Cherríe Moraga

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Writings by Radical Women of Color

This Bridge Called My Back

Gloria Anzaldúa

Updated and expanded edition of the foundational text of women of color feminism. Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, the complex confluence of identitiesrace, class, gender, and sexualitysystemic to women of color oppression and liberation. Reissued here, nearly thirty-five years after its inception, the fourth edition contains an extensive new introduction by Moraga, along with a previously unpublished statement by Gloria Anzaldúa. The new edition also includes visual artists whose work was produced during the same period as Bridge, including Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, and Yolanda López, as well as current contributor biographies. Bridge continues to reflect an evolving definition of feminism, one that can effectively adapt to, and help inform an understanding of the changing economic and social conditions of women of color in the United States and throughout the world. Immense is my admiration for the ongoing dialogue and discourse on feminism, Indigenous feminism, the defining discussions in women of color movements and the broader movement. I have loved this book for thirty years, and am so pleased we have returned with our stories, words, and attributes to the growing and resilient movement.  Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe), Executive Director, Honor the Earth Praise for the Third Edition This Bridge Called My Back dispels all doubt about the power of a single text to radically transform the terrain of our theory and practice. Twenty years after its publication, we can now see how it helped to untether the production of knowledge from its disciplinary anchorsand not only in the field of womens studies. This Bridge has allowed us to define the promise of research on race, gender, class and sexuality as profoundly linked to collaboration and coalition-building. And perhaps most important, it has offered us strategies for transformative political practice that are as valid today as they were two decades ago.  Angela Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz This Bridge Called My Back has served as a significant rallying call for women of color for a generation, and this new edition keeps that call alive at a time when divisions prove ever more stubborn and dangerous. A much-cited text, its influence has been visible and broad both in academia and among activists. We owe much of the sound of our present voices to the brave scholars and feminists whose ideas and ideals crowd its pages.  Shirley Geok-lin Lim, University of California, Santa Barbara This book is a manifestothe 1981 declaration of a new politics US Third World Feminism. No great de-colonial writer, from Fanon, Shaarawi, Blackhawk, or Sartre, to Mountain Wolf Woman, de Beauvoir, Saussure, or Newton could have alone proclaimed this politic born of necessity. This politic denies no truths: its luminosities drive into and through our bodies. Writers and readers alike become shape-shifters, are invited to enter the shaman/witness state, to invoke power differently. US Third World Feminism requires a re-peopling: the creation of planetary citizen-warriors. This book is a guide that directs citizenry shadowed in hate, terror, suffering, disconnection, and pain toward the light of social justice, gender and erotic liberation, peace, and revolutionary love. This Bridge transits our dreams, and brings them to the real.  Chela Sandoval, University of California, Santa Barbara

This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition

"This memoir's beauty is in its fierce intimacy." --Roy Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother’s decline, and also tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora. Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California’s Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation. As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. As Moraga charts her mother’s journey—from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer’s—she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother’s memory fails, Moraga is driven to unearth forgotten remnants of a U.S. Mexican diaspora, its indigenous origins, and an American story of cultural loss. Poetically wrought and filled with insight into intergenerational trauma, Native Country of the Heart is a reckoning with white American history and a piercing love letter from a fearless daughter to the mother she will never lose.

A Memoir

Native Country of the Heart

Poems, stories, and essays describe the political and personal implications of being a gay chicana in modern America

Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios

Loving in the War Years

Cherríe L. Moraga

"A jewel of a book by this celebrated Chicana lesbian writer chronicling 'one small human being's struggle for survival,' her 21/2-pound premature baby boy. While the specifics belong to Moraga and her loved ones, the tale is told in common with every woman who has experienced the wonder and terror of pregnancy, the trauma of a child's near-death."--BOOK JACKET.

Portrait of a Queer Motherhood

Waiting in the Wings

"The Hungry Woman, grounded in the Medea legend and Mesoamerican mythology, reinvents the story of Aztlan in the "near future," visualizing a world in which the Chicano/a nation has won a living space but betrayed the principle of equality of the fighters for the revolution. Passionate, earthy, and tragic, full of heroism and villainy, the play calls on a new audience to deal with an imagined political reality." "The Heart of the Earth is a feminist revisioning of the Quiche Maya Popul Vuh story, with lessons for modernity about the evils of racial doctrine, patriarchy, and greed. Moraga's improbable heroes, vatos locos returned from the deadly underworld, reveal that the real power of creation was always closer to home. The script, a collaboration with puppet maker Ralph Lee, was created for the premiere production of the play at the Public Theatre in New York in 1994."--BOOK JACKET

The hungry woman

El Pueblo de East Palo Alto

Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt: Watsonville: Some Place Not Here and Circle in the Dirt

Cherrie L. Moraga

This highly politicized and intensely personal work bravely and eloquently argues for a reconceptualization of gender, sexuality, race, art, nationalism, and the politics of survival.

Prose and Poetry

The Last Generation

Mariana Romo-Carmona

Alma Gómez

Cherrie L Moraga

The first collection of short fiction to bring together writing by Latinas from both the US and Latin America.

Stories by Latinas

Cuentos

Fortieth anniversary edition of the foundational text of women of color feminism.

This Bridge Called My Back, Fortieth Anniversary Edition

In these two plays Cherrie Moraga traverses the landscape of tragedy and comedy to show how myth and cultural history have shaped the Chicano Imagi-Nation.

The Hungry Woman

Originally released in 1981, "This Bridge Called My Back" is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherrie Moraga writes, the complex confluence of identities race, class, gender, and sexuality systemic to women of color oppression and liberation. Reissued here, nearly thirty-five years after its inception, the fourth edition contains an extensive new introduction by Moraga, along with a previously unpublished statement by Gloria Anzaldua. The new edition also includes visual artists whose work was produced during the same period as "Bridge," including Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, and Yolanda Lopez, as well as current contributor biographies. "Bridge" continues to reflect an evolving definition of feminism, one that can effectively adapt to, and help inform an understanding of the changing economic and social conditions of women of color in the United States and throughout the world."

Celia Herrera Rodriguez

DIVCollection of essays and poems that address the challenges of being a Chicana, a lesbian, and a feminist in the changing world of the twenty-first century./div

Writings, 2000–2010

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness

"Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities--race, class, gender, and sexuality--systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.""

An updated edition combining Loving in the War Years and The Last Generation: Poetry and Prose, with a new introduction by renowned writer and luminary, Cherríe Moraga. In celebration of the 40th anniversary since its original publication, this updated edition of Loving in the War Years combines Moraga's classic memoir with The Last Generation: Poetry and Prose, resulting in a challenging, inspiring, and insightful touchstone for artists and activists--and for anyone striving to foster care and community. Cherríe Moraga's powerful memoir remains as urgent as ever. A classic in Chicana as well as queer literature, Moraga's book explores the intersections of her Chicana and lesbian identities, moving gracefully between poetry and prose, Spanish and English, personal narratives and political theory. Moraga recounts navigating the world largely as an outsider, circling the interconnected societies around her from a distant yet observant perspective. Ultimately, however, her writing serves as a bridge between her cultures, languages, family, and herself, enabling her to look inward to forge connections from otherwise inaccessible parts of her interior world, to show how deep self-awareness and compassionate engagement with one's surroundings are key to building global solidarity among people and political movements.

Cherríe Moraga

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