12 CHICANA/LATINA STUDIES 5:2 SPRING 2006 CROSSING THE BORDER WITH LA ADELITA: Lucha-Adelucha as Nepantlera in Delilah Montoya’s Codex Delilah Ann Marie Leimer In 1992, to mark the five-hundreth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, San Francisco’s Mexican Museum produced an exhibit titled The Chicano Codices: Encounter ing Art of the Americas. Chicana photographer Delilah Montoya created an artist’s book, Codex Delilah, Six-Deer: Journey from Mexicatl to Chicana, whose central character, an indigenous girl named Six-Deer, meets iconic figures from the Mexicana/Chicana pantheon over a 520-year period. This essay examines a character from the work’s fifth panel, Lucha-Adelucha, a representation of La Adelita, the soldadera figure associated with the Mexican Revolution. The work traces representations of La Adelita within historical documents, the pictorial archive, the corrido, Chicana feminist recuperations, and Codex Delilah. Braiding together approaches from Chicana feminism, anthropology, art history, and queer theory, the study adopts the trenza paradigm as its analytical frame. Positioning Lucha-Adelucha as emblematic of multiple border crossings that include gender, sexual expression, and femininity/masculinity, and as an example of a nepantlera, the work argues for an interpretation of this figure as a visual representation that transgresses the confines of heteronormativity. [Key words: Delilah Montoya, Chicana/o art, La Adelita, Chicana feminism, gender theory, queer theory] In 1992, the world marked the five-hundredth anniversary of contact between the Americas and Europe with global commemorations that celebrated this initial juncture of the so-called Old and New Worlds. In the United States, artists and activists of mixed-race and indigenous heritage and their allies criticized the anniversary’s planned observances and raised both the issue of histories silenced by the conquest and that of the further elision of these cultures during the year-long commemoration. The Mexican Museum in San Francisco responded to this unique historical moment by producing an exhibition titled The Chicano Codices: Encountering Art of the Americas