This Bridge We Call Home

More than twenty years after This Bridge Called My Back made writing by women of color a forceful challenge to mainstream feminist “sisterhood,” Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating assembled This Bridge We Call Home as a new, larger conversation—not a simple sequel. Its more than eighty contributions range across poetry, memoir, theory, teaching, visual art, fiction, and spiritual reflection. The variety is not decorative: it refuses the idea that feminist knowledge must speak in one authorized academic voice. The collection asks what the earlier Bridge changed, what remained unresolved, and what new forms of community might require as different people enter the conversation.

The seven-part structure gives the anthology a practical reading map: “Looking for my own bridge to get over” explores the earlier book’s impact; “Still struggling with the boxes people try to put me in” resists imposed labels; “Locking arms in the master’s house” examines omissions, revisions, and new issues; “A place at the table” considers surviving battles and shaping worlds; “Shouldering more identity than we can bear” seeks allies in academe; “Yo soy tu otro yo / I am your other I” forges common ground; and “I am the pivot for transformation” enacts the vision. The sequence matters: it moves from inheritance and critique through institutional struggle toward relationship and action. The titles do not promise that a shared table or common ground has already resolved unequal power; they ask what would have to change for those practices to become real.

Anzaldúa’s nepantla helps name the uncertain threshold between worlds, but the anthology does not make in-betweenness a frictionless home. A threshold may enable someone to perceive relations that fixed categories hide; it may also mean displacement, contradiction, and exposure to unequal risk. The book’s bridge is therefore not a cheerful invitation for marginalized people to keep explaining themselves to everyone else. It raises a harder question: who is expected to do the work of crossing, translating, and making others comfortable, and who gets to remain where they already hold authority? Coalition is an activity and a responsibility, not a synonym for shared identity or a claim that everyone arrives with equal power.

The table of contents offers concrete routes through that question. Rebecca Aanerud’s “Thinking Again: This Bridge Called My Back and the Challenge to Whiteness” puts the earlier anthology’s legacy in conversation with whiteness. Evelyn Alsultany’s “Los Intersticios: Recasting Moving Selves” points toward the instability of selves formed across social locations. Reem Abdelhadi and Rabab Abdulhadi’s “Nomadic Existence: Exile, Gender, and Palestine” makes exile, gender, and political belonging part of the collection’s terrain. Nada Elia’s “The ‘White’ Sheep of the Family: But Bleaching Is Like Starvation” adds a direct challenge to assimilation and the burden of representation. These titles should be read as signposts, not as substitutes for the essays; together, however, they show that the volume’s expanded scope is meant to test how race, gender, sexuality, migration, and institutional location shape the possibility of speaking and acting together.

That expansion is the anthology’s wager and its most consequential tension. Anzaldúa’s official literary archive describes her editorial work as a form of cultural and collective change: this volume centers women-of-color writing while also inviting men, trans people, and white women influenced by those traditions. Such an opening can make new alliances possible, but invitation alone does not redistribute authority. In her chapter and a later contribution to the MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, Nada Elia describes conflict over Palestinian political speech and the terms on which contributors could challenge one another. In the same journal issue, Rabab Abdulhadi, Nadine Naber, and Evelyn Alsultany revisit tensions in the anthology’s contributor discussions. These are situated participant accounts, not a unanimous judgment by every contributor or editor. Their importance is precisely that they refuse to let “inclusion” stand in for shared control: a coalition can welcome marginalized voices while still placing the burden of explanation, translation, or proof on them.

This tension makes the anthology more useful as a record of coalition under pressure than as a blueprint that can simply be applied elsewhere. Its breadth also brings unevenness: more than eighty works do not form one seamless theory, and the collection’s spiritual language will resonate differently across readers and traditions. Nepantla should remain connected to Anzaldúa’s Chicana and Indigenous intellectual lineages rather than become a generic label for anyone who feels caught between worlds. Nor should the collection’s widened invitation be mistaken for evidence that colonial, racial, gendered, or academic hierarchies have disappeared. The feminist test is whether people can remain accountable across difference while changing the structures that decide who speaks, who is believed, and who carries the work of solidarity.

A useful route is to begin with Anzaldúa’s preface and Keating’s introduction, then read the sections on resisting labels, omissions and revisions, and forging common ground alongside one another. Follow chapter titles into the essays rather than treating them as miniature summaries. Pair the book with the earlier This Bridge Called My Back to compare the political conditions of the two anthologies, with Anzaldúa’s Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras for another experiment in feminist-of-color knowledge, or with Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders to extend the question of how solidarity can be practiced without flattening difference. For the edition’s description and contents, consult Routledge and Anzaldúa’s official literary archive; the 2005 MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies issue preserves additional participant perspectives on the coalition debates.