Shapeshifting Subjects

Gloria Anzaldua's Naguala and Border Arte

Kelli D. Zaytoun

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780252086519, 9780252044434
• eBook ISBN: 9780252053436
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Kelli D. Zaytoun draws on Gloria Anzaldúa's thought to present a radically inclusive and expansive approach to selfhood, creativity, scholarship, healing, coalition-building, and activism. Zaytoun focuses on Anzaldúa's naguala/ shapeshifter, a concept of nagualismo. This groundbreaking theory of subjectivity details a dynamic relationship between "inner work" and "public acts" that strengthens individuals' roles in social and transformative justice work. Zaytoun's detailed emphasis on la naguala, and Nahua metaphysics specifically, brings much needed attention to Anzaldúa's long-overlooked contribution to the study of subjectivity. The result is a women and queer of color, feminist-focused work aimed at scholars in many disciplines and intended to overcome barriers separating the academy from everyday life and community.

An original and moving analysis, Shapeshifting Subjects draws on unpublished archival material to apply Anzaldúa's ideas to new areas of thought and action.

CHAPTER ONE

La Naguala in Theory and Practice

Creativity is a liberation impulse, an activity that transforms materials and energy.

—Gloria Anzaldúa

Can we think of ourselves in cosmologies that affirm interconnection, communality, ambiguity? I think of Gloria Anzaldúa as enacting and expressing a cosmology for the new mestiza.

—María Lugones

This chapter explores the significance of la naguala/the shapeshifter across Gloria Anzaldúa's published and unpublished writings and places la naguala in conversation with contemporary feminist approaches to subjectivity. Inspired by a variety of influences but most notably her own Indigenous ancestry,¹ Anzaldúa's conception of la naguala, considered within feminism's move from late twentieth-century identity politics and poststructuralism toward today's new materialisms and decolonialism, offers a complex example of a radically relational subjectivity that resonates with yet departs from and complicates more recent theories of subjects and selfhood. Anzaldúa's la naguala as a theory and a practice presents an account of subjectivity that deconstructs the traditional Western dualisms of mind/body, matter/nonmatter, matter/spirit, and self/other. Importantly, as Anzaldúa engages with Indigenous philosophies and rituals, principally nagualismo, her theories attempt a decoloniality of subject formation.² Anzaldúa's use of Indigeneity is not without its critics, which chapter 2 discusses in detail; however, my analysis suggests that Anzaldúa's theories and artistic expressions, informed by postcolonial and feminist awareness and political purpose, avoid romanticizing or reinstating the past. By way of a specific transcultural practice of what she refers to as “border arte,” Anzaldúa works to avoid the pitfalls of cultural appropriation and primitivism. An invoking of nagualan consciousness is a critical part of this process. Before examining the politics of Anzaldúa's borrowing from Indigenous culture and practice of border arte, this chapter explains her terms and theories, her influences, and how her work can enhance discussions among other scholars and activists with similar investments in social and environmental justice.

La naguala, the feminine form of “nagual” (also spelled nahual and nahualli), is a Nahuatl concept associated with Pre-Classic Olmec–inspired depictions of shapeshifting humans or of animal guardians or companions or spirit guides. In the Nahuatl language, words containing the root “na” (such as Nahuatl itself) are associated with knowledge or creative power.³ Anzaldúa was keen to each of these definitions, for in addition to using naguala in its more well-known shapeshifting human/animal expression, she employed the term more broadly to refer to a powerful intuitive sense that serves to enhance relationality, a “a creative dreamlike consciousness able to make broader associations and connections than waking consciousness” and a “hyperempathetic perception [that] fuses you with your surroundings” (“now let us shift” 577; “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together” 250).⁴ Attention to the latter use of la naguala, particularly, complicates contemporary critical conversations that focus on borderland, mestiza, and nepantleran subjectivity in the context of identity politics and justice work. Although Anzaldúa's naguala shapeshifter can be read as a trope for transformation, I argue that naguala is more than a trope in the conventional sense; it is a designation for a literal capacity of subjectivity that, among other contributions, resists understandings of subjects rooted in Enlightenment-based humanisms.⁵ More specifically, nagualan subjectivity is negotiated in contexts within which human interaction and rational epistemology are just a part. Contrary to the self-determined, self-sufficient humanist subject, Anzaldúan subjects are strengthened, not undone, in creative connection to humans and nonhuman matter.⁶ La naguala is not merely a trope because, according to Anzaldúa, the transformation that naguala invokes extends purpose into the physical world by way of the imagination,⁷ which she viewed as energy-producing and as “real” as matter. La naguala, situated both in and beyond the body, shifts the shape and the boundaries of the subject, beyond strictly intellectual, humanist frameworks.

The claim that naguala is more than a trope is situated in Anzaldúa's nagualismo-informed beliefs with respect to conceptions of subjectivity and reality. In addition to investigating the sources that influenced Anzaldúa directly, those related to her upbringing as well as the academic and nonacademic texts she read, this chapter examines Anzaldúa's understanding of naguala in light of academic sources on Mesoamerican metaphysics, including those published since her death in 2004. Exploring Anzaldúa's grounding in Indigenous ontology with theories of posthumanism and, more generally, new materialisms serves as the foundation from which the book engages throughout in critical conversations with scholars’ recent work on Anzaldúa's theories of subjectivity. First is a brief overview of the character of the shapeshifter in Anzaldúa's work, followed by theoretical and critical considerations.

The Path of La Naguala in Anzaldúa's Work

Anzaldúa is one of countless storytellers and writers who continue to invoke the long-standing image of the shapeshifter in their work. Transcending limits of all types, shapeshifters today are employed to represent changes in identities, circumstances, life stages, and paths—transformation and flexibility, in general, as Kimberley McMahon-Coleman and Roslyn Weaver point out in their substantial study on the topic. The most popular contemporary American depictions of shapeshifters are of werewolves, a phenomenon likely connected to their prominence in Greek and Roman mythology. However, shapeshifters have a long presence in cultures across the globe, and many have influenced American popular literature from Japanese to Norse history and culture (6–7). McMahon-Coleman and Weaver also report that the appearance of shapeshifters in contemporary literature and film is on the rise; however, they found little critical work on the subject, especially when compared to the research on vampires and other monsters that, for the most part, maintain humanlike consciousness and form whereas shapeshifters transgress them. As shapeshifters are often associated with Indigenous groups, McMahon-Coleman and Weaver recognize the postcolonial politics that show up in narratives like The Vampire Diaries, Underworld, and Twilight, where, with troubling implications, werewolves are dependent on and dominated by white vampires (104).⁸ Scholarship on the nagual shaman in literature is especially inadequate and is “limited to discussion of one or two authors” (9). Why the rise in public interest in shapeshifters in fiction and film but lack of scholarly interest in the topic?

While the experience of shapeshifters as always-in-flux outcasts appears to resonate with many readers, perhaps the shapeshifter's seemingly distant relationship to the enlightened, rational human is responsible for its lack of exploration by academics. Like humans acutely aware of their lack of belonging any one place, shapeshifters are outsiders, “marked as different,” beings that “cannot reconcile their multiple identities and are forced to inhabit life on the edges of society” (McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 184). Shapeshifters as popular figures, therefore, reflect the real-life experience of navigating the rigid expectations of the contemporary world while they appeal to our intrigue with animals and the supernatural.

Perhaps, in light of its posthumanist features that emphasize extreme human transformation and the deep links among humans, animals, and the spirit world, part of the shapeshifter's lack of academic attention is not surprising given the humanist roots of scholarly work. Maybe shapeshifters, as conduits to our sensorial, animalistic intuition and deportment, take us too far from humanity, even the dark side represented by vampires and monsters, for our rational consideration. Academics elevate our human potential for logical analysis and emotional restraint. However, shapeshifters remind us of the lack of reason and individual control that permeate human life, a reality that is experienced daily but not well explained by secular, rational approaches. Read with the Indigenous philosophy (discussed later in the chapter), though, shapeshifting can be understood as allowing for more subjective control when control is viewed not as an individual power over something but as a power in conjunction with the other people and contexts within which individuals participate.

Attending to the shapeshifter is long overdue and offers much potential for rethinking the boundaries of subjective experience. McMahon-Coleman and Weaver make the case: “As uniquely fluid characters, shapeshifters are deployed in myriad ways to explore contemporary society and how it affects us” and their place in literature has “becom[e] particularly relevant in times of social upheaval” (184). Anzaldúa's work on the naguala is, among many other things, a contribution to how the shapeshifter is summoned in order to call for a transformation in how we relate to each other and our environment in times of conflict and turmoil as subjects of a newly defined, relational humanity. An outline of her use of the concept follows.

Anzaldúa employs the term “la naguala” in several of her published writings, including the ones discussed in this chapter: “The New Mestiza Nation: A Multicultural Movement,” “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together: A Creative Process,” “now let us shift…the path of conocimiento…inner work, public acts,” “Speaking Across the Divide,” and Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Although written in the order listed above, the first and last selections were published after her death; “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together” and “now let us shift” were published as book chapters in the final five years of Anzaldúa's life but were also a part of her dissertation, which was posthumously published as Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro. Nagual/naguala is also present in Anzaldúa's poetry and her unpublished papers, notes, and short fiction, notably in her unfinished and unpublished short stories “Lechuza,” “My Nagual,” “Vigil of the Lizard,” and “Werejaguar.” For the purposes of this chapter, my analysis is focused on her published essays, particularly “now let us shift,” where her parting vision of transformational self-work, coalition-work, and social-justice activism is clearly outlined. However, the idea of shapeshifting fascinated Anzaldúa even in childhood and is mentioned in her unpublished writing notes as far back as the 1970s.

Although Anzaldúa's emphasis on la naguala in her publications appears in the last years of her life, published evidence for her interest in shapeshifting shows up years before that in her interviews with Linda Smuckler in 1982 and Christine Weiland in 1983, where she refers to shamanism and extending the body's physical limitations.⁹ In the introduction to Weiland's interview, which is in the form of a conversation between Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, Anzaldúa mentions her story “Puddles,” in progress at the time,¹⁰ which involves the character of la Prieta changing into a shapeshifting “lizard-woman” (“Within the Crossroads” 72). Whereas Anzaldúa's early publications, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), in particular, are often read as being concerned with primarily the US-Mexican border and Chicana lesbians, Anzaldúa states she was also addressing broad borders and identities—the “psychological,” “sexual,” and “spiritual” borders that were “not particular to the Southwest” and the idea that identities are always “shifting and multiple” (Borderlands / La Frontera, preface). In the 1990s and beyond, the latter points became important to scholars seeking to address the problems posed by the identity politics of the late twentieth century, particularly, the idea of identity as a singular, representative, set point of reference. From Borderlands / La Frontera and her other works, scholars take up a number of Anzaldúa's concepts that help express the indeterminacy of identity: borderlands, mestiza consciousness, mestizaje, nepantla, queer, and nos/otras, to name a few. La naguala comes later, as Anzaldúa's definitions of identity and subjectivity become more expansive.

After Borderlands / La Frontera, Anzaldúa's work focuses on the challenge but necessity of what she called “alliance-coalition work,” and the ways in which she describes herself and identities, in general, become more complex and inclusive (“Bridge, Drawbridge” 143). Keating helps make this point in her citation of a 2002 excerpt from Anzaldúa's journal: “Shortest bio GEA [Anzaldúa]: Feministvisionaryspiritualactivistpoet-philosopher fiction writer” (Gloria Anzaldúa Reader 3). The running together of labels here suggests a seamless fluidity, as if even these wide designations were not broad enough. Her work takes a turn later in her life in what Keating calls Anzaldúa's “desire to go beyond description and representation by using words, images, and theories which stimulate, create, and in other ways facilitate radical physical-psychic change in herself, her readers, and the various worlds in which we exist and to which we aspire” (“Editor's Introduction,” xxiii). La naguala is an expression of the aforementioned desire, an image, theory, and practice of subjectivity. For Anzaldúa the naguala serves as a vehicle that deconstructs and decolonizes embodiment and being. More specifically, Anzaldúa takes up and develops the term “naguala” as a means for communicating her insistence on the fluidity of identity, the work of the imagination, and what Keating refers to as Anzaldúa's “metaphysics of interconnectedness,” which become critical to her later writings (“Risking the Personal” 9).

Anzaldúa's initial public mentions of the term “nagual” appear in talks and interviews in the 1990s.¹¹ She uses “nagual” in 1992 in one of those talks, “The New Mestiza Nation,” and then the term begins to appear more consistently in her work, including in one of her last writings, a 2003 email interview with Inés Hernández-Ávila, published as “Speaking Across the Divide” shortly before her death.¹² Reading these two pieces together helps to reveal the development of her theorizing with the concept.

Later published in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, “The New Mestiza Nation” reflects Anzaldúa's early thinking about the nagual as a reference to “a person who is changing identity” (211). She says, “We shift around to do the work we have to do, to create the identities we need to live up to our potential” (211). Her claim “Identity is shape-shifting activity” foreshadows her focus on naguala and nepantla in the 2002 “now let us shift” (discussed further into the chapter) (211). In “Speaking Across the Divide,” Anzaldúa uses the feminine version “naguala” and explains the naguala in another way, as assisting with creative activity, as “mysterious forces that guide” her “from the inner world” (293). This form of naguala, the “daimon” (meaning shapeshifter in this context), is described in much more detail in her 1999 “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together,” which is the first time Anzaldúa's use of the term appears in print, twelve years after the publication of Borderlands / La Frontera (“Speaking” 293). This understanding of la naguala, fleshed out in “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together” and discussed in the interview with Hernández-Ávila, becomes important to Anzaldúa's final writings.

Besides “now let us shift,” Anzaldúa's most extensive treatment of la naguala in her essays (prior to her posthumously published “Flights of the Imagination”) is in “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together.” In this substantial essay on the writing process, to which “now let us shift” was a “sister” piece, she refers to naguala as an “imaginal consciousness,” “the dreaming body…that's emotionally complex, diverse, dense, deep, violent, and rich, one with a love of physicality and the ability to switch bodies and their expressive codes instantly” (“Putting Coyolxauhqui Together” 253, 250). Anzaldúa describes how she “invokes this [naguala] sentience” to assist her in becoming in an intentionally physical way the subject about which she writes (250): “You become an internal experience, a particular emotional state or mood; you give life to tumultuous feelings, to raging anger. You become the crashing waves, the lighthouse with its beacon” (250). For Anzaldúa, an image induces physiological shifts in the body, and producing images (the function of naguala), more specifically, embodying them, is a prerequisite to writing about them.¹³ Later in her work, she extends the function of naguala to connecting with other people and surroundings, more generally, as a precondition for social-justice work.

In “now let us shift” Anzaldúa clarifies, for the first time, the position of la naguala in conocimiento or naguala as a specific practice of subjectivity in transformation, as the initiator of the inner work required for action in the outer world.¹⁴ For Anzaldúa, conocimiento comes from “multileveled” attention to “your surroundings, bodily sensations and responses, intuitive takes, emotional reactions to other people and theirs to you, and most important, the images your imagination create” (“now let us shift” 542). Identifying conocimiento as a path to “counterknowledge,” or “the unaccepted or illegitimate knowledges and ways of knowing used outside the inner circle of dominate ways,” she suggests that conocimiento provides an alternative to oppressive, socially constructed ways of knowing and being. Additionally, conocimiento, aided by the image of the naguala, encourages a change in how experiences of subjectivity and identities are created, with more flexibility and perviousness, a change that will facilitate more harmony, personally and collectively, more potential for coalitional work across differences (“Quincentennial” 178).

In “now let us shift” Anzaldúa describes the seven nonlinear stages of a subject's journey back and forth between “inner work” and “public acts”; she offers a detailed look at a subject's struggle for a rich experience of selfhood while becoming more radically interconnected (540). The stages begin with “el arrebato,” or an abrupt upheaval in one's former ways of knowing, a physical or emotional crisis that forces the consideration of change. Stage 2, “nepantla” is when a subject internally negotiates old ways with new ways of thinking. Stage 3, “Coatlicue” (or “Serpent Skirt,” the Nahua earth goddess of life and death and mother of the gods) or stagnation, represents a resistance to change, until stage 4, a call to go out of stasis into stage 5, “Coyolxauhqui” (Nahua moon goddess),¹⁵ where the subject begins remaking itself. Stage 6, “the blow up…a clash of realities,” is a process of confrontation and conflict with others that ultimately facilitates deeper, radical connection. In the seventh and final stage of conocimiento, Anzaldúa suggests that subjects act from the position of what she calls “the knower,” which has several functions. One of these functions, that of naguala, “arouses the awareness that beneath individual separateness lies a deeper interrelatedness,” and this reveals the aspect of Anzaldúa's work that resonates with not only the Indigenous ontologies from which she draws but also the posthumanism and new materialisms (discussed in the next section) (569). A close reading of the function of la naguala in “now let us shift” ends the chapter, but first a range of theoretical implications related to the concept is brought into relief.

La Naguala: Theoretical Considerations in Academic Feminism

Because a major feature of my interpretation of la naguala is its resistance to Enlightenment-based humanisms, I engage most substantially in this chapter with posthumanism and new materialisms, theoretical approaches that are largely motivated by this feature, as well, or with those that operate outside of Western humanisms altogether, for example, Indigenous metaphysics. Before moving into those approaches, however, I recognize the significant work of Latina/x feminist phen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward a Radically Relational Consciousness
• Chapter One. La Naguala in Theory and Practice
• Chapter Two. “An Artist in the Sense of a Shaman”: Border Arte as Decolonial Practice
• Chapter Three. Connections with Arab American Feminism
• Chapter Four. “Reaching Through the Wound to Connect”: Trauma and Healing as Shapeshifting
• Conclusion: Toward New Potentials of Imagination
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Subject Index
• Gloria Anzaldúa Works Index
• Back Cover