of a combined psychological and spiritual healing. Although some important Latin Americans such as the Peruvian politician Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre read and used the work of C. G. Jung, the more personalized, from-the-inside-out notion of psychospiritual healing did not come into favor until the 1950s, with the introduction of transpersonal or humanist psychology in the United States as well as in Mexico.7 In fact, Anzaldúa’s emphasis on psychological heal-ing exemplified an important shift in esoteric thinking between the two women’s  times. Historians of esoteric and alternative spiritualities mark the late 1950s and early 1960s as a watershed decade, especially  for the resurgence of esoteric ideas from sources such as theosophy, which itself had been increasingly marginalized during the first part of the twentieth century (S. Pike 2004, 67). Yet this resurgence carried with it a conceptual move toward the  idea of healing–—psychological or  social and spiritual. This shift owed much to the language and ideas of humanistic and transpersonal psychologies such as those of Abraham Maslow (who popularized the idea of “self-actualization” in the 1950s) and Erich Fromm; both “drew inspiration from . . . [William] James, one of the first writers with an interest in mysti-cal and peak experiences” (Hammer 2001, 71).8 As Paul Heelas notes, “In a general sense of the term, the entire New Age has to do with ‘healing’: healing the earth . . . healing the dis-eases of the capitalistic workplace . . . healing the person” (1996, 81). Yet this shift did not sweep away all that came before it; these same New Age thinkers and humanist psychologists looked to anthropology as well as to historians of religion (such as Mircea Eliade) for discussions of “primitive” mystical experience in other cultures and times. Long-held notions about the ancient wisdom and cosmic con-sciousness of  the shaman or wise man, about the mystical nature of  the psyche, and about the sexuality of primitive peoples became once again as familiar to both Anglo and ethnic counterculture ways of thinking as 

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they had been to those early twentieth-century thinkers concerned with questions about how to modernize nations.

Thus, Anzaldúa couched much of her writing in a therapeutic discourse of psychospiritual healing  that was  somewhat distanced  from Mistral’s more directly  theosophical  sensibility. But both women envisioned  the queer, mixed-race, and spiritual nature of their bodies in arrestingly similar ways. They saw their bodies as simultaneously metaphor, physical instance, and spiritual evidence of the blending of opposites, informed by ancient knowledges and moving  toward a  spiritual consciousness and a cosmic racial unity.9 These were bodies  from which could come, both women firmly believed, a critique of the racial, gendered, and sexual binaries and rigidities necessary to the modern state.

In what follows, I first provide a brief historical and individual con-text  for each woman’s use of esotericism and mestizaje.  I  then move to investigate what  it means to call Mistral’s and Anzaldúa’s work “queer,” keeping in mind the flattened readings that can result from assuming that queer, gay, and lesbian texts are only and always resistant to heteronorma-tive demands and assumptions. Finally, close  readings of both women’s often literalist appeals to the metaphors of “fusion” and “blood,” and their appeals to (indigenous) spirituality via figures such as the shaman and the Incan amauta, illustrate my discussion of the links as well as discontinuities between Mistral’s and Anzaldúa’s thinking.

Cosmic Consciousness across the Americas

In 1925, the Mexican politician José Vasconcelos used some of this same esoteric terminology in the service of questions of race, sexuality, nation, and modernization. In La raza cósmica, he suggested that a new and “cosmic” racial synthesis of white races with the Indian race would issue from Brazil. Two years  later,  in 1927,  the Peruvian  anthropologist Luis Valcárcel weighed in with Tempestad en los Andes (Tempest in the Andes). The book announced on its first page that “la nueva conciencia ha llegado” (the new consciousness has arrived) via the “milenario espíritu andino” (millenarian Andean spirit), the latter physically and spiritually founded on “la Raza” of the Peruvian Indian (Valcárcel 1963, 21, 24). These texts were not by any means alone in their evocation of a new and more cosmic conscious-ness, often linked with the coming (or arrival) of a more spiritual race, and frequently paired with an appeal to the ancient glories of the Aztec, Maya, or Inca. In Latin America especially, as Frederick Pike notes, this was a 

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period when “occult thought . . . gained acceptance in many quarters as the common intellectual coin” (1983, 481).10 As I have noted above, in countries with large Indian populations such as Mexico, the decades of the 1920s and 1930s saw many intellectuals use the seeming parallels between the  language of mestizaje and esotericism  in addressing nation-building and modernizing concerns.11 Such concerns, especially in Mexico after the armed phase of the Revolution, included how to achieve a sense of national unity among peoples who were deeply divided along racial, economic, and even tribal lines. With its conceptual emphasis on the union or fusion of opposites, the language of theosophy seemed to connect naturally for many Latin American thinkers with the metaphors of mestizaje, borrowed from the animal and plant  sciences,  such as  “hybridity” and “grafting.” The union of unlike or opposite things was indeed a strongly appealing concept in Latin American political and social thought of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries across much of the political spectrum.12 Because this language was understood to connote (spiritual) unity and harmony, as well as promising rebirth, regeneration, and newness, it was often employed in describing what a unified and harmonious nation could be. Theosophy especially, with its lodges across the world, served as a link between intellec-tuals, writers, and politicians.13 As Marta Casaús Arzú notes, theosophical lodges and their connections aided in “the formation of an antidictatorial, integrationist, anti-imperialist consciousness” (2002, 12).14

Unable to openly proclaim a queer life, Mistral used theosophy in part to construct a public self as a woman driven, as she put it in 1920, to feel “toda la solidaridad del sexo, la infinita piedad de la mujer para la mujer” (all the solidarity of the sex, the infinite pity of woman for woman) and to write “con intención casi religiosa” (with an almost religious intent) about the pain and vulnerability of those women who are despised and abandoned (2001b, 137–38). Beginning with her association with Vasconcelos,  she entwined what she called her “almost religious” fervor concerning women with her self-shaping as a mestiza advocate of the idea of a pan-Indoamérica. This  process  entailed  the use  of  the  theosophical  idea  that  spiritual evolution requires the blending together or fusing of seemingly opposite aspects—such as male and female, or two different “races”—toward a cosmic oneness. Although early in her career Mistral accepted the widely held view that Indians perforce must disappear by blending into the mestizo race, her discussions of mestizaje would nevertheless begin to focus more and more on an indigenista emphasis on the presence of “the Indian” both in her own heritage and in Latin America’s.15 This was undergirded by the idea that the 

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seemingly inevitable biological fusion of white and Indian “bloods” could give the mestizo access to a specifically indigenous spirituality and creativ-ity. Women like Mistral were concerned with creating not just national but pan–Latin American sensibility. Here, the suitably all-encompassing language of spiritual unity found in theosophy, and the emphasis on racial/cultural unity found in mestizaje, underwrote an emphasis among intellec-tuals on reshaping the political landscape of Latin America (especially in relationship to the United States). This language was often used to justify the efforts of technocrats, conservatives, antimodernists, and progressives alike in producing new kinds of citizens for unified, modernizing nations.

Mexico was one of the places where the idea of cultural as well as racial mestizaje (the two were conceptually conflated more often than not) became an important part of state-sponsored discourses on national unity  and a  shared  sense of mexicanidad.16 Here,  some background on Vasconcelos and his thinking in the 1920s will help us understand his role in the work of Mistral and, later, Anzaldúa. For several reasons, La raza cósmica has become one of the best-known discussions of mestizaje, particularly in the United States. It reads today as a mixture of pseudo-scientific ideas such as race eugenics and popularized notions of evolution theory  and animal  and plant breeding,  brought  together with  strong lashings of theosophical and mystic knowledge. The text is firmly, even a tad hysterically, heterosexual; as Fiol-Matta puts it, Vasconcelos was a “homophobe of the first order” (2002, 10). His raza cósmica had no room for alternative sexualities, as it had no real room for indigenous people, in its proposal for an “esthetic eugenics” of race mixing. Yet Vasconcelos chose to overlook the rumored homosexuality of several of his hires, at least in part because they shared his theosophical ideas.17 Theosophy, with its networks of  lodges and its emphasis on a brotherhood in the spirit, enabled  those who did not know each other on  “the Physical Plane” (Horan 2000, 163)  to write  to each other and also  to meet,  effecting intellectual and social connections between people who might not,  in the normal course of things, have come together.

By 1921, Mistral had been named director of one of Santiago’s most prestigious girls’ schools, Liceo #6. Her poetry and journalism were begin-ning to be widely read. But her theosophical connections undoubtedly also appealed to Vasconcelos. Thus, in the early 1920s Vasconcelos hired Mistral to come to Mexico and help him with his educational reforms. During the same period, apparently at the behest of Mistral herself, he gave a small job to the exiled Peruvian politician Haya de la Torre, founder of the left-wing 

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social democratic Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana. Haya de la Torre was himself a theosophist and rumored to be homosexual.18

Although I have not found direct evidence of this, Mistral and Haya de la Torres—and Vasconcelos—would no doubt have been familiar with the various discourses of  sexology  in Latin America. Theosophists,  too, influenced by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sexology, were deeply interested in questions of sexuality as they intersected with ques-tions of spirituality. According to Joy Dixon, theosophists in the United States and England “had  for  some years been developing a complicated understanding of  sexuality and sexual  identity  in an attempt to explore in concrete ways  the  ‘organic connections’ between  . . .  sexuality and spirituality” (1997, 414).19 In Latin America, the rise in the popularity and power of eugenics and eugenist societies as well as the increasing popularity of sexology put sexuality, especially that of women and sexual “deviants,” front and center  in debates over  scientific and public policy. Eugenics as  the  scientific accompaniment  to mestizaje  focused not  just on  racial outcomes but on sexual behavior as well.20 Added to this was the upsurge in interest among sexologists and anthropologists alike in “primitive” and/or “intermediate” sexualities, a topic that might have interested Mistral in her fascination with indigenous peoples.21

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the revival of an interest in mestizaje as a conceptual and political tool took place in the United States among a scattered number of Chicana/o scholars and, via pamphlet and word of mouth, among working-class Chicana/os. This would seem to be a world away from Mistral’s, Vasconcelos’s, and other Latin Americans’ concerns with women’s  sexuality,  theosophy,  the “Indian problem,” and modernization. Yet  important continuities  remained. Chicano cultural nationalism,  for example,  took much of  its  thinking about mestizaje as material and spiritual underpinning for chicanismo  from Mexican writers such as Vasconcelos as well as from Mexican cultural nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. They embraced that time’s idea of the “raza de bronze,” which in turn came from formulations of mestizaje by state workers like Manuel Gamio who,  in his 1916 Forjando patria  (Forging Fatherland), called  for  the  forging of  a  “new nation” of  “blended bronze and  iron” (5–6). Anzaldúa was influenced in particular by movimiento writers such as Luis Valdez and Rudolfo Anaya, who in the 1960s and 1970s were in the process of rediscovering and reframing early-twentieth-century Mexican archaeological and cultural nationalism, combining it with the Mexican and U.S. revival of interest in ancient Mesoamerican cultures and their 

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spiritual and religious beliefs.22 Following such figures, Anzaldúa read the work of Mexican archaeologists and anthropologists  like Miguel León-Portilla, who was himself engaged in rereading Mesoamerican culture and history, asserting that Aztec wise men functioned not just as teachers but as “psychologists” (1963, 13). In fact, the notion that the indigenous wise man practiced a kind of psychology was a profoundly appealing one, not just for Mexican thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s, but also for Chicana/o writers.  It suggested that the recuperation of an ancient and indigenous Mesoamerican wisdom might hold the key to healing modern psychic and spiritual wounds. Yet Anzaldúa, like Mistral before her, would queer such ideas away from their masculinist underpinnings, thereby rendering them “strange” and sometimes almost unrecognizable within their own contexts.

Anzaldúa’s  indigenism, connected  to her effort  to  rescue what  she called  in Borderlands  “the  Indian  in us” (1987, 23), was  framed  in part within the context of a long U.S. history that conflated Indian and Mexican bodies, imagining and imaging both as inherently despicable. Her tendency to romanticize indigenous peoples has been noted by Chicana/o critics; yet only a few, such as Rosaura Sánchez (1997), have traced such romanticism back to  its origins  in  the early-twentieth-century nationalist discourses, often combined, of Mexican  indigenismo and mestizaje.23  Indigenismo almost always functioned in the service of mestizaje, which assumes the folding of  the  indigenous  subject  into a  racialized heritage where  the mixed-race person has access to the supposed racial/cultural attributes of both “bloods.” And because  this  folding or mixing constituted a major force in Anzaldúa’s work, the theme of indigenous survival in her writing often became a matter of internal rescue through the foregrounding of “the Indian  in” her (my emphasis). As with Mistral, Anzaldúa’s metaphor of fusion and its accompanying racialized sense of spiritual connection with the indigenous (in the very flesh) was intimately tied to the occupation of a vulnerable and painful body, and she drew on this very pain to queer Borderlands’ vision of a “spiritual mestizaje” (1987, 81).

Queer Readings, Cosmic Meanings

In her essay “Cherríe Moraga’s Going Brown:  ‘Reading Like a Queer,’” Sandra Soto suggests that whereas “queering” heteronormative texts can produce  rich and complex readings,  the  tendency to assume that queer Chicana  texts  are  implicitly nonnormative,  resistant,  and even  “evi-dentiary” can result in a reading that seems, as she puts it, “flat-footed”: 

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Moraga’s work,  for example, “has been taken up in queer theory mainly as evidence” (2005, 238). Such readings, which are not confined only to Moraga’s work, run the risk of eliding the contradictory claims, conservative assumptions, and internal conflicts that can mark even the most progressive of queer texts.

Reading queerness—and its connections to what Soto calls the “illogic of race” (238)—in the writings of women like Anzaldúa and Mistral requires equal critical care. Not only do we risk flattening their readings, but as many scholars of Latin American, U.S. Latina/o, and Chicana/o writing note, queerness reads differently across these sites. For one thing, terms such as lesbian or gay were not always in use in either woman’s social context; as Anzaldúa put it, “I can identify with being ‘una de las otras’ or a ‘marimacha,’ or even a jota or a loca porqué. . . . These Spanish/Chicano words resonate in my head and evoke gut feelings and meanings” (1998, 263). Mistral so far as I know never used the word lesbian, and as much as she worked to queer her own gender role, she was also deeply invested in certain heteronormative roles—the maternal, for example—at both a public and a personal level. Additionally, critics have pointed out  that  it  is  the masculine/feminine binary, rather than the gay/straight, that shapes the sensibilities of many queer Latin American and U.S. Latina/o  texts.24 We can  see  this,  for example, in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, where she claims queerness as “mita’ y mita’,” half man and half woman (1987, 19). It may seem obvious by now, but  it always bears  repeating:  this means abandoning  the demand that “lesbians,” as academics most often know the term, somehow must exist in the same ways, in the same times and places (Treacy 1998, 203).

For Mistral, avoiding reading her work as evidentiary in a clear-cut case for her queerness has historically not been too much of a problem, since her sexuality remains a matter of debate. Yet when Licia Fiol-Matta, for example, discusses the topic of Mistral’s sexuality, she notes that “Mistral’s relationships with women are not difficult to locate; they are universally acknowledged as  life-sustaining. Whether  they  included a  sexual  aim and whether this sexual aim was queer are, for the time being, matters of speculation” (2002, 56). What complicates things is that at the same time, Mistral’s very profession depended on and contributed to a state-sponsored and heteronormative vision of women as maternal and teacherly, Indians as childlike and unevolved, and (biological) children as the true source of women’s worth. So it can sometimes be difficult to untangle a normative, public, “teacherly” orientation toward women and children (and Indians) from the queer sensibility one glimpses in her written work.

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Indeed, Mistral  felt a certain amount of perverse pleasure in the fact that there was more to her  life  than met the (public) eye. This was the case, for example, when it came to her esoteric beliefs. As she wrote to an acquaintance, “Now we come to the terrain of the pure confession. I was, from the 1920s to the 1930s, a Buddhist, hidden in secret from the people; like one hides a wound I hid my belief, because I was a teacher and because I felt—now I know—that it’s a tragedy to be thus, in the middle of a Catholic race” (Mistral 2002, 42). In the same letter, she also reveals how the death of her mother brought her back to Buddhism and to her “Asiatic superstitions,” as her secretary and companion, Palma Guillén, had called them: “All alone, like the faithful falcon, Buddhism returned to my hand and to my innards [entrañas]. It saved me, and I believe it continues to save me” (42).25 At the same time, in a 1939 letter to her good friend, the Argentinean writer and critic Victoria Ocampo, Mistral said, “With regard to reincarnation, I am always somewhat inarticulate, or embarrassed, or considered harmlessly crazy” (Mistral and Ocampo 2003, 95). Thus not coincidentally Mistral often used a “desviadora/mujer  loca” or “raving/crazy woman” persona in her poetry. Such a strategy, combined with the elliptical language in which much of her poetry is couched, simultaneously revealed and hid both her sensuality and her mysticism. As Elizabeth Horan says, Mistral took what she had learned from Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, from Annie Besant,  its president, and from Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, “using the theosophical convention of the parable to speak from the position of an outsider” (2000, 148) in order to fashion her “highly codified language of desire” (170). The double movement of constructing a “crazy” poet/“raving” persona meshed with her interest in occult or hidden knowledges: both would shield her work from hostile understanding, revealing her self (as poet) and her poetry only to the most sympathetic or perceptive readings.

This emphasis on the spiritual, hidden like a “wound” though it might have been, informed all her thinking and writing. Like the Peruvian politi-cian Haya de la Torre, Mistral carried her esoteric beliefs into the idea of an Indoamérica, an indigenist vision of a pan–Latin America. As we will see, again like Haya de la Torre, she combined esoteric and Eastern religious ideas with  the  idea of  the  Indian as possessing an ancient  spirituality. Although the impulse to speak of an Indoamérica in “cosmic” terms was not original to her, nevertheless Mistral’s construction of it as a spiritual and specifically woman-centered site, one that would connect women across generations, races, and borders, queered the ways it had been imagined by other, mostly male, thinkers.

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In fact, a sense of Indianness as constituting simultaneously a spiritual, racial, and cultural heritage  for  the mestiza was a central aspect of her aspirations to construct a particular kind of spiritualized sensuousness. Indig-enous peoples as well as her own presumed indigenous heritage were often important elements in, or the impetus for, Mistral’s poetic constructions of a woman-oriented space. In poems where she evokes Indian objects or people, for example in “La cajita de Olinalá” (The Little Box of Olinalá), written in 1924 in Mexico, or in the long poem “Beber,” written later in 1938, the indigenous figure or object becomes the persona’s poetic inspiration as well as her guide to that longed-for, queerly envisioned, cosmic Indoamérica.

It would seem difficult if not impossible to picture similarities between Anzaldúa and Mistral when  thinking about  the ways  they expressed a sense of sexuality. If Mistral’s writing worked to disguise from potentially hostile readings her esotericism as well as her own sensual feelings toward women, Anzaldúa’s writing can seem to be too much at one with her own self-identification as a lesbian, and one risks conflating a “lesbian” Anzaldúa with a “lesbian” text. As with Mistral, it is difficult to tease out the differ-ences between Anzaldúa the persona and Anzaldúa the person, but like any writer, Anzaldúa to some degree narrated and constructed her life and her experiences in her writing and interviews. This is important in reading her as a “queer” writer. Indeed, the way she constructed her sense of sexual-ity was much more complex and ambiguous than ontological notions of identity (as in “being a lesbian”) lead us to think; in her 1992 essay “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana,” Anzaldúa herself notes that “there are no lesbian writers . . . I am arguing for a lesbian sensibility, not a lesbian aesthetic” (1998, 263–71, emphasis in original). As with Mistral, again, keeping this complexity alive involves looking at the ways Anzaldúa’s writing about physical pleasure or sensuality is often mapped onto a body that  is both  spiritual and  racialized at  the  same time—indeed,  is a  site where one necessitates the other and where souls are, as she said, Indian. Part of what makes her points of contact with the same historical context in which Mistral worked so striking was that, like Mistral, Anzaldúa also constructed a body whose Indian heritage as a mestiza infused its sensual and sexual feelings with a spiritual meaning.

Paradoxically enough, however, Anzaldúa’s experience of very early, long, and bloody menstrual periods, as she told Linda Smuckler, translated for her into an early suppression of sexual identity: “I had no sexual iden-tity because this whole part of my body was in total pain all the time. . . . So  I withdrew all  feeling  from my genitals”  (Anzaldúa 2000, 29). She 

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maintained that even throughout most of her adult life “being a lesbian has never been an issue for me. What has been an issue is sexuality—of whatever kind. . . . I was around gay people. I just didn’t have a sexuality. I was like autoerotic. I wasn’t fucking men; I wasn’t fucking women. But I  started thinking of myself as a  lesbian” (47–48).26 Yet  sexuality  is also an important part of Anzaldúa’s thinking; although she is not explicit in her writing about sexuality—she does not give us the intimate scenes of lovemaking that Moraga does, for example—“fucking” does have a place in her work. She could have, as she said, sexual fantasies about animals, or feel “intense sexuality” toward her father, but these sensations were almost always read as spiritual: “Or I could have mistaken this connection [with her father], this spiritual connection, for sexuality” (79–80). It is less the sexual partner (real or imagined) or the means of achieving pleasure that are important for Anzaldúa; rather it is the melding spiritual “energy” of orgasm, unifying what was once disparate or even opposite: “In both the sexual and the spiritual act, all the ‘you’s’ are there, and it’s a tremendous amount of energy” (37–38). This energy, we must  remember,  is always racialized, whether  she  says  so explicitly or not. Her  insistence on  the idea that “I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female . . . the coming together of opposite qualities within” (1987, 19) is directly connected to her insistence on mestizaje as both physical instance and spiritual  impetus for  fusion, or blending: “the mestizo and the queer exist at this time and point on the evolutionary continuum for a purpose. We are a blending that proves that all blood is intricately woven together” (85). Thus the problem with using a kind of identity reading of Anzaldúa’s and Mistral’s sensual or sexual references, often embedded in a discourse of racial and spiritual “evolution,” as lesbian (or for that matter, queer) is that such a reading tends to obscure or take for granted the “illogic,” as Soto puts it, not just of discourses of race but of sexuality as well.

The Meanings of Blood

Suzanne Bost reminds us that “blood forms a key link between Anzaldúa’s theories and actual racialized and sexed bodies” (2005, 11). Indeed, blood links Anzaldúa both with her own body and with otherworldly experiences. In more than one interview, Anzaldúa has touched on this theme: “I think that when I was three months old . . . the spirit in my body left, so that I died for a little bit, and another spirit entered my body . . . an extraterres-trial spirit . . . [it was a male extraterrestrial, and so] he didn’t like my body” 

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(2000, 34). The fact that the extraterrestrial spirit did not like her body, and that she was “alienated” by this feeling, as she said (no pun intended), prompted early, copious, and painful menstrual bleeding. Yet this episode also taught her “certain things” she needed to know: “The only way for me [to learn things] was to have this other spirit in my body . . . in a way it explains this whole feeling of alienation—and the blood—because he couldn’t deal with the body” (34–35). What she learns is that blood and soul are linked, most often by mestizaje, although even white people can have Indian souls.

In her discussion of the 1903 serialized novel Of One Blood, by African American writer Pauline Hopkins, Susan Gillman notes that “If . . . blood refers to the literal passing down of inheritance theorized by the biological sciences as well as to the biblical  inheritance of spirit or culture,  it also produces,  in the novel’s occult context proper, a metaphysics of psychic identity that endures over time and space” (2003, 66). Blood is still today commonly used  to  refer  to  relations of consanguinity, as well as  to  the common sense that cultural ties are also a matter of  family in that they seem to be (physically)  inherited.  Indeed they  form both a metaphysics and a physicality of identity that, as Gillman says, “endures over time and space.” In much the same way, the figure of blood informs both Mistral’s and Anzaldúa’s  thinking about  the  spiritual dimensions of  those bodies that have  inherited,  through  the blood,  the culture and knowledge of indigenous peoples.

The image of blood was central to the related discourses of eugenics, nationalism, indigenismo, and mestizaje in Mistral’s time. Mistral’s adamant and even, as her good friend Victoria Ocampo put it, “fanatic” avowal of the fundamental Indian heritage of Latin America served to convince Mistral herself that her own “blood” heritage was not just Basque but also Indian (Mistral and Ocampo 2003, 15). According to Ocampo, “Mistral would ask of her friends ‘what part of America was so sacred that it demanded our unconditional loyalty?’ She assured us that, in large measure, it was Indian America, to which she was bound by blood” (286). Anzaldúa was equally adamant on this subject: the United States–Mexico border was “una herida abierta  . . .  the  lifeblood of  two worlds merging to  form a third country” (1987, 3), and those “people who have Indian blood,” that is, mestizos, would “cerrar la fisura entre la india y el blanco en nuestra sangre” (close the fissure between the Indian and the white in our blood) (63). Chicanos, because they were already mestizos, were “a blending that proves that all blood is intricately woven together” (85). For both Mistral and Anzaldúa, the mestiza 

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relationship with  indigenous blood required  imagining two bloodstreams carrying two cultural/psychic heritages, so to speak, which could be thought of as separately accessible but which at the same time had also to be thought of as racially, biologically, and by extension culturally intermixed, or fused.

Blood was also connected to writing for both women. Anzaldúa’s task, a task that would be realized through her writing and learned through her body’s bloody response to an alien possession, was to explain that people have “Indian” souls (2000, 35). Mistral posited the mixing of white Spanish and indigenous blood as the gateway to “a torrent of originality,” especially in poetic writing, just as Anzaldúa maintained that the queer mestiza was an “agent of transformation,” particularly in the act of writing. Both women saw the act of writing as both painful and revelatory, an act of “bitter fertil-ity” as Mistral called it: it was inextricably intertwined with the sexual and racial violence of mestizaje, yet writing was the setting where the mestiza could gain access to a spiritual (indigenous) source of creativity.

Typically for Mistral, the creativity accompanying the poet’s realization of his or her racial heritage was also marked with wounding or violence. As late as 1945, her essay “Colofón con cara de excusa” (Afterword with the Look of an Excuse) represents Mistral herself as inheritor of the first rapa-cious encounters of the conquest, wherein began the “grafting” of Indian to Spanish. She is, then, the recipient of a “troubled” physiognomy: “I am one of those who carry the troubled and irregular feelings, [the] face, and [the] expression because of the graft; I count myself among the sons and daughters of that twisted thing they call a racial experience, or better said, a racial violence” (Mistral 1979, 180).27 Such a racial violence also begot a linguistic one, which she called a “verbal mestizaje.” If Indians had not been, as Mistral put it elsewhere, “defeated in body and soul” (1993, 183), there might still exist a more elemental language. “Oh, if only there were still Indians!” Mistral wrote to Ocampo in 1942. “They’d know what the land is and they’d know the elemental words, the primary ones, that must be said . . . the other [words] don’t save anything because . . . [they] don’t burn and they don’t come out with the force of the blood” (Mistral and Ocampo 2003, 128, emphasis in original). Yet, as she said of Pablo Neruda, the “graft” of mestizaje bestowed the gift of a painful creativity:

The opposing  faculties and contrasted paths of  the American soul are always explained by  the mestizo  factor. . . . Blood mixing encompasses various aspects of pure tragedy; perhaps only in the arts does it present an advantage and provide the security of enrichment . . . when a mestizo opens a dam, a torrent of originality is set free. (1993, 219)

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As we can see, the figure of blood—even with its attendant implications of violence and wounding—was  spiritually  revelatory as well as episte-mological  for both women:  it was  central  in  their writerly depictions of a body whose pain and blood heritage  together could give access  to spiritual knowledge.28

Mistral’s important 1938 poem “Beber” (Drinking) uses images of water and blood in order to record a key epiphany wherein the persona realizes, first, that she possesses an indigenous heritage, and second, that this is a pan-American woman-heritage. Although the central image of the poem is water, not blood, the water draws the blood necessary for revelation and knowledge, while the  four different sources of  the water serve as a pan-Indoamerican and ultimately woman-centered, mestiza vision:

In the valley of the Río BlancoWhere the Aconcagua is born,I arrived to drink, leapt to drinkinto the whip of a waterfallthat fell long-maned and hardand broke stiff and white.I stuck my mouth in its boiling,and the holy water burned me;and three days my mouth bledbecause of that gulp of Aconcagua.

In the countryside of Mitla, one dayof cicadas, of sun, of walking,I knelt at a well and an Indian cameto support me over the water,and my head, like a fruit,was between his hands.I drank what he drank,so that his face was next to my face,and in a lightning flash I knewthe flesh of Mitla was my race.29 (Mistral 2003, 194–95; my emphasis)

For Mistral,  the “burning” of  the “holy water” of  the Aconcagua  river, such that the persona’s mouth bleeds—which not coincidentally lasts for three days—is the painful yet mystical precursor for the racial knowledge revealed “in a lightening flash” in the next stanza. Just as the holy water of the Chilean river marks her with her own blood, the water of Mitla, a famous site of pre-Columbian Mixtec and Zapotec ruins in Mexico, literally reveals her indigenous blood—that is, her racial—heritage.

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If the first two stanzas of “Beber” are a revelation of her own mix of white and Indian blood, the second two stanzas make it clear that this Indianness is contained in—in fact enabled by—an always potentially maternal body, one that belongs to a long line of girl children who might become mothers, and mothers who might bear girl children. The third stanza pictures the persona in Puerto Rico, where the palms are like “a hundred mothers.” Here though, another image of palms in a short essay of Mistral’s called “The Coconut Palms” troubles our reading of the palms in “Beber” as only maternal:  in Puerto Rico, Mistral wrote, “We immediately recognize the coconut palms; they cannot be counted. For each dead Indian, the Spaniard planted a live palm, remaking the landscape, just as the race was remade in order to forget the former island, the home of Indians” (1993, 163). In “Beber,” then, when a little girl breaks open a palm coconut so that the persona may drink, we know that the palms are not merely exotic background but point directly to racial violence. Yet here such violence is transformed by making racial fusions the source of a new feminine site of tenderness:

with grace a little girl brokenext to my mouth a green coconut,and I drank, like a daughter,mother-water, palm-water.And I’ve never drunk sweeterwith the body nor with the soul.

As the Indian held her head so that she could drink—an image that sug-gests, if only for a moment, a childlike dependence—the child’s offering of the coconut water engages the poem’s concerns with the circular nature of the maternal: daughters become mothers eternally. Thus, the persona drinks from the little girl’s offering “like a daughter.” The final stanza brings together two kinds of knowledge, both achieved through recognition: the revelation of an  indigenous heritage, mirrored  in an always potentially maternal gaze.

To the house of my childhoodmy mother brought me water.between one gulp and anotherI would see her over the cup.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .I still have the valley,I have my thirst and her gaze.This will be eternitythat even still we are what we used to be.

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In this final stanza, the persona-child’s gaze at the mother is similar to the persona’s gaze at her own face in the first stanza, and to the child’s again in  the  third  stanza, where  the persona herself drinks  like a (girl) child, and where the girl child stands in for the mother. This temporal circular-ity is thus bound up within one moment and one act; it gestures toward a woman-centered utopia where women mirror each other, and  in  the mirroring, bring full circle the racialized, mystical realizations of the first two stanzas. Finally, then, in the last lines of the final stanza of “Beber,” Mistral’s construction of  the memory of  the mother as  reflexive device (“I have my thirst and her gaze”)  to connect her  to both girl child and maternal body is also used to make a veiled reference to the theosophical notion that spiritual consciousness is immortal and cyclical: “even still we are what we used to be.”30

Shamans, Prophets, and Amautas

As I have noted, of particular relevance to the foundations of humanistic psychology  in  the 1950s and 1960s was  the work  that anthropologists, ethnologists, and travel and fantasy writers had done since the eighteenth century on the figure of the shaman. This interest grew originally around the figure of the Siberian shaman, and only later expanded to include shamans from other countries. As  interest  in  the psychological  state of  so-called primitives grew in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shamanism came to be seen in the West as a psychological pathology, a manifestation of a mental illness: an “arctic hysteria,” as it was often termed until the begin-ning of the twentieth century, when several scholars began to contest the “medicalization” of the term (Znamenski 2007, 79, 88). As the twentieth century progressed, widespread public  fascination with this figure quickly gave the term shaman the more popular meaning of a wise person, often a “medicine” man or woman, a meaning it still holds today. In appropriating this figure for their work, beginning in the 1950s, transpersonal psychologists deliberately turned on its head the link between shamans and mental pathol-ogy. The shaman became a figure whose own painful yet ecstatically altered state of mind had led him (or her) through a mystically and psychologically therapeutic  journey. The knowledge acquired made of  the shaman what Andrei Znamenski calls a “wounded healer” (254).

While  she did not use  the  term  shaman, Mistral was  attracted  to those figures whose roles had to do with prophecy, spiritual education, and mysticism. Indeed, for Mistral, writing was connected to what she called 

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“prophetic speech”; she identified herself with a long tradition of scorned women prophet-figures, writing to Victoria Ocampo that she believed “in Cassandra, I believe in Electra and in the charming Antigone” (Mistral and Ocampo 2003, 309). The common Latin American habit of conflating the “character” of indigenous peoples with those of “Oriental races,” particularly the Chinese, made it possible to bring together popularized anthropological and esoteric ideas about indigenous wise men and the mystical wisdom of Asian religions, in turn making it inevitable that such figures would have deep-seated appeal to those like Mistral who sought unconventional and/or unmodern sources of knowledge.

A neo-Inca resurgence took hold in Peru in the 1920s, partially driven by the writings of Peruvian anthropologist Luis Valcárcel,  including his 1927 Tempestad en los Andes.  In  this  text, he calls  for a  resurrection of the cultural values of the ancient Inca to reorder contemporary Peruvian society;  as Antoinette Molinié notes, he  “created a great  Inca epic by inventing the ‘Andean mode of production.’ . . . He defined the Andean people as a  ‘cosmic race’:  thanks  to  them, a  synthesis of all  the peoples of the world was to emerge in America” (2004, 240). Such ideas, which were resonant, if not precisely consonant, with Vasconcelos’s idea of the cosmic race in Mexico, influenced Mistral as late as 1947. In an essay called “Something about the Quechuan People,” Mistral proclaimed that the Inca represented an “Oriental” wisdom: they “were like a Chinese version of the American . . . their pagan mystical cult trained them in ritual dance and song” (1993, 183). Continuing, Mistral confessed that if there were one profession she would have desired, it was that of the Inca Quechuan amauta, or “wise man,” described in her essay as a combination of historian, mystical and religious teacher, and poet. Although Mistral exclaimed here that the amauta was a “beautiful vocation for a man,” her sense that her own writing could be considered prophetic casts a different light on this state-ment: “The Amauta served as a medium for inspiration but also organized solemn and popular festivals . . . the business of the Amauta was laden with honor but also with seduction. Perhaps his was the only profession I have envied or longed for in solitude, desiring it for myself” (1993, 183). To be an amauta was a “seductive” profession, queerly desired in its masculinity and longed for in its acclaim, part of her blood heritage in its indigenous creativity and wisdom.31

The same confluence of  ideas about ancient wisdom, mapped onto a  later U.S.  feminist  spirituality combined with a movimiento  interest  in popularized accounts of Aztec elite life, made it almost natural that Anzaldúa 

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would envision herself as a shaman-writer. When AnaLouise Keating asked Anzaldúa to say more about “the interconnections between writing and spiri-tuality,” Anzaldúa replied, “It’s related to my idea of the artist as shaman. . . . For me, writing is a spiritual activity just as it’s a political activity and a bodily act” (2000, 251–52). Ecofeminist and neopagan writers such as Starhawk, who wrote the hugely popular Spiral Dance (1979), also argued that women can be “natural” shamans: their experiences with the pain of subordination can,  if embraced and worked through, bring healing spiritual knowledge. The shaman-artist was, as well, a figure that would connect Anzaldúa with a definitively queer spiritual sensibility: as she put it in Borderlands, “sexu-ally different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking” (1987, 19).32  In this sense, the queer Chicana, with her store of  indigenous wisdom, could be  ideally suited to become what Znamenski calls a “wounded healer” (2007, 254).

As we have seen, Anzaldúa did indeed feel wounded by/in the blood—as despised  indigenous heritage and physical  trauma—at the  same time as blood endowed her with mystical knowledge, in much the same ways as Mistral felt it did. Like Mistral, Anzaldúa also made an appeal to the spiritual beliefs of indigenous, pre-Columbian peoples as both source and metaphor for her own work. In Borderlands, Anzaldúa refers to Aztec beliefs and metaphors in order to frame her own writing practices: as a “shaman” herself, she uses the metaphor of Aztec blood sacrifice in her chapter “Tlilli, Tlapalli/The Path of the Red and Black Ink.” “Escribo con la tinta de mi sangre” (I write with the ink of my blood), she begins, and continues,

For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this trans-formative power,  they must  arise  from  the human body—flesh  and bone—and  from the Earth’s body—stone,  sky,  liquid,  soil. This work, these  images, piercing  tongue or earlobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, my Aztec blood sacrifices. (1987, 71, 75)

Here, her source for Aztec beliefs and rituals comes almost entirely from Miguel León-Portilla’s  interpretations of Aztec codices  in his 1956 La filosofía náhuatl, estudiada en sus fuentes, published  in English  in 1963 as Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind. León-Portilla read the Náhuatl symbols for the god of duality and for writing as being combined. The god of duality is also both night and day: tecolliquenqui, “she who is clothed in black,” and yeztlaquenqui, “he who is clothed in red,” meaning “clothed in the color of blood.” As León-Portilla describes it, the 

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juxtaposition of these two colors also evokes the idea of written wisdom: the phrase used to describe the tlamatini, or Aztec wise man, is “His are the black and red ink” (1963, 30). What is particularly interesting about this book in relation to Anzaldúa’s work is its clear mission not only to intel-lectually and philosophically reengage with Náhuatl texts but to reorient thinking about ancient Aztecs away from the notion (widely accepted on both sides of the border) that they were warlike and ultraviolent, yet also passive and fatalistic about their “destiny” (read: their conquest). Toward this goal, León-Portilla’s language was influenced by humanist psychology. León-Portilla attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México at the same time as transpersonal psychologist Erich Fromm was teaching and practicing there, between 1950 and 1965. This suggests that León-Portilla, like many Mexican thinkers of the time, was influenced if not by Fromm himself then by ideas about humanistic psychology that were “in the air” during  those decades.33  In Aztec Thought and Culture, his  long discourse on the tlamatini averred more than once that this figure “functioned as a teacher and psychologist” (13), and that the Náhuatl texts meant to instruct and educate pointed “to the existence of a ‘humanistic’ thought among the Nahuas” (15). Although León-Portilla never explained in this text exactly what he meant by “humanistic” or “psychology,” he adopted the humanist psychology lexicon of dynamism and personality enrichment to describe these Aztec wise men’s teachings (141).

León-Portilla never used the term shaman, but Anzaldúa combined León-Portilla’s emphasis on the Aztec wise man as humanist psychologist with contemporary ideas of the shaman. Along with her strong attraction to popular Jungian ideas about the unconscious, the anima/animus, and the “shadow” aspects of the psyche, Anzaldúa constructed a framework of ideas that structured the therapeutic discourse she used. Again in “Tlilli, Tlapalli,” Anzaldúa asserted that the Aztecs “believed that through meta-phor and symbol . . . communication with the Divine could be attained, and  topan  (that which  is  above—gods  and  the  spirit world)  could be bridged with mictlan (that which is below—the underworld and the region of the dead)” (1987, 69). Here, Anzaldúa conflated the Aztec images of “above” and “below,” or  spirit world and underworld, with  the  idea of healing  from  the unconscious outward  to  consciousness, maintaining that “writing invokes images from my unconscious . . . in reconstructing the traumas behind the images, I make ‘sense’ of them. . . . It is then that writing heals me, brings me great joy” (70).34 It is this aspect of her work that  is  simultaneously  similar  to, yet  the most different  from, Mistral’s 

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thinking; both appealed to the ancient wisdom presumably embodied in amauta or shaman, yet the psychologized nature of shamanistic thought in the mid-to-late twentieth century means that Anzaldúa’s use of this figure  as  a means  for  individual  and  social healing  is  quite  different from Mistral’s desire for the public role of mystic, teacher, and prophet represented by the amauta.

La conciencia nueva

It is no accident that Valcárcel’s 1927 announcement at the beginning of Tempestad en los Andes, “la conciencia nueva ha llegado” (the new con-sciousness has arrived), uses much the same language as “La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness,” the title of the seventh chapter of Anzaldúa’s 1987 Borderlands. Notions of a new and cosmic—that is, a more broadly spiritual—consciousness achieved via racial synthesis echo through Latin American and Chicana/o texts from the first decades of the twentieth century well  into  the  last. Yet neither Anzaldúa nor Mistral was  interested  in merely  repeating such  images and  ideas.  Instead, each attempted a queer rewriting of inherited notions of race, race mixing, and sexuality by incorporating these notions into a woman-centered sensibility. For both women, the act of queering both the spirituality and race of the mestiza body made that specific body the central site wherein the “fusion” necessary for harmony and spirituality would continuously be effected. It is, in fact, the shared history of esoteric and racialized beliefs that makes their work seem at times startlingly similar and that spurred both to feel that it was the (new) “conciencia mestiza” of women that might ultimately, as Mistral put it, conserve “el cuerpo espiritual del mundo” (the spiritual body of the world) (2001a, 96).

Notes1.  For reasons that will become clear in the course of this essay, I hesitate 

to  label Mistral as a “lesbian”  in  the current U.S.  sense of  the word. Anzaldúa, in Borderlands /La Frontera (1987), moved back and forth between “lesbian” and “queer,” but by 1991, as she was drafting what would later be published as “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana,” she had moved away from the term lesbian. She argued that since this term was unknown in the Chicano community 

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from which she came, it did not fit her (1998, 264). The terminologies themselves, and their implicit associations with a certain kind of rigid (white) identity politics, posed a problem  for her.  If  asked  to choose,  she wrote,  she would  (reluctantly) choose “dyke” or “queer” (264).

2.  Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. It aimed to bring science and religion together by culling from “ancient wisdoms.” Theosophists prided themselves on being open to manifestations of the spiritual from any religious or alternative source, although concepts from the religious and philosophical systems of South Asia (especially India) were often central to their work. Some of the major sources of such wisdom were Hindu philosophy and religion, Buddhism, reincarna-tion,  spiritualism,  spiritism,  and popularized  archaeological  and  anthropological ideas of pre-Columbian indigenous religious and philosophical beliefs. At the time Anzaldúa was writing what would be Borderlands /La Frontera, those in the United States interested in the esoteric drew from many of these same sources of religious or mystical thought, combined with the rise of New Age and countercultural notions of spiritual and psychic healing. According to Olav Hammer (2001, 67), New Age can be thought of as a confluence of several earlier religious and mystic streams of thought, combined with  ideas  taken  from midcentury transpersonal psychology: “theosophy  and  the  harmonial  religions  [such  as  Christian  Science]  arose  from the same mesmerist roots  . . .  theosophy cultivated the mystical and speculative elements of its precursors . . . mesmerism [was pared] down to a minimal creed of personal well-being and prosperity . . . [and these gradually merged] into a single family of doctrines and practices. A third, more recent reference point has been the psychologization of religion.”

Indigenismo  was  often  the  other  side  of  mestizaje  for  countries  with  large surviving  indigenous  populations,  such  as  Mexico  and  Peru.  An  almost  purely symbolic sense of sympathy with the plight of the conquered Indian, indigenismo was nevertheless almost a complete construction of the sad and melancholic Indian by the white elite (see Knight 1990, 71–113). “It led to anthropological and socio-logical studies of the Indians . . . and to a romanticized celebration of their roles” in Mexico’s culture (Stepan 1996, 146). Most important, ancient indigenous cultures were  seen as  the  foundation  for a modern national history, while contemporary indigenous peoples were viewed as culturally and often  racially  (evolutionarily) degenerate. Indigenismo took on specific political “flavors” depending on where it was deployed: aspects of both Mexican and Peruvian  indigenista thinking were influential, for example, in Mistral’s work.

3.  For an excellent historical and conceptual overview of  “scientism”  in esoteric beliefs, see “Scientism as a Language of Faith” in Olaf Hammer’s Claiming Knowledge  (2001,  201–330).  As  historians  of  alternative  religious  beliefs  like Hammer point out, from the late nineteenth century through the beginning decades of the twentieth, the divide between scientific and esoteric ideas was not always clear. “Occult sciences” were often thought of as properly scientific. Susan Gillman’s Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult demonstrates how investigations into the occult “represented the marginal status of the new occult science . . . not, however, as an oppositional field, but as a science” (2003, 59). The interest in the United States since the 1970s in popularized interpretations of the 

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presumed  spiritual  aspects  of  certain  scientific  notions—like  quantum  or  chaos theory—continues  this  tradition. Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics  (1975) comes  to mind here, but there are hundreds more such texts published every year.

4.  See my discussion of race and anthropology in the introduction to Mestizo Modernism (Hedrick 2003, 1–100).

5.  See, for example, Mauricio Tenorio Trillo’s articles tracing the connec-tions between U.S. and Mexican history and social sciences (1997, 1999).

6.  These  range  from  theosophical  teachings  to  what  Olaf  Hammer  has called “post-theosophical” beliefs and practices dating from the beginning of the twentieth century. This  is not  to  say  that  theosophy was not  still an  influential doctrine and organization, but that “through processes of institutional schism and doctrinal innovation, a number of post-theosophical movements arose, and instead of a grand synthesis there was soon an entire spectrum of positions with similar narratives yet often incompatible details” (Hammer 2001, 63). Much of what these movements propound is what many people would today more informally call New Age ideas, though again Hammer locates the “rise” of New Age thought in the late 1950s (73).

7.  Haya  de  la  Torre  was  influenced  by  Jungian  ideas  of  archetype  and unconscious, according to Frederick Pike (1983, 491). Yet his appeal to Jungian ideas had more  to do with the  location of “the Indian” within the unconscious of the nation, and with the rebirth and regeneration not just of Peru but of all of Indoamérica, than with the sense of a psychospiritual healing of trauma to which Jung’s ideas would be put, from the 1960s onward, in the United States.

8.  Not  coincidentally,  one  of  the  foundational  texts  for  certain  ideas  in later  transpersonal  psychological  thought  was  Richard  Maurice  Bucke’s  Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901).  Bucke  cites Edward Carpenter, who in his own 1914 Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk tried to show the link between homosexuality and (primitive) psychic ability: “I think there is an organic connection between the homosexual temperament and unusual psychic or divinatory powers. . . . It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness” (Carpenter 1975, 49).

By the 1960s, humanistic or transpersonal psychology had also become deeply intertwined with the counterculture renewal of interest in spiritual and mystical thought, especially from Japan and India. Even more important, humanistic and transpersonal psychologists were once again interested in anthropological studies of “primitive” alternative states, especially those initially attributed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to Siberian shamans. As Znamenski puts it in The Beauty of the Primitive, “The exploration of alternative realities (altered states) in general and shamanic experiences in particular became the major themes for transpersonal psychology  . . .  [which] approached religion and spirituality as valid experiences that carried powerful healing potential” (2007, 168).

9.  Elizabeth Horan notes, “Like other writers of the era, Gabriela Mistral draws from theosophy and from modernism to construct alternative sexualities and express a bohemian, international sensibility” (2000, 148). As she says, theosophy was especially attractive to women: “disinclined to dogma, Gabriela Mistral found 

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that theosophy [presented] unusual opportunities for women’s intellectual develop-ment” (163).

10.  See Casaús Arzú (2002) for an especially good discussion of the role of theosophical thought in the Central American antidictatorship movements of the 1920s and 1930s.

11.  As Nancy Stepan notes, “in the 1920s and 1930s the discourse on gender and race became increasingly linked to the discourse on the nation. . . . Through eugenics . . . gender and race were tied to the politics of national identity” (1996, 105).

12.  As  Hammer  notes,  “Blavatsky’s  writings  are  permeated  with  evolu-tionism. . . . In fact there are more references to the term evolution in the index to The Secret Doctrine than nearly any other word” (2001, 256–57). Yet according to Hammer, Blavatsky criticized materialist evolutionists such as Darwin, Spencer, and Haeckel as incomplete, positing instead an “eternal, cyclic progression of emana-tions and retractions” where mankind spiritually devolves and evolves again,  in what Hammer identifies as an idealistic theory of evolution such as that of Hegel, “whereby there is a preexisting plan immanent in history” (257).

13.  For women writers and intellectuals, theosophy also opened up new spaces from which to write. As María Zaldívar has noted, theosophy allowed prominent Latin American women writers of the first part of the twentieth century, such as Delmira Agustini,  Juana de Ibarbourou, Alfonsina Storni, and Gabriela Mistral, a  measure  of  creative  independence.  Zaldívar  writes:  “Estas  mujeres  utilizaron la  ampliación  del  concepto  de  lo  espiritual  como  una  estrategia  discursiva  para liberarse  de  una  moral  conservadora  y  tradicional  de  la  época.  . . .  Es  así  como al abrirse a otras dimensiones de la espiritualidad como al hinduismo, la teosofía e incluso al espiritismo, entre otras manifestaciones de búsqueda, ellas afirmaron su independencia y su emancipación no solo como creadoras sino como mujeres” (These women used the amplification of the concept of the spiritual as a discursive strategy for freeing themselves from a conservative and traditional morality of the time. . . . In this way, opening themselves to other dimensions of spirituality like Hinduism, theosophy, and even spiritualism, among other means of searching, they affirmed their independence and their emancipation not just as creators but also as women) (2006, 166). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Spanish in this essay are mine.

14.  “El  papel  de  las  redes  teosóficas  en  la  formación  de  una  conciencia antidictatorial, integradora, antiimperialista, [y] el debate que abrieron acerca del valor de la igualdad frente a la libertad, del trabajo como derecho inalienable y de la necesidad de conseguir el sufragio para las mujeres y los indígenas. . . . El espiri-tualismo, el vitalismo, el espiritismo y la teosofía fueron corrientes de pensamiento que  [tambien] se enfrentaron con el positivismo y con el materialismo” (Casaús Arzú 2002, 12).

15.  Licia Fiol-Matta maintains that Mistral was not, in fact, mixed-race at all: “In spite of her championing of the indigenous peoples, Mistral was white and white-identified” (2002, 10).

16.  My ongoing discussion of how specific images have informed discourses of mestizaje across borders should not be taken as an indication that all ideas about, 

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and uses of, mestizaje were the same throughout Latin America. Indeed, the general outlines of ideas about race mixing as well as about esoteric matters were plastic enough to be shaped for very different political, artistic, and intellectual purposes, not  only  in  different  nations  but  within  the  intellectual  communities  of  those nations. In addition, not everyone saw the same need for mestizaje as an answer to the “Indian question.”

17.  David William Foster notes  that much of  the poetry of  the Contem-poráneo  group  of  Mexico—active  from  the  late  1920s  to  the  mid-1940s  and mentored by the Ateneo de Juventud, of which Vasconcelos was a member—was marked by a “deep homoeroticism” (1997, 7).

18.  There were rumors throughout most of his life that Haya de la Torre was homosexual, as Frederick Pike notes: “Not only his enemies but many a devoted Aprista had little doubt that Haya was indeed a homosexual” (1986, 101). Licia Fiol-Matta notes that Vasconcelos “hired prominent gay and lesbian intellectuals and writers to assist in his educational reform” (2002, 10), but she does not argue that he “intentionally hired queers or that he was conscious of this deployment” (226 n. 19).

19.  Theosophists as well as other important figures interested in the occult were particularly in the thick of things when it came to news about inappropriate or “aberrant” sexual behavior. In fact, the head organization suffered several widely publicized  scandals  in  the  beginning  decades  of  the  twentieth  century.  Charles Leadbeater was a leader in the Theosophical Society whose influential 1895 book The Astral Plane “provided a controversial and opposing view of an afterlife saturated with taboo sexual desires” (Mullin 2001, 87). He was put on trial in England in 1907 for having advised a thirteen-year-old boy to masturbate; this, along with revelations of his homosexuality, created a global scandal and threatened theosophy’s influence.

20.  Stepan  writes  that  in  Argentina,  beginning  in  the  1920s,  “eugenists proposed sexual education to ‘subdue the sexual instinct’ and turn it to eugenic ends; attacked sexual ‘delinquency,’ homosexuality, and sexual license; and offered advice and evaluations on the type of racial unions they believed would be ‘harmonious’” (1996, 118). She notes that much the same kind of thing was going on in Mexico at the time: “The Mexican Society of Eugenics had emerged in 1932 in a period of conservative consolidation of the state and growing political nationalism. It had good contacts with the federal and state health authorities and cannot be considered to have been completely out of sympathy with the goals of the national state” (129).

21.  Haya de  la Torre’s brief  stay with Vasconcelos  in Mexico may  indeed have prompted him to read in these areas. Frederick Pike (1986, 101) suggests that while Haya de la Torre was in exile in England from 1923 to 1931, his readings included anthropological studies of the “primitive” by Malinowski, such as Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) and The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929). More important, Pike suggests that Haya de la Torre may have read Edward Carpenter, a theosophist and openly homosexual socialist poet and writer, whose Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk drew on theosophical ideas to  investigate  the psychic  abilities of  sexually  “intermediate” primitive persons. Carpenter wrote, “I think there is an organic connection between the homosexual temperament and unusual psychic or divinatory powers. . . . It may possibly lead 

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to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness” (1975, 49).

22.  I am thinking here, for example, of the mélange of Chicano, Native American, Catholic, and Eastern spiritual and religious ideas laid out in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), where the overarching theme is the unity of opposites, or in the 1970s phase of Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino, the creation of  El  Centro  Campesino  Cultural,  where  members  learned  Aztec  and  Mayan spiritual and philosophical principles and sought to use them in their work. See Morton (1974).

23.  “In  appropriating  and  disassociating  [pre-Columbian]  myths  from  the specific history of the indigenous population that led to their production, Chicano/Chicana literary and cultural producers in effect reduce them to exotic discourses of  indigenismo  for  the  construction  of  a  contemporary  and  radically  different ethnic identity, imitating in the process cultural strategies for the construction of national identity deployed by the Mexican government after the 1910 Revolution” (Sánchez 1997, 357–58).

24.  Robert Ellis’s introduction to Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture  (Chávez-Silverman and Hernández 2000, 3–20) maintains that an Anglo-American and European paradigm  of  homosexuality,  with  its  emphasis  on  identity,  does  not  always  fit Latina/o and Latin American writing, with what he maintains  is  its  emphasis on being “en el ambiente,” or (as I might translate this phrase) “in the life” (3). In addition, he continues, “The lesbian/gay approach, on the one hand, tends to operate within a gay/straight binary opposition. . . . Yet in a number of Latino and Hispanic texts, the overwhelming sexual binary is not gay/straight but feminine/masculine” (4–5).

25.  “Ahora vamos en tierras de confesión pura. Yo fui, de los veinte a  los treinta y tantos años budista, a escondidas de las gentes; como se esconden llagas escondí mi creencia, porque era maestra fiscal y porque presentía—hoy lo sé—que es una tragedia ser eso, en medio de una raza católica. . . . Solito me volvió, como el halcón fiel el budismo a la mano y a las entrañas. Me salvó, y yo creo que me han salvado.”

26.  “‘Lesbian’ is the nearest thing that identifies me, but I don’t know what I am. ‘Lesbian’ is not an adequate term. I know that I consciously chose women” (Anzaldúa 1987, 115). Anzaldúa later noted that Cherríe Moraga, perhaps inevi-tably, “threw . . . the legitimacy issue at me. . . . In a book review of Borderlands: La Frontera, she implied that I was not a real lesbian because I did not stress my lesbian identity nor did I write about lesbian sexuality” (1998, 265).

27.  “Soy de los que llevan entrañas, rostro y expresión conturbados e irregulares, a causa del injerto; me cuento entre los hijos de esa cosa torcida que se llama una experiencia  racial, mejor dicho, una violencia racial  . . .  [es una  lengua]  lejos del solar español, a mil leguas de él” (1979, 180).

28.  “Any  attempt  at  writing  a  history  of  sexual  sensibility  expressed  by women in the early twentieth century . . . would look to metaphors . . . that pose the origins of speech in the quality of woundedness . . . that correlate versifying with violence” (Horan 2000, 166).

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29.  In this essay, all English translations of passages from the poem are mine. The complete poem in the original Spanish reads as follows: “Recuerdo gestos de criaturas / y eran gestos de darme el agua. / En el Valle de Río Blanco, / en donde nace el Aconcagua, / llegué a beber, salté a beber / en el fuete de una cascada, / que caía crinada y dura / y se rompía yerta y blanca. / Pegué mi boca al hervidero, / y me quemaba el agua santa, / y tres días sangró mi boca / de aquel sorbo del Acon-cagua. / En el campo de Mitla, un día / de cigarras, de sol, de marcha, / me doblé a un pozo y vino un  indio / a  sostenerme  sobre  el  agua, / y mi  cabeza,  como un fruto, / estaba dentro de sus palmas. / Bebía yo lo que bebía, / que era su cara con mi cara, / y en un relámpago yo supe / carne de Mitla ser mi casta. / En la Isla de Puerto Rico, / a la siesta de azul colmada, / mi cuerno quieto, las olas locas, / y como cien madres las palmas, / rompió una niña por donaire / junto a mi boca un coco de agua, / y yo bebí, como una hija, / agua de madre, agua de palma. / Y más dulzura no he bebido / con el cuerno ni con el alma. / A la casa de mis niñeces / mi madre me traía el agua. / Entre un sorbo y el otro sorbo / la veía sobre la jarra. / La cabeza más se subía / y la jarra más se abajaba. / Todavía yo tengo el valle, / tengo mi sed y su mirada. / Será esto la eternidad / que aún estamos como estábamos. / Recuerdo gestos de criaturas / y eran gestos de darme el agua” (Mistral 2003, 194–95). From Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright 2003 University of New Mexico Press.

30.  As Hammer describes it, “The living entities that populate the cosmos emanate  from a unitary Ground of Being.  . . .  [This] manifests  itself  through an eternal, cyclic progression of emanations and retractions” (2001, 257).

31.  Valcárcel, who became the director of Peru’s National Museum in 1930, had enormous influence with his idea that Inca wisdom and mysticism could be reconnected with, and serve to rejuvenate, contemporary Peruvian politics.

32.  The idea that the “berdache” or “two-spirit” Native American was consid-ered to have magical or spiritual power because of his presumed homosexuality has been a popular one since well before the beginning of the twentieth century, and it is part of a larger body of ideas devoted to the notion that (primitive) homosexuals often served as magic or spiritual figures. Indeed, Edward Carpenter’s 1914 Inter-mediate Types among Primitive Folk cites, among others, Frazer’s 1912 Adonis, Attis, and Osiris as well as John Irving’s 1835 Indian Sketches as sources for his discussion of the connection between (primitive) spirituality and homosexuality (1975, 15).

33.  According  to  Neil  McLaughlin,  “Fromm  became  an  influential  figure among the Latin American intellectual elite, gaining access to new forms of cultural capital and recharging his emotional energy. The Psychoanalytic Institute based at the National Autonomous University of Mexico City gave him followers and space to develop his own ideas to their logical conclusions” (2001, 276).

34.  In fact, the Aztec practice of personal bloodletting was limited to elite and priestly castes; “ordinary” Aztecs would not have participated in these rituals. Ramón Gutiérrez’s When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away notes that as late  as  1630,  when  Christianized  Aztecs  had  begun  to  flagellate  themselves  in imitation of Franciscan friars, a Chililí “medicine man” had vociferously objected on the grounds that it was unseemly for ordinary people to do what had previously been reserved for rulers (1991, 89).

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