Author Gloria Anzaldua refused to allow herself to be pigeonholed when she addressed about 200 students and faculty in Von Canon Tuesday night.
Styling herself a "Latina-Chicana-dyke-feminist-writer," Anzaldua delivered the keynote address for Mi Gente's Founders' Week Celebration, discussing the marginalization of cultural and racial minorities in the world of higher education.
"The Academy is a place that I love but I have a love-hate relationship with it," Anzaldua said. "I came into it with an open heart."
Anzaldua said that Latinos and other minorities are seduced into attending primarily white universities and coaxed into believing that they will be safe from discrimination there.
"The only people who are safe in such places are those who see their lives reflected in the textbooks and the professors' lectures," Anzaldua said. "When they walk the halls they see themselves affirmed by others like them."
Because they are not easily incorporated into the conformity of these institutions, minority or oppressed students can be left feeling ill at ease, she said. "You feel out of balance, off-key."
Anzaldua extended her definition of "minority" or "oppressed," to include not just those with different skin color, but also those with any difference that puts them noticeably outside the norm.
"You can be oppressed by your sexuality, a handicap, or because you're short," she said.
Latino students in particular, Anzaldua said, may have trouble assimilating into the cookie-cutter society of the university. Besides facing subtle racism on campus, Latino students must also contend with a greater degree of social responsibility than white students if they wish to earn more respect, she said.
They must counter the ways that others attempt easily and conveniently to categorize them, she said citing as examples the "South of the Border" shopping center on Interstate 95 and the greek mixer at Duke of the same name and theme, both of which she said stereotype Latino culture.
Having to confront such scenarios on a daily basis serves to tire out minority students and quell their passion for asserting themselves and their race, she said.
"You've got to teach your professors what it's like to be a person from Ecuador, from Puerto Rico," she said of a Latino student's quest to maintain their identity. "Then you've got to tell the students, who want to know in five sentences or less what it's like to be a Latino."
Despite her criticisms, Anzaldua urged Latino students not to be ashamed that they are attending a predominantly white university.
"I'm not ashamed of the white part of me -- the part of me that was educated in white schools," she said.
Anzaldua also used the "South of the Border" example to highlight how Euro-American culture steals parts of Latino culture.
"With `South of the Border,' that's a specific thing about our culture that was taken and glorified," she said. "They're after our minds, ideas and art that first appears in our culture and is then taken over by Euro-American culture."
Although such a practice shows that Euro-American culture is open to other ideas, Anzaldua said, it also illustrates how Euro-American culture only takes those pieces of culture that are "easy to swallow," such as cubism or Mexican food.
"It's taking an entire people and commercializing it," Anzaldua said of such a trend.
In the face of these difficulties, Anzaldua advised students not to give up hope in the struggle for racial and cultural equality, as some white students are starting to realize the effects of racism and cultural imperialism.
"A few whites are interrogating their whiteness, realizing that racial oppression is harmful to them, too, even if they're not the ones being directly oppressed," she said.
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