Intro: Attempt to give a robust account of what life is like living on borderlands (political and social "borders") as well as what sorts of identities result. Broadly construed, our focus here is on the notion o f being authentic in heterogeneous social contexts.

1. Roots: "…the ground of my own being."

1. Identity –tripartite sense of self (c.f. unitary Rational Self –not just break from coherence of contents, but an ontological break from core self)

1. Generations: one’s people, sense of belonging
2. Conscious Self: "to live life as I …"
3. The Shadow Beast: aversion to any authority/constraint, aspect of self outside of culture –clothed in cultural meaning.

1. Culture

1. Beliefs: content of ways of seeing and coming to know "reality" (c.f. expectations & "jails"): authorizes epistemically viable possibilities
2. Practices: enforcement and sustenance (c.f. checks and maintenance)
3. Community: transmission of cultural ways

1. Women’s Subservience: submission to men/male constructed/dominant ways

1. Life Choices (c.f. life plans): nun, prostitute, wife, and (for a very few) education
2. Suppression & Fear: divine and undivine aspects of self are targeted
3. Culture/Religion as "guardian:" represses or controls things feared

1. Conformity

1. Individuality (in indigenous peoples): the person is first kin, then an isolated self (c.f. Frankfurt)
2. Ambition and Envy: one entails the other –both vices of character
3. Respect: linked to those in power via rules of behavior, c.f. abuelita

1. Deviants: difference from the norm

1. Moral Status: culturally induced negativity
2. Magic: possessing "supernatural powers"

1. Divine Aspects: "godlike" qualities of being above or beyond culture
2. Undivine: "animal-like" qualities connected with rhythms of nature

1. Essentialism: sources of deviancy lie in "despot duality" –cultural claim that true humanity (or whatever, love, friendship, etc.) is this or that, never in-between or something else entirely.
2. "Twice Evil:" multiply deviant in oppositional manner, c.f. Latina Lesbian –sexual woman (deviant body) & homosexual (deviant expression)

1. Borderlands

1. Lands and Worlds: metaphor for normatively loaded identity forming social spaces (social determinants spatially construed)

1. Normatively loaded: having value, judgment attached to object
2. Identity Forming: social determinants/factors that influence identity

1. Multiple Alienation

1. Alienation: "cast out, no longer a member, no sense of having a home" –to be separated from an important aspect of oneself
2. Mother Culture & White Culture: cast out for different and overlapping reasons.

1. Los Intersticios

1. Border people find themselves occupying different spaces
2. Paralyzing: homogeneous function of those spaces is to immobilize
3. Identity is formed in the cracks between pressures of inhabited places –on a dangerous and unpredictable heterogeneous ground

1. Cultural Criticism

1. Inhibitions: awareness of the devaluation by whites leads to uniformly valorizing one’s own culture.
2. Love of Culture: honest critical appraisal of hurtful aspects of culture
3. Goal: identity that accounts for all aspects of one’s cultural inheritance: Indians, Mexican, & Whites