Mestizaje refers to the mixture of Spanish colonizers and the indigenous peoples of Mexico and to the hybrid culture that has developed in the borderlands during the five centuries since the conquest. This paper explores the insights and limitations of a leading Chicana feminist, Gloria Anzaldúa, who seeks to create a new political consciousness for the mestizo (mixed) people. Anzaldúa’s cultural and historical context led her to reject the various forms of oppression that she found in the Chicano community, including all forms of institutionalized religion (especially Catholicism). In this essay I will examine how Anzaldúa’s rejection of Catholicism made her unable to see the resistance of the Chicana/o people to seemingly oppressive religious and societal structures. Drawing on Saba Mahmood, an Islamic feminist theorist, I argue that Chicana/o resistance may be expressed in ways that are different from the overt forms of resistance and defiance that are found in other societies. Two of Anzaldúa’s contemporaries, Marta Cotera and Virgilio Elizondo, were able to work within the confines of Catholicism and to find a spiritual and political home in the hybrid Catholic church of Texas. Based on my experience witnessing life in the borderlands, I propose a reconceptualization of mestizaje that addresses both its politics and its poetics.