Carmen Rivera to discuss Mexican identity in literature

Carmen Rivera (chairperson of foreign languages), will be presenting a lecture titled, “Octavio Paz and Gloria Anzaldúa: The Labyrinth of Mexican Identity,” for the Brown Bag Lecture Series of the College of Arts and Humanities on Wednesday, March 7, at noon in Room G-144 of the Williams Center. The event is free and open to all campus and community members.

Professor Rivera will examine the contested meanings of Mexican identity through a comparative study of two major writers, Octavio Paz and Gloria Anzaldúa. She considers the connections between Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a collection of essays based on the history of violence and rupture in Mexico (conquest, colonization and revolution) and Anzaldúa’s collection of lyrical essays and poems, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). 

While Paz argued that Mexicans live a life of pain, anguish, and solitude shaped by a shared history of violence, Anzaldúa draws on the metaphor of the border to speak of an identity that is fluid and ambiguous, which provided a counterpoint and a new theoretical frame for cultural, transnational, ethnic studies. In the end, Rivera contends that while it appears that Paz and Anzaldúa take totally different, and at times, opposing approaches to the conception and construction of Mexican/Chicano identity, underlying both of their texts is the constant presence of “pain” and “rupture” in the experiences on both sides of the border.

The Brown Bag Lecture series offers monthly informal talks featuring new creative and scholarly work by members of the SUNY Fredonia faculty. Each 30-minute talk and/or presentation is followed by a brief discussion. For more information on the lecture series, please contact David Kinkela, committee assistant director by email or at 716-673-3876.