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Border Crossing, Democracy, and Deweyan Growth
On John Dewey’s social theory of identity, our personality is constructed from cultural
materials available to us. Personal growth, on his view, involves the integration of socially given
concepts and values into coherent self-conceptions. Dewey rightly praises democracy as the
mode of associated life that best promotes growth, since the pluralism that characterizes
democratic culture offers a potential wealth of resources for self-development. However, I argue
that his understanding of growth as the progressive unification of differences within the self
ignores the democratic potential of holding diversity in productive tension. In this paper, I draw
on Latina feminist theories of plural identity to throw light on social virtues unique to
personalities shaped in the borderlands between multiple and conflicting normative and
conceptual frameworks. Specifically, I claim that Dewey’s ideal of growth should be
reconstructed in the light of María Lugones’s concept of “curdling” and Gloria Anzaldúa’s
concept of “mestiza consciousness” in order to better meet the task of building a more
democratic community.
As Gregory Pappas has noted (2001), Dewey’s broad philosophical orientation, including
his rejection of rigid ontologies and his attention to lived experience, nicely accommodates the
phenomenon of plural identity. His conception of growth, I claim, thus should make room for
differences that cannot be integrated neatly into a greater whole. A conception of growth tailored
to the needs of pluralistic society not only would recognize the social constitution of identity, but
also would allow for multiplicity within the self. Such a conception would offer strong support
for the sort of engagement with difference Dewey champions.
“Growth” is Dewey’s term for human flourishing. It involves integrative interactions
between tradition and creative impulses. Thus growth is fostered not only in interactions between
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generations within a culture, but also in interactions across cultural borders, since the well-worn
habits of one group may be novel to another group. Growth, then, enlarges the self and
strengthens the community. Consequently, we should design social institutions with an aim
toward fostering the development, not only of competent epistemic agents, but also of
empathetic agents—people capable not just of using other’s beliefs as premises, but of inhabiting
the situated perspectives of people different from themselves.
On the Darwinian view of human development Dewey endorses, we are constantly
evolving through interaction with our physical and cultural environment, not toward any fixed
end or telos, but in order to ameliorate current problematic situations and better equip ourselves
to cope with future contingencies. An important difference between Dewey’s conception of
growth and, say, Aristotle’s conception of human flourishing (or Martha Nussbaum’s conception
of human capability), is that Dewey does not posit specific traits a human must develop in order
to realize her inherent potential. For Dewey, there is no essential human nature and thus no core
capacities that, when developed, constitute our telos. Given the Darwinian insight into the
malleability and contingency of human nature, no list of capacities can be final and no particular
capacities are intrinsically more valuable than others. Thus our self-development is open ended,
fluid, and is not to be circumscribed by prior notions of what a human being is or should be.
Growth, then, does not have an end outside itself but is a continuous process with no
fixed end other than more growth. One objection, often raised against Dewey’s conception of
growth, is that, because there is no fixed end, there is no way to distinguish between good and
bad growth. However, this worry dissolves once we appreciate the distinction between growth
that forestalls later development and growth that creates the conditions for continuous
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development. While learning skills particular to an anti-social group (such as a criminal gang1) is
a kind of growth that has a definite limit and forecloses later development, learning how to
interact flexibly with others creates the conditions for more growth. The former kind of growth is
bad insofar as it blocks more growth, and the latter kind is good insofar as it allows for
continuous productive interaction in an ever-evolving physical and social world.
Dewey’s characterization of growth in terms of the progressive integration of diverse
experiences into a unified whole overlooks the possibility that all experiences cannot or should
not be harmonized. Indeed, given the deep diversity that persists in liberal democratic societies,
it seems that such unification never can be completed. On the one hand, Dewey would be the
first to acknowledge this, given the open texture of his conception of individual growth and his
claim that democracy is a moral ideal always ahead of us. As he well understood, the complexity
and interconnectedness of our social world endows most of us with multiple identities that shape
our individuality. These identities may be forged by the various and often incongruous roles we
play in our personal, professional, and/or public lives. As William James notes, “We do not show
ourselves to our children as to our club companions, to our customers as to the laborers we
employ, to our own masters and employees as to our intimate friends. From this there results
what practically is a division of man into several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting”
(1892, p. 47).
On the other hand, Dewey never pauses over the moral and political implications present
in the possibility of holding diversity in tension. Indeed, the value he places in diversity seems to
be limited to its role as a spur to further unification. For example, in Art as Experience, Dewey
writes, “The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life. In a
finished world [a world with no conflict], sleep and waking could not be distinguished. In one
1
Dewey 1927, p. 148.
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wholly perturbed, conditions could not even be struggled with. In a world patterned after ours [a
partially unified, partially conflicted world], moments of fulfillment punctuate experience with
rhythmically enjoyed intervals” (1934, p. 16).
From a democratic perspective, the problem with overthematizing unification or harmony
is that it inevitably privileges hegemonic values while further marginalizing differences that
cannot be reconciled with dominant moral and political views. Dewey’s commitment to human
equality, when confronted with incommensurable culturally situated perspectives, suggests a
moral imperative to hold such conflicting experiences in tension rather than attempt to subsume
one perspective into another—which, in practice, usually means eliding minority perspectives in
order to maintain a hegemonic order. At the social level, the imperative of unification, then, risks
creating permanent minorities who, in effect, are excluded from the democratic process. Further,
at the personal level, unification as a moral ideal risks forever problematizing individuals with
inherently plural or uneasily integrated identities.
While I agree that growth involves harmonizing the self with our social and physical
environment, my claim is that Dewey’s conception of growth should be reconstructed in the light
of the experiences of intersectional subjects who embrace multiple and conflicting groupassociated identities. Here we can supplement Dewey by turning to Anzaldúa’s and Lugones’s
theories of plural identity. Their work demonstrates that the structural ambivalence inherent in
intersectional subjectivity allows for intelligent self-reflection and empathetic understanding—
which are essential virtues for both self-development and community building. The ability to
identify with conflicting perspectives allows for a richer and more internally diverse selfconception that better enables us to forge connections between diverse groups in an increasingly
complex and pluralistic social world.
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Pappas has claimed that, were he living, Dewey “would be interested in, and on the side
of, one of the most radical and insightful group of feminist thinkers at the end of the twentieth
century: Latina Lesbian Women in the U.S.A.” (2001, p. 152). The lived experiences of Latina
lesbians such as Anzaldúa and Lugones challenge notions of identity that insist on the internal
coherence of the self. Lugones repudiates what she sees as a pervasive “logic of purity”
according to which persons who have plural identities are seen as impure, deviant, and whose
experiences thus are ignored or repressed. She and Anzaldúa “reject the either/or option between
masculine/feminine as well as the one between Latina/American” (Pappas 2001, p. 154). In place
of the binary logic of purity, which assumes that what is multiple can be separated into discrete
units, Lugones recommends a logic of curdling, which views separation in terms of degrees of
coalescence—as when mayonnaise curdles, leaving “yolky oil and oily yolk” (Lugones 1994, p.
459). Thus, as Pappas explains, “‘curdled beings’ can affirm their multiplicity without
conceiving themselves as fragmented into pure parts” (2001, p. 154).
Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of “mestiza consciousness” captures the psychic dimension of
curdled being, or, what she terms mestiza2 identity. Anzaldúa explains,
In perceiving conflicting ... points of view, [the new mestiza] is subjected to a swamping
of her psychological borders. She has discovered that she can’t hold ... ideas in rigid
boundaries. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are
entrenched habits ... ; these habits ... are the enemy within.... Only by remaining flexible
is she able to stretch horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of
habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends ... toward a
Traditionally, “mestiza” refers to a woman of mixed race, especially Spanish and American Indian.
However, Edwina Barsova-Carter notes that “mestiza consciousness” may be expanded to encompass any
“subjectivity characterized by a diversity of different identities and worldviews that mingle and collide
within the self” (2007, p. 6-7).
2
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single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away
from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather
than excludes.
The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions.... She learns
to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view.... She
has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out.... Not
only does she sustain contradictions, she turns ambivalence into something else. (1999,
p. 101)
As Jeffry Edmonds notes, the concept of mestiza consciousness strikes familiar pragmatist notes
in its “imaginative, pluralistic, tolerant, and reconstructive” character (2012, p. 128). Anzaldúa
and Dewey agree that when habits become entrenched they inhibit further growth. However,
Anzaldúa stresses that the new mestiza’s plural identity is what allows her to break from routine
in an imaginative reconstruction of her identity that accommodates pluralism without forcing
coherence. The new mestiza’s ambivalence does not inhibit growth; rather, the “Western mode”
is crippling insofar as it demands an inauthentic unity. I want to read the horizontal and vertical
stretching the new mestiza’s border crossing allows for as a mode of growth that defies the
convergent thinking inherent in Dewey’s notion of growth.
On Pappas’s interpretation, Dewey’s attention to experience, as well as his metaphysics
of continuity and emergence, nicely accommodates the phenomena of curdling and mestiza
consciousness. Dewey rejects the atomistic view of cultures as monolithic and sharply bounded
entities, since experience reveals their permeability. “Cultures,” writes Pappas, “have a center
and fluctuating, indeterminate boundaries. These boundaries are fringes and are places of
continuity and interaction between cultures” (2001, p. 157). Further, Dewey’s view that new
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things can emerge from the interaction of existing things (e.g., his view of mind as a property
that emerged from human biological evolution) helps explain how mestiza consciousness is not
reducible to its constituent parts. The new mestiza’s parts are constructed as antagonistic and
relate to a history of violence and oppression, and thus cannot be integrated without remainder.
Anzaldúa’s new mestiza assembles her multiple parts, not into a neatly integrated whole, but in a
way that creates “a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third
element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense
pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary
aspects of each new paradigm” (1999, pp. 101-2).
It is tempting to interpret mestiza consciousness within Dewey’s framework for growth,
as Pappas does (see Pappas, p. 158). After all, the new mestiza’s self is enlarged and enriched in
virtue of the emergence of a “third element” that allows her to break free from prescribed
identity categories. However, as I have stressed, Dewey’s definition of growth as the unification
of diverse experience prevents us from endorsing such an interpretation. Contrary to Pappas’s
suggestion that Dewey would be “on the side of” Lugones and Anzaldúa, the curdling activity of
the new mestiza resists the impulse toward unification that Deweyan growth requires. This is
unfortunate, since mestiza consciousness embodies personal virtues crucial to the development
of social democracy.
In virtue of their affiliation with oppositionally situated groups, border crossers are
uniquely positioned to forge meaningful and potentially transformative connections across deep
culturally inscribed differences. The intellectual and emotional openness and flexibility needed
to maintain a plural identity compliments Dewey’s democratic virtue ethics. The connections
that border crossers forge can lay the groundwork for political mobilization organized around
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points of commonality, despite differences and historical resentments that otherwise would
foreclose cooperation. Further, thinking of border crossers as vanguards of democratic progress
dovetails with Dewey’s insistence that responsibility for initiating social change rests with those
who directly confront problematic existential situations.
By embracing identities that have been oppositionally constructed and that are implicated
in both sides of historical violence, the new mestiza is in a position to diffuse historical
resentments that threaten to calcify divisions rooted in differences of race, class, gender, sexual
orientation, or political ideology. “We can no longer blame you,” writes Anzaldúa, “nor disown
the white parts, the male parts, the pathological parts, the queer parts, the vulnerable parts”
(1999, p. 110). While the internalization of both sides of cultural conflict no doubt involves an
element of synthesis and unification of differences, some differences cannot be fully harmonized,
as Anzaldúa and Lugones make clear. No amount of deliberation can achieve consensus when
opposing groups start from opposing premises—premises rooted in group-specific experiences
rather than in transcendent principles.
The legacy of sexism, racism, and homophobia that exists in the United States has created
identities that cannot be unified fully (certainly not in the foreseeable future). Nevertheless,
conflicting identities can be sustained in a single consciousness, though this entails pain. For
Anzaldúa, both her Latina identity and her lesbian identity are important to her sense of self,
regardless of their uneasy relation to one another. However, these two identities cannot be
unified into a coherent “Latina lesbian” self. As Cheshire Calhoun notes,
Within Hispanic culture, lesbianism is an abomination. Within the lesbian community,
Hispanic values and ways of living do not have central value. As a result, ‘Latina lesbian’
is not a coherent identity, nor is there a single, unified conceptual and normative
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perspective which could count as the ‘Latina lesbian’ perspective and thus no single
perspective from which to take issue with both racist and heterosexist oppression. (1995,
p. 239)
Despite emotional pain, Anzaldúa is committed to both her Latina and lesbian identities. Her
willingness to hold within herself these conflicting identities attests to her openness and
vulnerability—virtues indispensible for the development of a community capable of sustaining
deep diversity.
For the new mestiza, the psychological processes involved in negotiating the borderlands
between conflicting identities without rejecting either or reducing one to the other do not aim
primarily at dissolving disagreement; rather, the focus is on ameliorating historical resentments,
thereby opening the possibility of flexible and productive interaction between the new mestiza’s
different perspectival communities. Similarly, moral and political deliberation in a democracy
should aim to forge mutual understanding and respect among diverse groups and individuals
whose experiential horizons cannot be merged without remainder.
Notwithstanding the foregoing considerations, Dewey is right to claim a role for selfunification as it relates to growth, since enlarging ourselves necessarily involves some
integration of diverse experiences. And yet, as communities incorporate conflicting groups,
individual selves incorporate conflicting group-affiliated identities. Thus the only way to truly
“unify” ourselves is to take ownership of the multiplicity within us, which is a reflection of the
multiplicity of the social forces that have shaped us. An adequate theory of growth, therefore,
must allow a structural role for pluralism. As the outcome of multi-perspectival deliberation,
actions that flow from an ambivalent psyche may promote self-development and community.
Thus we need a conception of growth that allows for both unification and multiplication.
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Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 1999, Borderlands/La Fronera, San Francisco: Aunt Lute.
Barvosa-Carter, Edwina, 2007, “Mestiza Autonomy as Relational Autonomy,” The Journal of
Political Philosophy, Vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1-21.
Calhoun, Cheshire, 1995, “Standing for Something,” The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 92,
pp. 235-60.
Dewey, John, 1916 [Reprint], Democracy and Education, New York: The Free Press.
–––––, 1920 [1982], Reconstruction in Philosophy, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 18991924, Vol. 12, JoAnn Boydston, ed., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, pp.
77-202.
–––––, 1927 [Reprint], The Public and Its Problems, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
–––––, 1934 [Reprint], A Common Faith, London: Yale University Press.
Edmonds, Jeffry, 2012, “Re-Imagining America: Pragmatism and the Latino World,” The
Pluralist, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 120-32.
James, William, 1892 [2001], Psychology: The Briefer Course, New York: Dover.
Lugones, María, 1994, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” Signs, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 458-79.
Pappas, Gregory, 2001, “Dewey and Latina Lesbians on the Quest for Purity,” The Journal of
Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 152-161.