Gloria Anzaldúa, disentangling the heavy hanging strands fringing the cave of mestiza consciousness, finds speechlessness compounded by femaleness, and both by the fact of being alien, "queer," not a woman in her culture's eyes. Her sense of identity is more complicated than Baca's because she's forced to transform many layers of negativity surrounding femaleness itself-images of Malintzin, the Indian woman as betrayer, of la chingada, the Indian woman as the fucked-one, of la Llorona, eternally mourning, long-suffering mother-and to confront the despot duality of simplistic masculine/feminine: I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.