The Borderlands. An untamed wild region far-flung from the comforts and protection of civilization. A lone fortified Keep is the only bastion of Good desperately striving to maintain the forces of Chaos at bay. But Evil is everywhere, lurking in dark caves, fetid swamps, and forlorn forests.
More at Goodman Games. In addition, each volume will include a conversion of that original adventure to the fifth edition rules set. This format allows nostalgic gamers to re-live the adventures of their youth, and play those adventures again in a modern rules set! These classic adventure modules were played by millions of gamers in their original editions.
Among other things, the book includes:. The deluxe hardcover volume is anticipated to be available at Gen Con with general release in September For additional information, visit Goodman Games online at goodman-games. Translate PDF. English and Spanish. Some poems translated from Spanish.
ISBN pbk. Mexican-American Border Region - Poetry. Mexican-American women - Poetry. Mexican-American Border Region - Civilization. Title: Frontera. N95B6 '. Preface The actual physical borderland that I ' m deal i ng with in this book is the Texas-U. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands a nd the spiritual borderlands a re not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle a nd upper classes touch, where the space between two i ndividuals shrinks with intimacy.
I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican with a heavy I ndian influence a nd the Anglo as a member of a colonized people i n our own territory. I have been straddling that tejas -Mexican border, and others, all my life. It's not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions.
Hatred, a nger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape. However, there have been compensations for this mestiza , a nd certain j oys.
Living on borders a nd i n margins, keeping intact one's shifting a nd multiple identity and i ntegrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an "alien" element. Strange, huh? And yes, the "alien" element has become familiar-never comfortable, not with society's clamor to uphold the old, to rej oin the flock, to go with the herd. No, not comfortable but home. This book, then, speaks of my existence. My preoccupations w i th the i n ner life of the Self, a nd with the s truggle of that Self a midst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial i mages ; with the u nique positionings consciousness takes at these confluent s treams; a nd with my almost instinctive urge to communicate, to speak, to write about l ife on the borders, life i n the shadows.
Books saved my sanity, k nowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar. La madre naturaleza succored me, allowed me to grow roots that a nchored me to the earth. The switching of "codes " in this book from English to Cascillian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl to a mixture of all of these, reflects my language, a new language-the language of the Borderlands.
The re, at the j u ncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized ; they die and are born. Presently this infant language, chis bastard language, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society.
But we Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, chat we need always to make the first overture-co translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step.
Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you-from the new mest1zas. La perdida sus plumas el viento, page Cultures, page sobre piedras con lagartijos, page el sonavabitche, page mar de repollos, page A Sea of Cabbages , page We Call Them Greasers, page Matriz sin tumba o "el bano de la basura ajena ", page III. Este el esfuerzo de todos nuestros hermanos y latinoamericanos que han sabido progressar. Some call themselves Chicanos and see themselves as people whose true homeland is Aztlan [the U.
Southwest ]. Across the border i n Mexico stark silhouette of houses gutted by waves, cliffs crumbling i nto the sea, silver waves marbled with spume gashing a hole u nder the border fence. In the gray haze of the sun the gulls' shrill cry of hunger, the tangy smell of the sea seeping into me.
I walk through the hole in the fence to the other side. Under my fingers I feel the gritty wire rusted by years of the salty breath of the sea.
Beneath the iron sky Mexican children kick their soccer ball across, run after it, entering the U. But the skin of the earth is seamless. The sea cannot be fenced, el mar does not stop at borders. To show the white man what she thought of his arrogance, Yemaya blew that wire fence down. This land was Mexican once, was I ndian always and is. And will be again. Que la Virgen de Guadalupe me cuide Ay ay ay, soy mexicana de este lado.
The U. A nd before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third cou ntry-a border culture. Borders a re set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from t hem. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and u ndetermined place created by the emotional residue of an u nnatural boundary.
The prohibited a nd forbidden are its i nhabitants. Southwest consider the i nhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens-whether they possess documents or not, whether they're Chicanos, I ndians or Blacks.
Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence a nd u nrest reside there and death is no stranger. I n the fields, la migra. My aunt saying, "No corran, don't run. They' ll think you ' re del otro lao. Sin papeles-he did not carry his birch certificate co work in the fields. La migra took him away while we watched. Se lo llevaron. He tried co smile when he looked back at us, co raise his fis t. B ue I saw the shame pushi ng his head down, I saw the terrible weight of shame hunch his shoulders.
They deported him co Guadalaj a ra by plane. Pedro w alked all the way to the Valley. Se lo llevaro n sin un centavo al pobre. Se vino andando desde Guadalajara. During the original peopling of the A mericas, the first i nhabitants migrated across the Bering S traits and walked south across the continent.
The oldest evidence of humankind in the U. In B. The Cochise culture of the Southwest is the parent culture of the Aztecs. The U ta-Aztecan languages stemmed from the language of the Cochise people. Now lee us go. Tihueque, tihueque, vamonos, vamonos. Un pajaro canto.
Huitzilopochtli, the God of War, guided them to the place that later became Mexico City where a n eagle with a writhing serpent i n its beak perched on a cactus.
The eagle symbolizes the spiri t as the sun, the father ; the serpen t symbolizes the soul as the earth, the mother.
A t the beginning of the 1 6th century, the Spaniards and Hernan Cortes invaded Mexico a nd, with the help of tribes that the A ztecs had subjugated, conquered it. Before the Conquest, there were twenty-five million I ndian people in Mexico a nd the Yucatan.
I mmediately after the Conquest, the I ndian population had been reduced to under seven million. Chicanos, Mexican-Americans, are the offspring of those first matings. Our Spanish, I ndian, a nd mestizo a ncestors explored and settled parts of the U.
Southwest as early as the sixtee nth century. For every gold-hungry conquistador a nd soul-hungry missionary who came north from Mexico, ten to twenty I ndians a nd mestizos went along as porters or in other capacities.
I ndians a nd mestizos from central Mexico intermarried with North A merican I ndians. Levantate, Manquilef. Levantate, Pailahuan. Their i l legal invasion forced Mexico to fight a war to keep its Texas territory. It became a nd still is a symbol that legitimized the white imperialist takeover. With the capture of Santa Anna later i n 6, Texas became a republic.
Tejanos lost their land a nd, overnight, became the foreigners. Ya la mitad de! Ustedes muy elegantes y aqui nosotros en ruinas. W ith the v ictory of the U. Separated from Mexico, the N ative Mexican-Texan no longer looked toward Mexico as home; the Southwest became our homeland once more.
The border fence that divides the Mexican people was born on February 2 , 1 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The land established by the treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soon swindled away from its owners. The treaty was never honored a nd restitution, to this day, has never been made.
The j ustice a nd benevolence of God will forbid that. Texas should agai n become a howling wilderness trod only by savages, or. The A nglo-American race are destined to be forever the proprietors of this land of promise a nd fulfillme nt. Their laws will govern it, their learning will enlighten it, their enterprise will i mprove it.
Their flocks range i ts boundless pastures, for them its fertile lands will yield. Wharton9 The Gringo, locked i nto the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping I ndians a nd Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Many, under the threat of Anglo terrorism, abandoned homes and ranches a nd went to Mexico. After Mexican-American resisters robbed a train in B rownsville, Texas on October 18, , Anglo vigilante groups began lynchi ng Chicanos.
Texas Rangers would take them into the brush and shoot them. O ne hundred Chicanos were killed in a matter of months, whole families lynched.
Seven thousand fled to Mexico, leavi ng their s mall ranches a nd farms. The A nglos,. Race hatred had fi nally fomented into an all out war. Mi papa se murio de un heart attack dejando a mama pregnant y con.
Yo Jui la mayor, tenia diez aflos. The next year the drought continued y el ganado got hoof and mouth. Se calleron in droves en las pastas y el b rushland, pansas blancas ballooning to the skies.
El siguiente aflo still no rain. Mi pobre madre viuda perdi6 two-thirds of her ganado. A smart gabacho lawyer took the land away mama hadn't paid taxes. No hablaba ingles, she didn't know how to ask for time to raise the money. Mama Locha had asked that we bury her there beside her husband. El cemeterio estaba cercado. But there was a fence a round the cemetery, chained a nd padlocked by the ranch owners of the surrounding land.
We couldn't even get in to visit the graves, much less bury her there. Today, it is still padlocked. The sign reads: " Keep out. Trespassers will be shot. The land they toiled over had once belonged to many of them, or had been used commu nally by them. Later the Anglos brought in huge machi nes a nd root plows a nd had the Mexicans scrape the land clean of natural vegetation. In my childhood I saw the end of dry land farming.
I witnessed the land cleared; saw the huge pipes connected to underwater sources sticking up in the air. As children, we'd go fishing in some of those canals when they were full and hunt for snakes in them when they were dry. In the day growth season, the seeds of any kind of fruit or vegetable had only to be stuck in the ground in order to grow. More big land corporations came in and bought up the remaining land. To make a living my father became a sharecropper.
Rio Farms I ncorporated loaned him seed money and living expenses. Sometimes we earned less than we owed, but always the corporations fared well. Some had major holdings i n vegetable trucking, livestock auctions a n d cotton gins. I remember the white feathers of three thousa nd Leghorn chickens blanketing the land for acres around. My sister, mother a nd I cleaned, weighed and packaged eggs. For years afterwards I couldn't stomach the sight of an egg.
I remember my mother attending some of the meetings sponsored by well-meani ng whites from R io Farms. They talked about good nutrition, health, a nd held huge barbeques.
How proud my mother was to have her recipe for enchiladas coloradas i n a book. Los gringos had not stopped at the border. By the end of the nineteenth century, powerful landowners in Mexico, in partnership with U. Currently, Mexico and her eighty million citizens are almost completely dependent on the U. One-fourth of all Mexicans work at maquiladoras; most are young women.
Next to oil, maquiladoras are Mexico's second greatest source of U. Working eight to twelve hours a day to wire in backup lights of U. While the women are in the maquiladoras, the children are left on their ow n. Many roam the street, become part of cholo gangs.
The infusion of the values of the white culture, coupled with the exploitation by that culture, is changing the Mexican way of life.
The devaluation of the peso and Mexico's dependency on the U. No hay trabajo. Half of the Mexican people are unemployed. By March, 1 , 1 , pesos were worth one U. I remember when I was growing up in Texas how we'd cross the border at Reynosa or P rogreso to buy sugar or medicines when the dollar was worth eight pesos and fifty centavos.
La travesia. North A mericans call this return to the homeland the silent invasion. Smugglers, coyotes, pasadores, enganchadores approach these people or are sought out by them. This time, the traffic is from south to north. El retorn o to the promised land first began with the I ndians from the interior of Mexico a nd the mestizos that came with the conquistadores in the 1 5 00s. Today thousands of Mexicans a re crossing the border legally and illegally; ten million people without documents have returned to the Southwest.
Faceless, nameless, invisible, taunted with " Hey cucaracho" cockroach. Trembling with fear, yet filled with courage, a courage born of desperation.
Barefoot a nd u neducated, Mexicans with hands like boot soles gather at night by the river where two worlds merge creating what Reagan calls a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country.
Without benefit of bridges, the " mojados" wetbacks float on inflatable rafts across el rio Grande, or wade or swim across naked, clutchi ng their clothes over their heads. Holding onto the grass, they pull themselves along the banks with a prayer to Virgen de Guadalupe on their lips: Ay virgencita morena, mi madrecita, dame tu bendici6n. The Border Patrol h ides behind the local McDonalds on the outskirts of B rownsville, Texas or some other border town. They set traps a round the river beds beneath the bridge.
Cornered by flashlights, frisked while their arms s tretch over their heads, los mojados are handcuffed, locked in jeeps, a nd then kicked back across the border. One out of every three is caught. Some return to enact their rite of passage as many as three times a day. Some of those who make it across u ndetected fall prey to Mexican robbers such as those i n S mugglers' Canyon on the A merican s ide of the border near Tijuana.
As refugees in a homeland that does not want them, many find a welcome hand holding out only suffering, pain, and ignoble death. Those who make it past the checking points of the Border Patrol find themselves in the midst of 15 0 years of racism i n Chicano barrios in the Southwest a nd i n big northern cities. It is illegal for Mexicans to work without green cards. But big farming combi nes, farm bosses and smugglers who bring them i n make money off the " wetbacks"' labor-they don't have to pay federal minimum wages, or ensure adequate housing or sanitary conditions.
The Mexican woman is especially at risk. Often the coyote smuggler doesn ' t feed her for days or let her go to the bathroom. Often he rapes her or sells her into prostitution. S he cannot call on county or state health or economic resources because she doesn't know English a nd she fears deportation.
She can ' t go home. She's sold her house, her furniture, borrowed from friends i n order to pay the coyote who charges her four or five thousand dollars to smuggle her to Chicago. Or work i n the garment industry, do hotel work. Isolated and worried about her family back home, afraid of getting caught a nd deported, living with as many as fifteen people in one room, the mexicana suffers serious health problems. N o t only does she. This is her home this thin edge of barbwire.
Y como mi raza que cada en cuando deja caer esa esclavitud de obedecer, de callarse y aceptar, en mi esta la rebeldia encimita de mi carne. Debajo de mi humillada mirada esta una cara insolente lista para explotar. Me cost6 muy caro mi rebeldia-acalambrada con desvelos y dudas, sintiendome inutil, estupida, e impotente. R epele. Hable pa' 'tras.
Fut muy hocicona. Era indiferente a muchos valores de mi cultura. No me deje de los hombres. No fut buena ni obediente. Pero he crecido. Ya no sol6 paso toda mi vida botando las costumbres y los valores de mi cultura que me traicionan. Tambien recojo las costumbres que por el tiempo se han provado y las costumbres de respeto a las mujeres.
But despite my growi ng tolerance, for this Chicana la guerra de independencia is a constant. I stand between my father a nd mother, head cocked to the right, the toes of my flat feet gripping the ground. I hold my mother's hand.
I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me. I was the first in six generations to leave the Valley, the only one in my family to ever leave home.
But I didn't leave all the parts of me: I kept the ground of my own bei ng. O n it I walked away, taking with me the land, the Valley, Texas. Muy andariega mi hija. I had a stubborn will.
It tried constantly to mobilize my soul under my own regime, to live life on my own terms no matter how unsuitable to others they were. Even as a child I would not obey. I was " lazy. Every bit of self-faith I'd painstakingly gathered took a beating daily.
Nothing in my culture approved of me. Habia agarrado malos pasos. Something was " w rong" with me. Estaba mas alla de la tradici6n. There is a rebel in me-the Shadow-Beast.
It is a part of me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities. It refuses to take orders from my conscious will, it threatens the sovereignty of my rulership. It is that part of me that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed. At the least hint of limitations on my time or space by others, it kicks out with both feet.
Cultural Tyranny Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture.
Culture is made by those in power-men. Males make the rules and laws ; women transmit them. The culture a nd the Church insist that women are subservient to males. If a woman rebels she is a mujer mala.
I f a woman doesn't renounce herself i n favor of the male, she is selfish. If a woman remains a virgen until she marries, she is a good woman. For a woman of my culture there used to be only three directions she could turn: to the Church as a nun, to the s treets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother. Today some of us have a fourth choice: entering the world by way of education a nd career a nd becoming self-autonomous persons. A very few of us. As a working class people our chief activity is to put food i n our mouths , a roof over our heads a nd clothes on our backs.
Educating our children is out of reach for most of us. Women are made to feel total failures if they don't marry and have children. Se te va a pasar el tren. St, soy hija de la Chingada. I ' ve always been her daughter. No 'tes chingando. Humans fear the supernatural, both the u ndivine the animal impulses such as sexuality , the u nconscious, the unknown, the alien and the divine the superhuman, the god i n us.
Culture a nd religion seek t o protect us from these two forces. The female, by virtue of creating entities of flesh a nd blood i n her sto mach she bleeds every month but does not die , by virtue of being in tune with nature's cycles, is feared.
Because, accordi ng to Christianity and most other major religions, woman is carnal, animal, a nd closer to the u ndivine, s he must be protected. Woman is the s tranger, the other. S he is man's recogn ized nightmarish pieces, his S hadow-Beast. The s ight of her sends him into a frenzy of a nger and fear. La gorra, el rebozo, la mantilla are symbols of my culture's "protection" of women. Culture read males professes to protect women.
Actual ly it keeps women in rigidly defined roles. It keeps the girlchild from other men-don't poach on my preserves, only I can touch my child's body.
Our mothers taught us well, "Los hombres n o mas quieren una cosa"; men aren't to be trusted, they are selfish a nd are like children.
We were never alone with men, not even those of our own family. Through our mothers, the culture gave us mixed messages: No voy a dejar que ningun pelado desgraciado maltrate a mis hijos. And in the next breath it would say, La mujer tiene que hacer lo que le diga el hombre. Which was it to be-strong, or submissive, rebellious or conforming? Much of what the culture condemns focuses on kinship relationships.
The welfare of the family, the community, a nd the tribe is more important than the welfare of the individual. The individual exists first as kin-as sister, as father, as padrino-and last as self. In my culture, selfishness is condemned, especially i n women; humility and selflessness, the absence o f selfishness, i s considered a virtue. I n the past, acting humble with members outside the family ensured that you would make no one envidioso envious ; therefore he or she would not use witchcraft against you.
If you get above yourself, you're a n envidiosa. If you don't behave like everyone else, la gente will say that you think you're better than others, que te crees grande. Respeto carries with it a set of rules so that social categories a nd hierarchies will be kept in order: respect is reserved for la abuela, papa, el patron, those with power in the community.
Women are at the bottom of the ladder one rung above the deviants. The Chicano, mexicano, a nd some I ndian cultures have no tolerance for deviance. Deviance is whatever is condemned by the community. Most societies try to get rid of their deviants. Most cultures have burned a nd beaten their homosexuals and others who deviate from the sexual common. La gente def pueblo talked about her bei ng una de las otras, "of the Others. They called her half a nd half, mita ' y mita ', neither o ne nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature i nverted.
There is somethi ng compelli ng about being both male and female, about having an entry i nto both worlds. What we are suffering from is a n absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and can not evolve i nto something better. But I, l ike other queer people, am two in one body, both male a nd female. Fear of Going Home: Homophobia For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior.
Being lesbian a nd raised Catholic, indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer for some it is genetically i nherent. It's an interesting path, one that continually slips i n a nd out of the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts.
I t makes for loqueria, the crazies. It is a path of k nowledge-one of knowing and of learning the history of oppress ion of our raza. It is a way of balanci ng, of mitigating duality.
The two lesbian students and we two lesbian instructors met with them to discuss their fears. One of the students said, "I thought homophobia meant fear of going home after a residency.
Fear of going home. And of not bei ng taken in. We' re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being u nacceptable, faulty, damaged. To avoid rejection, some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows.
Which leaves only one fear-that we will be found out and that the Shadow-Beast will break out of its cage. Some of us take another route. We try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow-Beast, stare at the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction we see on its face, discern among its features the undershadow that the reigning order of heterosexual males project on our Beast.
Yet still others of us take it another step: we try to waken the Shadow-Beast inside us. Intimate Terrorism: Life in the Borderlands The world is not a safe place to live in. We shiver i n separate cells in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking shock along with our morning coffee, fearing the torches bei ng set to our buildi ngs, the attacks in the streets.
Shutting down. Woman does not feel safe when her own culture, and white culture, are critical of her; when the males of all races hunt her as prey. A lienated from her mother culture, " alien" in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self.
Petrified, she can't respond, her face caught between las intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits. B locked, immobilized, we can' t move forward, can' t move backwards. That writhing serpent movement, the very movement of life, swifter than lightning, frozen. We do not engage fully. We do not make full use of our facul ties. We abnegate. My Chicana ide ntity is grounded in the I ndian woman's history of resistance. Like la Llorona, the I ndian woman's o nly means of protest was wailing.
So mama, Raza, how wonderful, no tener que rendir cuentas a nadie. I feel perfectly free to rebel a nd to rail against my culture. I fea r no betrayal on my part because, unlike Chicanas and other women of color who grew up whi te or who have only recently returned to their native cultural roots, I was totally i mmersed i n m i ne.
I t wasn' t until I went t o h igh school that I " saw" whites. U ntil I worked o n my master's degree I had not gotten withi n an arm's distance of them. I was totally i m mersed en lo mexicano, a rural, peasant, isolated, mexicanismo. Yet in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano i s i n my system. I a m a turtle, wherever I go I carry " home" on my back. Not me sold out my people but they me. So yes, though " home" permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I too a m afraid o f going home.
Though I ' l l defend m y race a nd culture w he n they a re a ttacked by non-mexicanos, conosco el malestar de mi cultura. I abhor some of my culture's ways, how i t cripples its women, com o burras, our s trengths used against us, lowly burras bearing humility with dignity. The abili ty to serve, claim the males, is our highest virtue. I abhor how my culture makes macho caricatures of its men.
I can understand why the more tinged with A nglo blood, the more adamantly my colored and colorless sisters glorify their colored culture's values-to offset the extreme devaluation of it by the white culture.
It's a legitimate reaction. But I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have inj u red me in the name of protecting me. So, don' t give me your tenets a nd your laws. Don' t give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures-white, Mexican, I ndian. I want the freedom to carve a nd chisel my own face, to stal,lnch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.
And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand a nd claim my space, making a new culture-una cultura mestiza-with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.
Nos condenamos a nosotros mismos. Esta raza vencida, enemigo cuerpo. Malinali Tenepat, or Malintzin, has become known as la Chingada-the fucked one. She has become the bad word that passes a dozen times a day from the lips of Chicanos.
0コメント