Nepantla Quotes

“Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“We’re both exiles, she’d thought, right then, and had hated herself for thinking it. She’d been gone a few months. She had no right to the name. She was home.

She wasn’t, and she knew it. (There was no such place any longer.)”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“What writer Audre Lorde says to black men and women is true for all of us: "If we do not define ourselves, we will be defined by others for their use and to our detriment." Our country and perhaps all human history is a pattern of oppression, repression, suppression, subjugation. Racism is part of our heritage, reminding us that not all aspects of a culture should be preserved.”
― Pat Mora, Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle

“The either/or proposition that forces you to choose between your community and, say, your country has never been true. The very skills we learn to cross borders within ourselves help us to cross borders toward others outside our community.”
― Sergio Troncoso, Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds

“You cross a border because you are searching, because you want more, because you want to match where you are with who you are, because you want to test your place. Maybe because you want to expand your sense of place. You are searching for something that may as yet be indefinable. A border crosser questions the very idea of home.”
― Sergio Troncoso, Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds