“Decolonizing Reality”

The Absence of Divine Election in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Process of Shamanic Initiation

Abstract

This article complicates Gloria Anzaldúa’s claim of being a chamana—shamaness—who heals colonialism’s wounds by decolonizing reality. Her shamanic experiences have been taken as paradigmatic among scholars, from different fields, since the publication of her generative book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), as well as the culmination of her life’s work, Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015). Yet, divine election, a cross-cultural element present in the shamanic initiation of ancient and contemporary magico-religious healers in México, is absent from the shamanic initiatory process she describes. I argue that Anzaldúa’s “decolonial” process of shamanic initiation is better understood, not as being derived from Mexican spiritual traditions, but as part of the neo-nagual legacy of the “fake shaman” Carlos Castañeda. The symbolic, cultural, political, and spiritual borders between what is and isn’t colonial are, in the end, far more complex than what Anzaldúa represented in her writings.