Prieta Is Dreaming

Reviews / Votes

"This extraordinary posthumous collection from Chicana poet and theorist Anzaldua (Borderlands) offers a window into a woman's marginalized yet magical life on the Texas plains ... Anzaldua plays wonderfully on the theme of hybridity throughout, blending realism and fantasy, fiction and memoir, and human and animal. This radiates with joy." - Publishers Weekly

"Over decades, Anzaldua labored to offer this painstaking, relentless exploration of the queer experience in all its richness as part of quotidian life. Prieta's story is a foundational piece of the dam against erasure and marginalization Anzaldua spent her life building." - Kirkus Reviews

"With Prieta Is Dreaming, Gloria Anzaldua, whose words guided a generation of girls into womanhood, reminds us of what cemented her into the Latino Canon in the first place. Here she's given us a Chicana Odyssey-an epic of Prieta's adventures into nepantla and coming back asserting a more powerful version of herself. Rich, immersive, and profound, this collection records the voices of Prieta's childhood, of her growth into queer womanhood, of her dreams and her nightmares, helping us all feel less alone. Reaching out with a gentle ancestral hand across space and time, Anzaldua posthumously mothers us with her guiding intelligence." - Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming

"There is a particular kind of pain in reading Prieta Is Dreaming-knowing that Gloria Anzaldua did not live long enough to finalize these stories. Anzaldua's voice is as fearlessly honest and vulnerable here as it has ever been. 'The sky and the night and the stars come into my body,' she writes, inviting the perception of other worlds to begin the transformative work of 'reorienting her mind, rearranging the cells of her body, remapping the nerves and synapses.' These are stories from the borderlands, achingly familiar to all of us who take our borders everywhere we go." - ire'ne lara silva, author of flesh to bone and the light of your body

"In Prieta Is Dreaming, Prieta, in all of her facets, guides readers through nepantla and ontological shifts, magnificently displaying life on the borderlands. Through these formidable cuentos/testimonios/autohistorias we (time) travel with them to the montes, ranchitos, and beaches of el valle de tejas as Anzaldua's Prieta reveals previously suppressed epistemologies under the astute, loving curation by Anzaldua scholars Zaytoun, Keating, and Bost. This significant collection is required reading for all who dwell en los mundos zurdos." - Sonia Saldivar-Hull, author of Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature

"Even science fiction has elements of autobiography. That is putting it mildly. Here is a collection of writings that shape-shift our banal distinctions between imagination and reality. Here are fusions of fact and fiction, of experience and experiment, works of autohistoria, as Gloria Anzaldua so beautifully crafted them. Be prepared to be changed by an encounter with these stories, which are not just stories." - Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else