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A generative, genre-bending collection of nineteen intertwined stories by legendary writer, theorist, and activist Gloria E. Anzaldúa.
Best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria E. Anzaldúa was also a prolific fiction writer. Prieta Is Dreaming, a speculative novel-in-stories, follows the precocious Prieta from her childhood in South Texas to college and beyond as she tries to find her way in the world. Imbued with supernatural powers, Prieta traverses time, changes form, explores her desires, and defies convention. Started in the 1970s and revised up until Anzaldúa's death in 2004, Prieta Is Dreaming comes as a revelation, affirming Anzaldúa's place at the forefront of contemporary feminist, queer, and border theory, while transforming what we think about both her writing and ourselves. In these nineteen intertwined stories, we find some of Anzaldúa's most adventurous, inspired ideas about gender, sexuality, and the very nature of existence—as well as a character, la Prieta, as bold and memorable as the book itself.
"This extraordinary posthumous collection from Chicana poet and theorist Anzaldúa (Borderlands) offers a window into a woman's marginalized yet magical life on the Texas plains … Anzaldúa plays wonderfully on the theme of hybridity throughout, blending realism and fantasy, fiction and memoir, and human and animal. This radiates with joy." — Publishers Weekly
"Over decades, Anzaldúa labored to offer this painstaking, relentless exploration of the queer experience in all its richness as part of quotidian life. Prieta's story is a foundational piece of the dam against erasure and marginalization Anzaldúa spent her life building." — Kirkus Reviews
"With Prieta Is Dreaming, Gloria Anzaldúa, whose words guided a generation of girls into womanhood, reminds us of what cemented her into the Latino Canon in the first place. Here she's given us a Chicana Odyssey—an epic of Prieta's adventures into nepantla and coming back asserting a more powerful version of herself. Rich, immersive, and profound, this collection records the voices of Prieta's childhood, of her growth into queer womanhood, of her dreams and her nightmares, helping us all feel less alone. Reaching out with a gentle ancestral hand across space and time, Anzaldúa posthumously mothers us with her guiding intelligence." — Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming
"There is a particular kind of pain in reading Prieta Is Dreaming—knowing that Gloria Anzaldúa did not live long enough to finalize these stories. Anzaldúa's voice is as fearlessly honest and vulnerable here as it has ever been. 'The sky and the night and the stars come into my body,' she writes, inviting the perception of other worlds to begin the transformative work of 'reorienting her mind, rearranging the cells of her body, remapping the nerves and synapses.' These are stories from the borderlands, achingly familiar to all of us who take our borders everywhere we go." — ire’ne lara silva, author of flesh to bone and the light of your body
"In Prieta Is Dreaming, Prieta, in all of her facets, guides readers through nepantla and ontological shifts, magnificently displaying life on the borderlands. Through these formidable cuentos/testimonios/autohistorias we (time) travel with them to the montes, ranchitos, and beaches of el valle de tejas as Anzaldúa's Prieta reveals previously suppressed epistemologies under the astute, loving curation by Anzaldúa scholars Zaytoun, Keating, and Bost. This significant collection is required reading for all who dwell en los mundos zurdos." — Sonia Saldívar-Hull, author of Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature
"Even science fiction has elements of autobiography. That is putting it mildly. Here is a collection of writings that shape-shift our banal distinctions between imagination and reality. Here are fusions of fact and fiction, of experience and experiment, works of autohistoria, as Gloria Anzaldúa so beautifully crafted them. Be prepared to be changed by an encounter with these stories, which are not just stories." — Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else
Editors' Introduction
"La Prieta is Dreaming"
Part One: Familia
1. The Second Heart/El segundo corazón
2. Out of the Corner of the Eye/De reojo
3. In the Mouth of the Sea/En el hocico del mar
4. People Should Not Die in June in South Texas
Part Two: Patlache
5. Como Quelite
6. Mita' y mita'
7. Movidas of a Baby Butch
8. Eating the fruit/Comiendo del árbol como Xochiquetzal
9. El Paisano is a Bird of Good Omen
Part Three: University Life
10. In the Shadow of la Chingada [or Smoking Mirror]
11. The Crack Between the Worlds
12. Becoming luciérnaga/Swallowing fireflies/tragando luciérnagas
13. Night of the Lizard/ Noche de la lagartija
Part Four: Becoming Chamana
14. She Ate Horses
15. Reading LP
16. Like a Crow on the Wing/Como urraca en vuelo
17. Ghost Trap/Trampa de espanto
18. The Were-jaguar in the Woods of the Dream
19. Song of the Rattlesnake/Canción de cascabel
Acknowledgements/Reconocimientos
Appendix 1: Instrucciones a la autora/Intstructions to the Author
Appendix 2: A History of the Stories
Appendix 3: Anzaldúa's Writing Process: "The Crack Between the Worlds"
Works by Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Editors' References)
Editors
About the Author