Entre Guadalupe y Malinche is a vibrant collection of modern and contemporary personal essays, poetry, short stories, and visual art by women from the Texas–Mexico borderland who identify as Tejana. Guadalupe and Malinche, perhaps the two most significant cross-cultural icons in Chicana art, literature, and criticism, not only make up the book's title, but also comprise, Inés Hernández-Ávila informs us, a literal intersection in Laredo, TX – collapsing a literal and symbolic crossroads, much like this collection itself.

If the Texas–Mexico borderland serves as the geographical backdrop for the book's contributors, then Chicana feminist theory serves as the contextual backdrop for negotiating and mediating cultural, spatial, temporal, familial, and gendered borderlands. Entre Guadalupe y Malinche draws specifically from Emma Perez's notion of the decolonial imaginary as third space that makes gendered local histories visible.Footnote ¹ The works included in the collection thus navigate the interstitial spaces of life along the border, both the complex and the quotidian, in order to highlight the fluidity of culture. The texts collectively imagine, create, and rewrite Tejana stories into the Texas–Mexican landscape but contest any single notion of a unified experience, be it cultural, gender, or geographical.

The book, like the interstitial spaces the contributors highlight, also functions in an in-between state, combining theory, art, poetry, and other genres into five thematic sections that oscillate between the written word (both English and Spanish) and visual art. The first pays homage to the late Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of Nepantla, the Nahuatl term for an in-between state, opening with her text, “Border Arte: Nepantla, El Lugar de la Frontera”; followed by a section on personal life stories; a section dedicated to the visual arts; and a section on connections to land, family, and friends; before concluding with a section on healing.Footnote ²

Chicana theory is brought to life as each section seamlessly moves to the next, (re)writing and illuminating the experiences of Tejanas in their own words or images, as the case may be in the section on visual arts. While the pieces can theoretically function in any of the sections, the layout helps guide the reader, and if Chicana third-space feminism, the decolonial imaginary, or mestiza consciousness seem like daunting theoretical frameworks, the book roots them in practice. Anzaldúa's notion of Nepantla comes to life, for example, as she navigates the Denver Museum of Natural History's exhibition on Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital city, forcing her to contemplate her subject position: “what does it mean for me, esta jotita, this queer Chicana, this mexicatejana, to enter a museum and look at indigenous objects that were once used by my ancestors? … I too am passively consuming and appropriating an indigenous culture” (23). Or the way Inés Hernández-Ávila is forced to contemplate her own split subjectivity in the fourth grade when a schoolmate tells her, “Ines, I like you, even if you are a Mexican.” The exchange gets played over and over in her mind: “I like you even if you are a Mexican I like you even if you are a Mexican burning itself into my spirit, dislodging me from a certainty I didn't realize I had until I lost it” (51). Complicating notions of essentialized difference, the book deals with culture, race, and class exchanges, as well as issues of gender and sex within Tejana communities.

Entre Guadalupe y Malinche takes the reader on personal journeys of discovery, family, love, and healing all while rooted in the larger paradigm of the decolonial imaginary. In this way, the book moves beyond the local or folkloric into a larger “regional, national, and global discourse of decolonization and transformation” (4). Because of this, Entre Guadalupe y Malinche is a valuable resource for those interested in Chicano/a studies, American studies, borderland studies, critical regionalism, and women's studies, just to name a few. However, I must make a note on language, just as the book does in its introduction. Language is tied to a Tejana identity and thus resists “oppositional forces that would have us be monolingual” (13), and so the works included in Entre Guadalupe y Malinche reflect this, as some are in English, Spanish, and English and Spanish. While this might be difficult to navigate for some readers, it forces the reader to actively participate in the text – even those readers who are English–Spanish bilingual. As the book tells us, “in Tejas, Spanish is a language of commerce and culture, along with English and along with language Tejan@s speak” (13).