Cynthia Paccacerqua

This article provides a century-long history of the major events and decisions that made the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) Philosophy Department the first to integrate Spanish-English bilingualism and Mexican American biculturalism into a regular rotation of roughly a dozen bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate (B3) philosophy courses. In the first section, we focus our story on the ongoing (re)founding of our institution—its students, faculty, and curriculum—using both local archives and available scholarship to fill in details chronologically. In the second, we draw not only upon the historical record but also upon our own memories to tell the story of “Pluralizing Philosophical Languages and Cultures in the South Texas Borderlands” from 2010 to present.

Although Gloria Anzaldúa's critical categories have steadily entered discussions in the field of philosophy, a lingering skepticism remains about her works’ ability to transcend the particularity of her lived experience. In an effort to respond to this attitude, I make Anzaldúa's corpus the center of philosophical analysis and posit that immanent to this work is a logic that lends it the unity of a critical philosophy that accounts for its concrete, multilayered character and shifting, creative force. I call this an “affective logic of volverse una.” Starting with the understanding of a situated modality of all subjectivity, Anzaldúa's work exhibits a logic of three moments distinguished by states of awareness. Each state of awareness is characterized by the generative degree of the subject's responses to its conditions: critical, individuating, and expansive. Led by her late concepts of conocimiento and nepantlera, I return to her earlier works and trace Anzaldúa's innovative exploration of undoing the oppressive condition of marginal subjectivities from “La Prieta” through Borderlands/La Frontera to her final published essay “now let us shift.” I find a liberatory schema of volverse una/becoming whole that is grounded in an active receptivity of sensibility and facilitated by affective technologies for transformation.