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Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 34:2 Fall 2009 © University of California Regents
Queering the Cosmic Race
Esotericism, Mestizaje, and Sexuality in the Work
of Gabriela Mistral and Gloria Anzaldúa
Tace Hedrick
ABSTRACT: Despite their differences in place and time, the woman-centered Chilean poet
Gabriela Mistral and the Chicana lesbian feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa both looked
to a transnational intellectual American history that frequently connected discourses of
esotericism, indigenismo, and mestizaje. My comparative approach shows how both women
used these discourses as a way to reconceptualize the subjectivity of the queer, indigenous-
identiied mestiza in a modern world. Notions of a new cosmic consciousness achieved
via racial synthesis echo through twentieth-century Latin American and Chicana/o texts;
theosophical ideas about race and spirit were deeply inluential in Mistral’s writing and
beliefs, and theosophy in turn informed the New Age feminist spirituality that helped shape
Anzaldúa’s work. Outlining a history of the connections between these esoteric beliefs and
those of mestizaje, and indigenismo, I show how Mistral and, later, Anzaldúa inherited
and rewrote these notions by incorporating them into a queer sensibility.
As a lesbian I have no race . . . but I am all races because there is the queer
of me in all races. . . . I am participating in the creation of . . . Nuestra
alma el trabajo, the opus, the great alchemical work; spiritual mestizaje.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
A mixture of races accomplished according to the laws of social well-being
. . . will lead to the creation of a type ininitely superior to all that have
previously existed . . . explained as the result of a beneicial spiritual
Mendelianism.
José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica