We hope that you’ll enjoy the rich array of different approaches to “hybridity” that are embodied in the pages that follow. To return to Anzaldúa: “the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness” (102). Mythmaking, alterities of perception and language, shifts and slips between voices and bodies, images that bleed and blur on the screen: these are the modes to which we hope the work in this issue responds. As artists, as readers and writers of literature of color, hybridity is our survival; we celebrate it here.

Peace and Light,

Iris & Mia
March 2013

Note: Gloria Anzuldúa quotations are taken from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Aunt Lute.