Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004) was an American scholar and an important voice in the development of a distinctive Chicana feminism. In addition, she contributed to the academic disciplines of cultural theory and queer theory, an activist academic perspective that insists scholars deconstruct traditional assumptions about gender and sexual identities and that challenges traditional academic approaches to gender. Anzaldúa, who was born on the Mexico-Texas border, used her lived experiences to ground her academic work. The liminality of the South Texas borderlands prompted her to examine cultural marginalization from the lens of her own life story. Her primary academic focus was on chronicling the marginalized, fluid, and mixed cultures in borderlands communities