Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras

Edited by Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras gathers more than seventy works by women of color across poetry, testimony, visual art, theory, folktale, and political manifesto. Its title names survival as an active practice: “making face” means confronting the forces that distort or erase you, while “making soul” means producing an inner and collective life from materials dominant culture has devalued. Form is therefore part of the argument. Knowledge does not belong only to academic prose; it also resides in image, rhythm, memory, anger, spirituality, and embodied speech.

The anthology extends the coalition politics associated with This Bridge Called My Back. Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Chicana, Latina, lesbian, and other contributors do not appear as examples under a single theory. Their juxtapositions reveal disagreements about race, sexuality, class, nation, and cultural loyalty while refusing the white middle-class woman as feminism’s default subject. Coalition is made through accountable encounter among nonidentical histories, not through a vague claim that all women share the same oppression.

Published in 1990, the book bears the vocabularies and movement debates of its time; its categories cannot stand in for every contemporary trans, disability, migration, or mixed-identity politics. The collection is also deliberately expansive rather than theoretically seamless. That heterogeneity is its continuing value for FemRes: it teaches readers to treat editing as political world-making, to notice whose forms count as knowledge, and to understand a feminist canon not as a finished list of great individuals but as a contested conversation sustained by many voices.