Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

Gloria Anzaldua’s essay titled How to Tame a Wild Tongue is a great piece of literary work that discusses the idea of borderlands, where two or more different cultures, economic classes, religions, come in contact. This is also know as a “hot zone.” I am an anthropology minor and we have studied this idea numerous times. It is something I am very passionate about. A particular obvious example of a borderland is affluent suburbs surrounding the inner city. For example there are two completely different societies in every way possible yet they share the same land. Anzaldua uses the example of the Chicanos. They are a group of people who strattle the boarder of Mexico and Texas. Here two different cultures collide. I think this is a particular good example because the Chicanos because their own group. Many geographical places in the world where borderlands exist create a new group of people with a new culture. They combine cultures from other groups surrounding them and use ideas and practices to form something new. In my essay I want to talk about the pos and cons of borderlands. I wanted to write about they can create new cultures or almost cause war. For example the Israelis and Muslims have been fighting over the holy land for over 60 years when Israel became a sovereign nation. It has caused nothing but distress and war. The notion of borderlands is very interesting especially in the United States since the US is a melting a “melting pot.” “The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact the Border-lands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy." This quote out of the whole essay is what I want to base my paper on. Ksweets 11:47, 8 March 2007 (EST)