This Bridge We Call Home

Published more than twenty years after This Bridge Called My Back, This Bridge We Call Home gathers over eighty writings edited by Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating. Poetry, memoir, theory, pedagogy, visual work, and spiritual reflection revisit women-of-color feminism while opening the conversation to contributors positioned differently by race, gender, sexuality, and institutional power. The anthology does not treat “bridge” as a demand that marginalized people make themselves available to everyone else. It asks what kinds of selves and communities must be transformed before crossing difference can become more than a celebration of diversity.

Anzaldúa’s concepts of nepantla and the nepantlera give the collection a demanding politics of in-betweenness. Living between worlds may produce perception and connection, but it also involves contradiction, wounds, and unequal risk. Contributors examine privilege, academic labor, queer and lesbian communities, welfare, racialization, spirituality, and alliance, repeatedly testing whether identity can remain a source of historical knowledge without hardening into a sealed political category. Coalition is therefore not unity achieved once; it is an ethical practice of listening, self-interrogation, conflict, and action in which common ground must be made without pretending that everyone arrives with equal power.

The anthology’s size and generic variety make it generative but uneven, and its spiritual vocabulary will not persuade every reader. Its attempt to include white contributors and men also creates productive questions about when inclusion redistributes responsibility and when it recenters those already heard. These tensions are not reasons to dismiss the project; they are part of the bridge’s test. For FemRes readers, the collection links Chicana and women-of-color feminism to a broader theory of transformation. It insists that solidarity is not an identity one claims but a relation one builds, and that building it may require changing the self that first imagined reaching across.