The notion of “home” is a complicated one for feminist scholars since it often points to an uncritical “safety” of sameness and unchallenged assumptions. Indeed, as Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty note, “home” courts a troubling stability and homogeneity; they write that, for example, “unity through incorporation has too often been the white middle-class feminist’s mode of adding on difference without leaving the comfort of home” (193). What is outside the home is the other, the unknown. It is tied to a personal nation-state in which borders are policed and otherness contained. Challenging that sense of home is one step toward critical consciousness, a step that plays into our deep fears of losing the self. As Minnie Bruce Pratt writes, “When we discover truths about home culture, we may fear we are losing our self: our self-respect, our self-importance. But when we begin to act on our new knowledge, when we begin to cross our ‘first people boundaries,’ and ally ourselves publicly with ‘the others,’ then we may fear that we will lose the people who are our family, our kin, be rejected by ‘our own kind'” (47).

 

Gloria Anzaldúa makes a similar point in her discussion of nepantla, a mental space that is a “site of transformation, the place where different perspectives come into conflict and where you question the basic tenets inherited from your family, your education, and your different cultures” (548). She writes with AnaLouise Keating:

 

Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement—an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of “home.” Though this state links us to other ideas, people, and worlds, we feel threatened by these new connections and the change they engender. (1)

 

Is that mental space home or not-home? What is the longing that brings us there? As these authors say, staying home "comes from woundedness, and stagnates our growth," and we must bridge, loosen borders, "[open] the gate to the stranger, within and without" (Anzaldúa and Keating 3).