Beyond Development and Morality 157climate, cuisine, a sense of the aesthetic, but also a more-than-human set of
geological and bio-ecological coordinates. Space is also saturated with
time in ways that cannot be easily or productively disentangled. For
Anzaldúa (1987), who we are is not separable from the geo-biological
coordinates of older ancestral knowledge. The land that we inhabit and
beings that live on that land that we inhabit compose our lives across time
without reference to western industrial capitalistic notions of minutes,
hours, years, and so on. Anzaldúa (1987) crosses the contemporary
moment of her own life with older understandings of Aztec deities such as
Coatolopeuh (she who has dominion over serpents). Her interest in such
things was not archeological, but phenomenological. For her, to produce
the past and the present in binary form was to refuse a profound
understanding of how we are becoming. She said, “I know things older
than Freud, older than gender” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 26). The figure of
Coatolupeuh was a figure of entanglement. A referent to a way of being in
the world that phenomenologically acknowledges the indistinguishability
of time and space at the level of materialist ontology. In this sense, the
body’s movement across the life span never really arrives at any/where or
any/time in particular. Because, there is a multiplicity of agentic elements
in constant movements of composition, there are elements in motion and
elements in momentary stasis. The body as a multiplicity in motion is a
space of, what Anzaldúa (1987) termed, “the borderland.” Of such a space,
she said:
Cuando vives in la frontera, people walk through you, the wind steals
your voice, you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat, forerunner of a new race,
half and half—both woman and man, neither—a new gender ... To
survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads.
(Anzaldúa, 1987, pp. 194-195)This reading of the borderland as a space of alterity opens non-binary
formations of identity founded in what Barad (2007) might refer to as
“matter-in-the-process-of-becoming.” For our purposes, it offers us an
alternative reading of time and space that opens us to the possibility of