The term mestiza, though, is not mine. My people are not mestiza, not in the ways that Anzaldúa means to signify. Like Anzaldúa, I find myself in the gap between worlds, the canyon between cultures, but for Anzaldúa the term mestiza is foremost a way of marking the cultural space between Mexican and American, Spanish and English, lesbian and straight. The borders I cross are different, are differently marked, require different survival strategies.

     The easiest way to name the canyon I traverse on a regular basis, the gap I live in, the rock walls that stand between me and full integration into any one culture is class. Superficially class is an accurate signifier of the cultures I am suspended between, but class is not really enough. Class does not capture the subtleties of the differences between the place I came from and the places that I am going. Class does not capture the differences between rural and urban, educated/intellectual and uneducated, well-traveled and static, stuck in the bonds of place.

      I was born poor and urban but when I was two we moved to rural Southwest Wisconsin. I was, am, and inevitably always will be an outsider there. I was a first generation immigrant, if you will. Perhaps had I stayed, married, raised children there I would be able to be acclimated into that world. Certainly my children might be accepted, might be content to stay. Simply in the act of going away to college, however, I have forever rendered such an outcome impossible or, at the least, horribly improbable.

     The "real" world was my dream as early as junior high but the act of traveling between my hometown and Madison, where I attend the University of Wisconsin, switching languages between the academic, intellectual, theoretical discourse I breathe daily at school and the slightly ungrammatical, mundane, small talk of my past, a language I could not speak fluently even when I spoke no other, has unhinged my ideas of what constitutes the "real" world.

     The urban, middle-class, cultural elite possesses a heritage I cannot share. I was exposed to a modicum of art and literature, high culture and travel in my country-girl childhood. For my hometown I had all the possible advantages, parents who listened to National Public Radio somewhat regularly, encouragement to read extensively and broadly, exposure to a certain amount of art and a vague knowledge of classical music. I grew up eating traditional Indian food: curry, dahl, chapatis because my father had spent much of his childhood in India, where his parents served as missionaries for years and his father started an extensive training program for Indian doctors. When I was fourteen I traveled for three weeks to Kenya where my great aunt and uncle were stationed as missionaries.

     Already, then, I had begun nesting in the walls of the canyon that stood an empty gulf almost unspannable between home and that mythical real world where knowledge of other cultures, travel, love for poetry and literature, and all the other marks of cultural and intellectual elitism were normal, valued, even expected. I did not yet know that I was feeding off the cultural and intellectual table-scraps of that elite. I did not yet know that the world I longed for was no more real than the world I felt was chaining me, trapping me. I did not yet know that the cultural elite I longed to join were ignorant about the realities of my life. I did not know that I would later question fundamentally the values of the middle and upper-middle classes.

     It is possible to navigate the spaces between worlds without noticing the distance. It is possible to build a bridge from one side of a canyon to the other and to cross that bridge without ever looking down, without ever seeing that the "ground" beneath your feet is in fact not ground, is not solid, is instead constructed of some thin ethereal essence that, like the air beneath a cartoon character's feet, loses all substance when looked at directly, letting you fall into the depths of the chasm. For almost two full years of college I blindly walked that bridge. Only 70 miles separate that place of my childhood and Madison and I was willing to take those miles at face value, to deny the differences they implied. Why? I had finally propelled myself into that real world I had spent my teen years longing for. I had finally gotten out, and if belonging to the real world, fitting in in academia, passing as cultural elite meant forgetting where I came from, denying my differences, well then that was the price I paid for freedom. The assumption of homogeneity, though, began to wear on me. I grew tired of hiding my differences. It felt almost as if I were hiding my existence.

     The price I paid for denying that difference, the truth of my existence, was a constant fear that my shell would turn translucent, that my clothes would give me away, my accent, my lack pf knowledge of certain works of classic literature, the fact that I hadn't traveled within the United States, even my lack of knowledge about pop culture. I grew up in a valley where the hills interfered with our television reception. I spent my formative years watching only CBS. Until I came to college I had only seen The Simpsons once or twice.

     I was ashamed of where I came from. I was ashamed that I grew up poor, that my father had been a janitor for years, that my tuition and expenses were paid almost exclusively with a combination of grant and work study money. Until I came to Madison I didn't even know that I wasn't middle-class. I had always assumed that because my family's income fell in the middle of the spectrum of those represented by my high school classmates, that I was safely middle-class. I ate nutritious food on a regular basis, I had new clothes when I needed them, my parents gave me spending money and could afford to maintain a third car when I got my driver's license. That's more than some of my friends growing up could claim.

     I have come to understand since then that in terms of privilege I am situated between the place from which I came and the places to which I may be going. I have assumed pieces of the educated elite's privilege. My language disguises my past well. Nonetheless, I have never taken a family vacation, besides the trips my mother and I make regularly to Ohio to visit her family there. I have never seen the Grand Canyon or Disney World. I worked harder for my education here than did some of my friends. My high school education was woefully incomplete in all areas. My knowledge of history is by far the worst because I spent my high school years fighting my history teacher's hands off my body. I was a sophomore before we had a sexual harassment policy I could have turned to and even then I knew better than to try to file a complaint. He was one of the most popular teachers and my social standing was too precarious already to expose myself to the dangers of taking a stand against him.

     I can't go back again. I know that I have shaped myself now in such a way that I could never fit in that life again. I don't want to go back anymore, I never did. The only thing that has changed is that I refuse to forget who I am and where I came from. I refuse to stand silent when the privilege of class goes unmarked in a discussion of oppression. I do not fear being stripped of my disguise. I label myself poor white trash with a certain defiant pride. I take great joy in relating stories of the people I knew in high school, some of whom I still keep in touch with, the types of people who my suburban middle-class friends avoided like the plague. Their high schools were big enough to isolate the geeks and the rebels from one another. Where I came from the geeks and the rebels existed side by side in a sort of tolerance that bordered on acceptance. We were all on the outside looking in, we couldn't afford extreme forms of dissension.

     The clashes of cultural and class privilege, though, aren't the only ones that relegate me to a position between worlds. I am poor, I am female, I am rural, but I am also queer. Being queer is one more locus of difference, one more cave buried deep in the gap between cultures. I am not a lesbian. I do not belong unproblematically to lesbian culture. I am not straight. I do not belong unproblematically to mainstream heterosexual culture. I am bisexual. My desires locate themselves between the two worlds and neither group will embrace me with open arms. My desire for men makes me suspect in the world of lesbians. My desire for women marks me subversive and dangerous in the non-queer world because in their eyes at any point I may step over that line into pure lesbianism. I can walk the streets without conflict because I wear my disguise well. I look straight. I walk with a man at my side. I can pass for straight the way I can pass for middle-class, for intellectual elite. Such passing, though, erases who I really am. It leaves my existence unproblematized. It writes onto my body assumptions that I cannot comfortably wear. It etches into my existence a fear of discovery that hangs over me like a cloud. So I refuse to abrogate any part of myself. I refuse to deny my past or the longings of my body. I refuse to let the world label me as a non-sexual creature. The erotic is important to my identity, to my existence, to my survival. So I pound my way into the rock of the chasm. I make my home there, decorating it with the artifacts of the cultures that form my identity. By day I walk the edges, out there in the world. I clamber across the divide, sometimes over and over again each day. But by night I curl in the warmth of my cave, nestled against the wall of the canyon that spans the distance between the worlds I travel. 

* Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute Book Company.