I have been blogging for close to a decade and while doing my own radical women of color media making work have earned a deep respect for fellow rwoc media makers, especially zinesters. Zines still confound me. I can make words, string them into sentences and make them dance to a rhythm on the edge of my lips, but a zine? It is an art I haven’t been able to commit to, even as other amazing mujeres around me have.

This weekend I sat with the comp zine, Finding Gloria: Nos/otras. It was edited by Noemi Martinez and has writings by Elle Gray, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, ire’ne lara silva, Fabiola Sandoval, heather bowlan, noemi martinez and Kamala Platt. Artwork and photos by: Fabiola Sandoval, Celeste De Luna, and Veronica Gomez.

I opened the plain brown envelope as if it were a navidad gift before navidad. Seeing the return address from Noemi, I knew what it was, and I had carried the zine in it’s envelope for a few a few days waiting for a few moments to steal and give the zine the attention it deserved. For days that moment never came, so on my commute to and from tutoring the children of immigrants on the proper use of punctuation, on subway trips above ground and underground, between the mami’hood and the mala’hood, Finding Gloria: Nos/otras found me and each page brought tears to my eyes. The zine, an altar en papel for Gloria Anzaldua, is also an evolution of her legacy. We, the other women, Nos/otras spill stories in pen and ink, draw and photocopy our histories, and paint the future.

Essays, like Obligado by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, speak about facing the sense of obligation to our creative spirits and the spirits of our foremamis through words and writing them. Images by Celeste De Luna imagine the borderlines as the motherland that is our bodies and our words. I answered “yes” to the questions put out in the poem question for the cafe’s only brown poet. Noemi Martinez writes directly to Gloria Anzaldua in The Other Resistance is Fear about expectations put on us by ourselves and our ancestors. The piece also raises the issue of getting over fucking up and rooting the self in your chosen home, even if that home is in the actual or metaphorical borderlands.

As if the zine wasn’t gift enough there are gifts inside the gift, palabras envueltos en papel, ofrendas pa’ los muertos and for us, los vivos. This zine may be addressed to Gloria, in words and pictures, but it is also an offering to each author/artist/contributor, and us as readers.

Consider getting this zine for yourself or someone you love.