A woman who lived sin fronteras.

In the mid-1970s I was an under-graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in business administration. It seemed practical for a first-generation college student. The only thing that kept me going during those years on campus was the presence of a small group of Mexican American women faculty whose dedication to community and scholarship inspired me. One woman was Gloria Anzaldua, then a graduate student in her mid-thirties, who taught in Mexican American Studies. She died on May 15 at the age of sixty-one from complications associated with diabetes.

When I heard that she had passed away, memories came flooding back: her constant admonition to "read more!"; her willingness to share her work and knowledge with us; the way that she challenged students to listen to each other.

In the three decades since I sat in her classes learning about Mexican American literature, history, and art, Gloria published groundbreaking works on gender, sexuality, race, and class. She influenced scholars, activists, and countless students across a variety of disciplines.

Born in South Texas in 1942, an area with a long history of racial discrimination and violence against Mexican Americans, Anzaldua attended segregated schools is a child. She leaned English after beginning school but never gave up Spanish. Coming of age between two nations, as well as multiple cultures and languages, Anzaldua understood borders. She wrote, "I have been straddling [them] all my life. It's not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions."

Anzaldua concerned herself not just with the physical U.S.-Mexican borderlands. She explored "wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy." For her, the borderlands were physical, psychological, spiritual, and sexual.

She described the border as an open wound "where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds." Yet, the border also brought her hope. She ended her well-known poem, "To live in the Borderlands means you," with the following: "To survive in the Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras [without borders] /be a crossroads."

She loved words. She loved learning. She loved teaching. She became an avid reader as a child and a prolific writer as an adult. She worked with migrant farm worker children in the 1960s and university students from then on. She earned a bachelor's from Pan American University and a master's from the University of Texas at Austin.

She continued her own education despite the many obstacles she faced. In the 1970s, she was unable to continue her graduate education because her fields of interest were considered unacceptable. Back then scholars such as Anzaldua often had difficulty getting their work accepted by universities that did not believe that studying Mexican Americans or feminism was valid. As someone who tried to combine both, Anzaldua often faced such criticism. At the time of her death, she was close to finishing her doctorate at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Anzaldua's work--particularly This Bridge Called My Back, which she co-edited with Cherrie Moraga, and Borderlands--transformed how a generation understood issues of identity, history, culture, and sexuality.

As one of the first openly lesbian Chicana writers, she set a proud example for others to follow.

I remember her telling me almost thirty years ago to "be a bridge." It took me many years to understand what she was asking of me. Gloria Anzaldua believed in bridges; she believed in change.

Yolanda Chavez Leyva is a historian specializing in Mexican American and border history at the University of Texas at El Paso.