Dear Graciela Limon

My name is Vega and I am a 5th year senior at a former academic

institution you taught at, Loyola Marymount University. Currently I

am enrolled in a Chicana/o Studies class entitled Chicanas/Latinas in

the U.S. where we are designing web pages, with the help of Alma Lopez,

on authors, artists, activists of our liking. In my case I chose to create a web

page on you that will entail a short biography, work samples, and a

timeline to name a few.

As a soon to be graduate it is a coincidence that I end my academic track in

the very same fashion that I started, which is with reverting back to your book

and reflecting on its ideas that I can now relate to other works like

Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldua and Chicana Art by Laura E. Perez.

Beginning with La Frontera I could not help but relate the way I viewed

the story of Huitzitzilin with the Anzaldua's chapter entitled Tlilli, Tlapall.

In the section The Path of Red and Black Ink the author shares a story

of when she was a young girl and she would recall stories to her sister in

"installments" each one "building up the suspense with convoluted

complications until the story climaxed several" days later (Anzaldua, 87).

Upon reading this I rushed back to the feeling of suspense I was often left in

reading a section from your book that was an account of the conquest from the eyes of a native.

With each passing even from Song of a Hummingbird , such as the description so real that immersed the reader into the plot almost

as if feeding directly to the same suspense. In that instance I fell under the same trance Anzaldua speaks of as The Shamanic State

whereby she is able to create the story in her head and "allow the voices and scenes to be projected in the inner screen of [her] mind"

(91). In the very same way I too feel removed from my own sense of reality and in character with the history being revealed before

my eyes and in my head. Whereas Anzaldua believes "the work manifests the same needs as a person" and that "it needs to be fed'

I believe otherwise (89). rather what is fed is a drive within a person, such as myself, to search and seek a knowledge of truth and

greater sense of humanity.

In Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities, Laura E. Perez's chapter on Tierra, Land is where I find

myself looking to feed my drive. What comes to mind from your book is not only the separation of religion, customs, and beliefs

, during the conquest but most importantly from a land that over the years has been taken from below our feet. Throughout history

Aztlan as been stolen and its people evicted. Agreeing with Laura E. Perez, "it is the age-old heroic struggle to reintegrate the psyche

after the individuals confrontation with evil and to return to her lost community as a home" (196) that we as a people have had to

struggle with. While our colonizers are quickly able to call this new territory home the natives are never truly to once again establish

a connection with the land in the same way as they once were and through history it becomes more difficult as we now as a people

are divided by an imaginary line called the border. not only must we with great effort search through the trash of the junkyard I call

western culture to find our native roots but even if we do, we face the diversity of having to transport it across a national boundary

where we also were once native to but are now labeled as outsiders. As is shared in this chapter, "it has produced ...the fear and

discomfort within one's own skin that are the hallmark of the trauma of colonization" (Perez, 148). Individuals, just as with land, find it

difficult to identify with their heritage in fear of discriminatory retaliation and instead deny their legacy for the acceptance of the

dominant culture.

Thank you for your time in reading this letter,
Rafael Vega