Anzaldúa, Gloria (1942—2004) Mexican-American, radical lesbian cultural critic and writer. Born in the Rio Grande Valley in Southern Texas, she received her BA from the Pan American University and her MA from the University of Texas at Austin. Anzaldúa was an early critic of what she saw as the colour and class blindness of feminist theory and through collective works like This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour (1981), co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, sought to raise awareness of the implications of this blindness. Her most famous work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), is a poetic attack on the binaries that shape everyday life---black/white, male/female, and so on---and a powerful celebration of diversity. Anzaldúa advocated a vision of life she referred to as ‘mestiza’, which means ‘mixed’, but should also be understood as a refusal of binary logic, extending it to every sphere of existence from biology to ideology.