SOURCE: Moraga, Cherríe, and Karin Rosa Ikas. “Cherríe Moraga: Poet, Playwright, Essayist, and Educator.” In Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers, pp. 152-72. Reno, Nev.: University of Nevada Press, 2002.

[In the following interview, originally conducted in 1997, Moraga discusses the nature and discourse of feminism, particularly with regards to race, class, and how it has shaped her writing over time.]

Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana poet, playwright, essayist, scholar, and activist. She became a central figure in feminist, lesbian, women-of-color, Chicana, and American literature when she started publishing her work in the 1980s. Her writing is highly politicized, intensely personal, and eloquently honest.

Born on September 25, 1952, in Whittier, California, Moraga is the offspring of a mixed-race marriage. Her paternal roots go back to Missouri and Canada, and her maternal roots to California, Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico. Like Southern California, where she grew up, Moraga is the product of Mexican and Anglo influence. She experienced Mexican customs at home and American traditions in school, and she was surrounded by the Spanish and English languages. Due to her relatively fair skin, she could “pass” for a white woman in society. Thus she did not experience the pain of prejudice that many Mexican Americans and Latinos face. However, as a lesbian, Moraga had to cope with another type of discrimination: homophobia. The anger and frustration about all these different types of discrimination, as well as her belief that change must be instigated by the oppressed themselves, contributed to Moraga's passion for writing. In 1974 she earned a B.A. degree from a private college in Hollywood, and after several years of teaching English, she decided to concentrate more on her writing. In addition to writing poetry and critical essays, she began her thesis for her master's degree in feminist writing at San Francisco State University.

Together with Gloria Anzaldúa, she collected essays, poems, letters, and conversations of women of color on issues like feminism and lesbianism for a book. With this work, entitled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Moraga completed requirements for her master's degree in 1980. Shortly after it was published in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back was recognized as a groundbreaking collection of third-world feminist writing and theory that also challenged Anglo-American feminism. It was republished in 1983 and received the 1986 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. In 1988 a revised, Spanish edition entitled Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces de Mujeres Tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos was published. In 1981 Cherríe Moraga cofounded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in New York City to allow more feminists and women of color to express themselves textually. Two years later Moraga's first collection of works, Loving in the War Years/Lo Que Nunca Pasó por Sus Labios, was published there. In that work Moraga discusses the effects of Chicanas' cultural heritage on sexuality—homosexual and heterosexual. She asks all Chicanas to free themselves from the sexual and cultural oppression that has taught them to think of the needs of their men before their own. Loving in the War Years was the first published book of writing by an avowed Chicana lesbian. With Norma Alarcón and Ana Castillo, Moraga edited The Sexuality of Latinas (1989) and the already mentioned edition of Bridge, Esta Puente, Mi Espalda.

Moraga's experience at Intar, the Hispanic-American Arts Center in New York City, provided her with the skills needed to write and produce plays and contributed to her success as a playwright. Her play Giving Up the Ghost: Teatro in Two Acts was published in 1986 and performed in 1987 in San Francisco and Seattle. In it Moraga deals with the brutality of heterosexual love as opposed to the homosexual love the play's female characters Amalia and Marisa share.

Moraga has received several awards, including the Fund for New American Plays and the National Endowment for the Arts Theatre Playwrights' Fellowship for Shadow of a Man (1988) and Heroes and Saints (1989). Some critics, such as Catherine Wiley, regard Shadow of a Man, for example, “in many ways as a radical revision of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman with the sexual tension of Miller's subtext placed in the foreground.”¹ In her latest plays Moraga puts more and more emphasis on social problems and political activism, and adds these elements to her ever present criticism of various forms of oppression. In Watsonville: Some Place Not Here (1996) a cannery workers' strike, a miraculous vision, a single mother's sexual breakthrough, and an earthquake are brought together. In Heroes and Saints (1992) Moraga displays the human drama of a Chicana family suffering the effects of pesticide-related deaths, birth defects, and poisoning. In an unusual blend of political theater, realism, and surrealism, Moraga develops the action of Heroes and Saints around the female protagonist Cerezita, who—due to birth defects—is just a head poised on a wheeled cart. Moraga's book The Last Generation is a collection of highly politicized essays and poems. Moving freely between Spanish and English and also crossing literary genres, Moraga argues for a new conception of gender, sexuality, race, art, nationalism, and the politics of survival based on a radical transformation of consciousness and society.

Moraga is artist-in-residence and instructor of theater and creative writing at Brava Theatre Center of San Francisco. She is also president of the board of directors of Latin American Theatre Artists, teaches at Stanford University in Palo Alto, and lectures around the country.

[Ikas]: We are now almost at the end of the twentieth century. Your first works were published in the 1980s. How have things changed since then? How would you describe yourself as a person and as a writer now in the late 1990s?

[Moraga]: Well, my first book published was This Bridge Called My Back in 1981. Then Loving in the War Years came out in 1983. I think the major difference is that at the time that both of those books were published, there wasn't very much in print and no real dialogue where women of color were articulating perspectives about feminism. Within the context of the Chicano literary movement there was virtual silence concerning lesbianism and, to a certain degree, concerning feminism as well. Therefore, when those two books were published in the 1980s, they were unique in the sense that they somehow introduced the fact that one could be both lesbian and Chicana in the same human body. Also, these books showed that feminism wasn't a compromise of one's Chicanismo but that in fact one could define feminism from a Chicano cultural perspective.

I have taught at the university for many, many years now. I see in the way Chicano issues come up that much of these things are already understood now. So they are grounded; they are now established. Therefore, as we are moving into the twenty-first century, people can go on to ask more complex questions about how class, gender, race, and sexuality intersect. You no longer have to question whether you have the right to look at it at all—which was the case twenty years ago.

Would you say that there is a generational gap between the younger Chicana/o writers and the ones of your generation? Or do you support and help each other?

Obviously, with each generation there are new sets of questions and concerns. But there is not a generational gap because we were mostly in the role of teaching that younger generation, and they are reading our work. So I feel like there is continuity. In terms of my own generation of writers, we were very much starving at the beginning. To have a twenty-year body of literature on Chicana feminism, that's nothing. And that's just barely coming of age itself. The younger generation may look at us as ancianos. But I feel that we just really understand the ways we want to write; if you ask anyone of my generation, everyone just feels this way. Culturally we have a whole body of work in front of us. So I see all of us as still very young, and I feel like the younger people, the new generation coming up, can take a greater risk in theme and concern. Maybe other people see it differently but I think—because I work so much with young people—that there is incredible continuity.

Your first writing is very angry. Are you still angry about your situation?

I have never lost my anger.

Can you describe that anger to us? Are you angry about the society as a whole? For example, if I think of The Last Generation, in which you deal a lot with global issues, your anger seems to be put into an international context. Is this the way your anger goes now?

I think that the only people who have a right to write with anger are white people. I just feel that categorizing our work as “angry” is a way to totally trivialize it. So I always ensure that no matter what I am writing about, even a love poem, I remain angry. It has always been a tradition in the United States that the standard American literary perspective on that is that somehow art is antithetical to anger and anger is antithetical to art. But I don't see these distinctions at all. I believe there is only a difference when you're younger. For example, I myself as a younger writer didn't feel as though I had the right to write, and I see this with a lot of younger writers today as well. So the anger has more to do with what helps you to get the stimulation and the motivation and to feel that you can put your ideas in print. It's almost like you need the anger as the impetus to feel like you have the right to do it, because it's not a given that you should have ever written. And I think the difference is that now, as I understand I have a right to write and that no one is going to take that away from me, I feel less embattled about that aspect, but certainly not less embattled about my perspective. And yes, I agree that my work has become increasingly more international. But I feel like that just has to do with one's evolution and one's understanding of the causes of injustice, oppression, and even love.

I would like to talk a bit more about The Last Generation. What did you have in mind when you started this work?

Well, it was partly motivated by both personal and political concerns. The personal concerns are that most of the elders in my family are now into their eighties and nineties; they are passing as we speak. I feel that the generations coming up in my own family are much more assimilated and less conscious of their Mexicanism, their Chicanismo. I lament that. So there is a certain sense in which, as a writer, I feel like I am the last one in my family to remember and record that we're Mexicans. But I also see that in this country there is such a movement toward multiculturalism—which is just a sort of acronym for the melting pot—making “nationalism” a dirty word. This reaction to nationalism has happened all over, internationally as well. However, some of the roots of Chicano nationalism are still very valid. This has to do with remembering that this was initially our land, and that the land was stolen from us. This is similar to what Native American people do. And that kind of cultural nationalism in terms of one's consciousness—for example, having a right to land, like the Palestinians or anybody else—is very, very important. Although I feel that there is a move in this country to Hispanicize us, to Europeanize us, and make us another immigrant group that we are not, and to ratify us. So the book was motivated by both the personal concerns and then by the much more political concerns. The latter is about the passing of a generation, of a movement, and the refusal to let this movement go underground. It is not the last generation. When you say something like “the last generation,” it is to stop it from being the last generation; it is a conscious political movement. So those were the two primary motivations for this work.

In this book you deal with lesbianism as part of “the last generation” as well. It seems that, in that context, you see yourself as the last of your generation also because of your homosexuality and the consequent difficulties in having children. However, now you have a child yourself. You have a son who is about three and a half years old. Did this motherhood experience change your writing and you as a person?

At the time I wrote the book, I didn't have children. What I always try to do is to make a distinction between the life of a writer and the life of a book. In the life of that book, that writer has no children. So when she says no one is going to call me “mami, grandma, abuelita” or whatever, that writer meant that. But my concern about family and the re-creation of family, including queer familia, has always been the same. I think by virtue of being Mexican, family is so culturally important. And I came from such a huge extended family that, whether I'm queer or straight or whatever, I always tried to re-create that, even if it was just with lovers and their children. You know that kind of re-creation of a familia that countered the nuclear family model. So to me having a child is a kind of logical extension of those ideas. But I was never guaranteed a pregnancy or any of that. So the fact that I have a child now almost seemed to be in my role. It was my part to do that, and it just happened to me. However, it may not have worked. I mean, it could have been that I didn't get pregnant. So the fact that it did happen showed that it was in my path to do that.

What it has changed, however, is that it reinforced how necessary it is, even in the rearing of children, to draw from the positive elements of one's culture in terms of values and respect for elders and ancestors, for example, and to get a more collective understanding of how the formation of family happens. In addition, we should not copy the problems that the typical American nuclear family has put up for itself. We do need to create new models about how to raise our children. Queers are in the position to do that because we are outside of society. That's why we are never really interested in domestic marriages and all that kind of stuff. I have become even more committed to trying to draw from certain cultural traditions that I think work and to critique those traditions that don't work. This happens in particular with regard to raising my own child and sharing him with the other people who are helping to raise him.

If you think about white feminism, women-of-color feminism, and lesbianism—the three major issues in your work—is it more important for you to concentrate on women-of-color lesbians, and are you therefore not so interested in making alliances with white feminists?

Well, I make alliances with white feminist individuals, but not with the white feminist movement. I mean, there are numbers of white feminists who really are my allies because they are antiracist, and they practice what they preach. But as a movement, white feminism has nothing to offer me. Just calling it “white” feminism shows it excludes. In large part, the institutionalization in terms of organizations that are dominated by white feminists is one reason why white feminists still are not able to really integrate concerns of not just women of color, but working-class and poor women as well. But that has nothing to do, necessarily, with individuals. I mean, I will build coalitions with anybody whose work I feel a common cause with. So that can be a white woman, that can be men. And there are a lot of women of color I don't work with because we don't share a common cause either. But when you're talking theoretically, when you're talking in terms of your political analysis, white feminism has nothing to offer me. What it did was to provide a base twenty years ago from which I could then critique what was missing. Not just me but us as a collective body of people. Women of color could critique what it had to offer and what were the missing parts, and on that we built a broader-based movement, one that makes sense globally as well.

What was most influential for your writing at the beginning, and what is most influential now?

As a poet, Adrienne Rich had a great impact on me. I studied her work a great deal. In the mid-seventies I was reading all the work that came out, like Mary Daily and Juliet Mitchell. I read all the work of white women and the “bibles” of feminism, Marxist feminism, radical feminism, and social feminism. They were all providing a base of analysis for me to understand feminism and to figure out how Marxism coheres with that or how it doesn't. I wanted to get a handle on understanding my own oppression, the oppression of the women around me, and of my culture. So what happens is that you read all that stuff, and then you ask, What's missing in the picture? That's what then made me primarily reflect on black feminism. By and large, black feminists at that time were not writing theory, with some exceptions, of course. I was reading the poets and the novelists like Toni Morrison, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker. I read Walker's Meridian in the early days. At that time black feminists were the only ones who were articulating a kind of class, race, and gender analysis. So that's sort of your natural progression. You think about what is missing in that picture, and you bring it to your own kind. Those were my first influences.

In recent years I read much more Native American women's work than anything else; for example, Leslie Marmon Silko and Linda Hogan. I feel an affinity within to these women's work. Their writings run closer to the Chicano experience, given the fact that we both have native roots here in the United States.

What about the Asian Americans?

I've read plenty of Asian American literature. I see similarities in terms of the kind of repression that women experience in relation to very patriarchal societies. We build coalitions against common threats. But I think it is the passionately political nature of black literature in this country that makes it most influential. Every people-of-color movement will tell you that they draw from models of the African American movement because racism is so pervasive in the United States. African Americans have always had to be at an extremely cutting edge in their radicalism to counter that racism. So that always inspired me politically. When I draw from the Native American tradition, it is more in a cultural and spiritual sense.

Do you feel there is a common bond between African American and Chicana/o writers?

No, because I think we know a huge amount more about them than they know about us. By and large, as a general rule, I don't think that it is mutual. We Chicanos/as remain very invisible within the U.S. literary scene. Even very well read and very well published African American writers in the U.S. hardly know us. If you ask them about Chicana writers, the only person they know is Sandra Cisneros. So they usually only know people who have really crossed over to the mainstream. There isn't the motivation to do the same research we do. African Americans have more mainstream writers. So they and their literature are more accessible to us. I think that we have always taken the examples of leadership from the black movement. However, I don't think the relationship is reciprocal, which is a kind of a shame.

If you think about the future of feminism as a whole, and women-of-color feminism, in particular, what will it look like in the twenty-first century?

The most hopeful start has been made in terms of the international connections among diaspora people; for example, the African diaspora and black American feminists creating international connections. Or Native American women during the quincentenary, when there were international conferences happening, connecting native people, indigenous people, from all over the globe. I think there is an incredible amount of potential, of women, of nations of women, coming together that doesn't recognize these national boundaries. It is a very patriarchal and also a very imperialist capitalist notion to allow these geopolitical borders to separate us. Although women are doing many other things, I feel somehow hopeful when women connect with each other, violating those boundaries. That's really exciting to me.

Can white women and white feminists be part of that, too?

That happens in terms of international conferences. The problem is never that it can't happen. It's just that, by and large, when you're dealing with the dominant class—which tends to be white people, Euro-American and European women—it is rarely a dialogue. It never is. That is my experience, from all the work I've done with white women. When you go to an international conference, you always know what to expect in terms of it being dominated by European methodology. So when you have an international conference where European women and Euro-American women are there, the dialogue is still dominated by that cultural perspective. I have never experienced it any other way except that it is happening within a different context and so it is different people who define the terms. It doesn't mean that it is impossible. It is also a question of who is running the show, who has the power, who determines the nature of the debate. By and large, if you have international conferences that include both women of color and white women, white women continue to be the ones who define the nature of the debate and the conversations. That always limits what can really happen.

If you think about intercultural and cross-cultural understanding that goes beyond current borders between women of color, people of color in general, and white people, are you pessimistic or optimistic that it is going to happen in the future?

It's not that I am pessimistic about it. I just think the real work in that context begins locally. It's like that saying: “Think globally, act locally.”

Like in your case, you're from Germany. There are people of color there, like there are in every other city and country around the world. That's where the work begins, in your own country and community. It is not about going across the world to have conversations with people. It is about—and I don't want to sound too Christian here—how you treat your neighbor.

I remember going to Germany, to Berlin. I was staying in that area where there were mostly Turks living and other people of color. So to me it was almost like any other American city where you can find people of color everywhere. And it became very clear that the people who invited me to Germany to give a talk about us Chicanas and Chicanos in the United States were very liberal about us. They could say that we were interesting and exoticize Chicanos/as or natives or blacks in the United States. But in their hometown, very little has been done in terms of dealing with people of color there. And that's where the real work should be. It is not about being pessimistic. It is about believing that real change happens at the most intimate level first. All these are good gestures and stuff, but they don't impress me. What impresses me, and what I believe in, is that kind of contact work in your own community.

Let's talk a bit about your essay writing. Do you have a particular theory in mind when you write your essays?

No. I have a particular question in mind. Some essays are also driven by personal experience. Right now I am finishing a book called Waiting in the Wings. It has to do with the birth of my son and deals with personal and philosophical questions. But usually I write essays motivated by questions I have, contradictions, what I see politically in society that I can't find an answer to. I don't necessarily have a theory I want to work out. It is more like I have a question I want to ask in public. I may not have an answer. I just want to ask the question so that people will talk about it.

At a poetry reading you gave at San Francisco State University on November 21, 1996, you mentioned that “theater is hard but very revolutionary, it's three-dimensional and in the flesh.” Can you tell us a bit more about that, especially because you are one of the few Chicana playwrights?

It has to do with the fact that things are different once you give them a voice. Reading is a very private act. The readers can shut the book, open it, or do whatever they want. They can interpret the writing any way they want to. Theater is more confrontational. You have to open your heart and take a play in or not. But it is also an opportunity to do that in a very visual way. With a book you don't have that possibility. You can keep your mind—at least to some degree—separate if you want to. I find it very exciting that theater is so much more confrontational.

What is most important for you when you write a play?

Characters are the most important element for me. Usually I am always motivated by a character first or an image.

What about the audience? Do you feel that it is sometimes difficult for the audience to deal with the sometimes very outspoken lesbian elements in some of your plays?

It depends on who is in the audience, homosexuals or people who are homophobic. But I don't worry about that. In that context, for me writing theater is somehow a bit like writing a novel. The characters are talking to you, and you have to listen to them. If you try to superimpose your ideology of that time, the work gets very flat. So I never am concerned about how the audience is going to respond. I never censor anything based on who the audience is. I write for my ideal audience that is probably made up of people who are not homophobic, not racist, people who are open-minded. So if you assume your audience is open-minded, and you write well and with enough depth, then whoever is in the audience—white person, person of color, whatever—will be able to see the other—maybe for the first time in their life—just as humans. That's where your hope is.

Your theater seems to be very political. I think about Watsonville or Heroes and Saints, for example. In those plays you deal with the situation of Chicana/o fruit pickers who are exposed to pesticides. In Heroes and Saints the protagonist is Cerezita, a disembodied head [due to her mother's exposure to pesticides during pregnancy]. How important is that political content in your plays?

Well, of course there is a political message in my plays. But again, my theater is in particular about trying to have the character's humanity express that message. Otherwise we are just polemical, and people think you are lecturing them. Then they don't open their hearts. Of course, I want to raise consciousness. I want to wake people up. The way I do that is by creating fully dimensional characters.

What does Cerezita, the protagonist of Heroes and Saints, stand for in particular? The issues you bring up with her are manifold. I already mentioned the bad situation of fruit pickers. Other topics include sexuality and love from the point of view of the handicapped woman, Cerezita, then religion—in particular, the Catholic Church—and there is also love for a priest. Then you have an overprotective mother, hypocrisy, and several other elements in there.

Most important about Cerezita is that she is a Mexican American woman who has great vision and who is imprisoned. She is a symbol for all of us, for any young Chicana who has great vision and is not allowed to be fully dimensional in a world dominated by sexism, racism, and all of that. So she is somebody who is so brilliant, who can see so much, almost everything. She sees truth, and you are not supposed to be able to do that. Her not having a body is the representation of that. She is completely physically disabled from being able to speak the truth. That's how I feel about so much of the potential of young Chicana and Mexican American women. There is all that beauty and vision. So probably at the heart of it, that's what that play is about. You can say that the things that stop Cerezita are the environmental racism, the Catholic Church, homophobia, and the list can go on. But nonetheless, part of it is that she is just a human being who is not allowed to have her full humanity. And that is the biggest crime of racism, sexism, and homophobia: it keeps people from achieving their full humanity.

We are here at Brava! For Women in the Arts, a nonprofit organization that encourages and supports women to pursue professions in the arts. It also sponsors female theater projects like the experimental Latina Theatre Lab. If we think about the male-dominated history of the Chicano theater, in particular by Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino and others, how do you feel about the situation right now?

Now there is no longer a real Chicano theater movement at all. Some of us are writing Chicano theater in a Chicano context; others are writing within a mainstream context. But very highly politically motivated work—that is really about social change—by and large is not being written by Chicanos anymore—at least not right now. It doesn't mean that our plays have to be about strikes and social protests. However, they should involve issues that are very necessary for Chicanos, for our own evolution as a people. But at the moment, plays often are either so highly personalized that they don't have enough of an impact on Chicanos/as, or they are too superficial or too pedantical. Therefore, I feel that right now Chicano/a theater in general—written by women or men—is kind of biased. Additionally, like you have already said, as the history of Chicano theater is very male-dominated, the plays written by women are just gradually about to get more recognized anyway.

Who are the most important contemporary Chicana playwrights to you? And what would you say are the major difficulties they have to cope with?

There are many talented Chicana playwrights, like Denise Chávez and Josefina López. But by and large, almost no Chicana has the opportunity to fully concentrate on writing drama. Most of us are doing other things as well, like acting, writing for tv, et cetera. In terms of looking at the time when theater was really part of a revolutionary movement, when there was a political movement to support it, that's no longer the case. We are writing as individuals now. And even on an individual basis I feel like the work is not progressive enough. It doesn't reach far enough and doesn't challenge the mainstream enough. It is too colloquial. I think that is the trouble with our literature, too. There is not enough Chicano/a literature that is really challenging the preconceptions about who we are as a people by the mainstream. Also, we don't critique ourselves as people so that we can become better people.

This applies to all of us today, that is, on January 2, 1997; we have to change that. We need to do the kind of intercultural critique that will make us a stronger people, and also the critique that challenges the status quo. It is hard to do that and still get the mainstream attention we need to survive as artists.

Coming back to what you asked about Chicano theater in relation to mainstream theater, we remain very ghettoized and tokenized. None of that has changed yet. There is very little progress in that area. None of the work—with the exception of Luis Valdez's works—has really crossed over into the mainstream. There are a few writers, Latino writers, not just Chicanos—like José Rivera, Caldo Solice—mostly men, however, who had made some crossover more to mainstream regional theaters, but by and large we remain a ghettoized theater.

Have [you] ever thought about adapting one of your plays for the tv screen?

Sure, but I have to be offered that. I would not waste my time coming up with a screenplay and pushing to get it on the screen since that is like winning the lottery. In the past there has been some interest in my work for that, but nothing has worked out so far. It is so expensive to do film or tv. As a writer you constantly get invitations to do these things, and some projects go further than others. But to actually see something realized into a film is very rare. Well, I respond to those invitations if they seem interesting. And, of course, I am interested in that to the degree that those two mediums have incredible access in a way to many people. They also reach people who don't read or don't go to see a play. But I would never put my time and energy into being a screenplay writer because as a screenplay writer you are no longer able to control the production of your work. The director does this. So if you do want to have control, you don't write screenplays.

What projects do you have in mind at the moment? What about your future plans?

I am finishing a book right now that is called Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. It basically deals with my son. He was born premature. It is actually about what it means to give birth to a child when the generation that raised me is leaving the earth. There are also some more philosophical questions involved. Then I have a play called The Hungry Woman, the Mexican Medea that I am finishing this spring.

Do you incorporate the La Llorona myth in that new play?

Yes, that's what it is. It is kind of a turn-of-the-century Llorona. It is now a feminist Llorona as opposed to the patriarchal interpretations of her. In my play the Medea myth runs parallel to the one of La Llorona.

Focusing a bit more on your theoretical work: you started doing theory in the 1980s with Gloria Anzaldúa when you edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. At that time you were one of the few Chicana writers doing theory. How has the situation changed since then? Do you still work with Gloria Anzaldúa?

Gloria Anzaldúa and myself, we have our own different approaches. The only collaboration I did with Gloria was This Bridge Called My Back. That was about fifteen years ago. Now there are plenty of people writing theory, such as Norma Alarcón, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano and Ana Castillo.

With regard to Chicana theorists and Chicana writers, how does the situation look like right now? What seems to be most important at the moment?

The problem right now is that we are cultivating more critics than we are cultivating artists. So many young Chicanas are going into literary criticism. There are plenty of them if you think about all the dissertations done in that area by young Chicanas in recent years. So there is a lot of that happening, but not much in the cultivation of really good writers. And that's what I am really interested in. So these theorists are doing academic criticism, which I think is different than what Gloria Anzaldúa and me or even Ana Castillo are doing. We are writing as creative writers. We are running personal essays, essays that have theoretical components. But it is not that we are trying to sit down to write academic essays. It's about creating theory that also is very experimental. It is also based on research. The essays are literary to me, as opposed to academic essays. I don't consider myself an academic even though I teach at Stanford. I consider myself a professional writer and that to me is different. I am looking for young writers really coming into the work. I mean, I think of someone like James Barth, who wrote incredible essays. That's the kind of theory you can use. Otherwise, to me standard academic writing presents you with language that is less accessible and more exclusive and requires a more formally educated readership. I am looking for essays, philosophies, and ideas that can change people. It has to be written like the mind that filtered to the heart.

What kind of philosophy is important to you? Sometimes it seems that you create a kind of personal philosophy, in particular with regard to your theoretical writing.

Yes, to some extent I create my own philosophy. I agree with Gloria Anzaldúa, who mentioned already years ago that she always wanted to be a philosopher. That's beautiful thing. It is not that she wants to make a career in the academy. It is that she wants to think. Like Jackie Alexander, who teaches in New York, said, “Our great philosophers were the eldest in our village who sat on the porch and had the ideas.” This idea of a real solid base of ideas is what is important to me.

In that context another vital element in Mexican and Mexican American culture comes into my mind, curandismo [folk healing] and the curanderas, the women who practice it. They deal a lot with Chicano/a traditions and cultural elements and incorporate them to heal. Can a writer or writing itself function that way as well? Do you feel like a healer sometimes?

I don't like to use that language because it is too overused. But, of course, I've seen that writing can save lives. I've seen young writers who saved their own lives by writing. So I know the act of writing is very cleansing, and sometimes it also can save your life. But that's not what being a curandera means. A curandera is somebody who has practiced the art of healing, who uses herbs, and who has a special relationship to indigenismo, rituals, and prayers. Curandismo has its own folk tradition. I respect that, but I would never use that word to describe my thoughts.

Crossing borders and even dissolving borders are some of the keywords of your writing. Postcolonialists deal with dissolving borders as well. Are there any postcolonial theories that you feel can be applied to Chicana literature? Do you sometimes feel like a postcolonialist yourself?

No, I never use the postcolonial theory in my writing. Whatever theory I read, and I have read a lot of different philosophies—Buddhism, for example—I try to get some answers to my questions. In postcolonialist discourse there is language that is useful. But I try not to use that language in my writing. I find it alienating to my readers and myself. I like language to give tools that help people to get a hold of understanding their situation and their experience. If I understand it, I read it and translate it to other languages. So it has its validity in my own reading. But for the most part I tend not to re-create or use that language in my own writing. Instead I try to use a language that I feel is original to my own perspective.

How do you then feel about critics who call you a postcolonial writer?

Lots of people do that, and that is fine with me. I have read a lot of things in which people refer to me as a postcolonial writer. The way people use my work has nothing to do with me. The book has its own life once it is published, so I don't have to agree with everything. However, that's not important to me anyway. It's just the conversation that has to happen. You have no control over how people react and interpret your work.

So as the book has its own life once it is written, I assume you also never go back and rewrite some of your essays or books?

Right, I wouldn't. However, I hope that each book reflects a development. I mean, sometimes people come to me and say: “How could you say that? That contradicts what you said ten years ago.” And I tell them: “Thank God, thank God it contradicts it!” I mean, if I am not changing, I would be really worried. I would expect work, whatever new work, to be a kind of reflection of my own evolution. But certainly I would not go back and fix something. There are a lot of things I've written in the past I do no longer agree with. But at that time, it was OK. That twenty-nine-year-old writer, or however old I was at that time, had a right to write that. It stimulated dialogue then.

So one always has to see your writing in the context and in the time it was written.

Sure, in the ideal world. But it is not an ideal world, and therefore many critics often don't look at my work that way. People don't even pay attention to copyrights sometimes. I can give you an example on the issue of identity politics because This Bridge Called My Back is so strongly an advocate of identity politics, and I think there are a lot of weaknesses in identity politics from my perspective now. Sometimes I feel like Bridge too easily lent itself to making it seem as if, if you were lesbian of color, for example, given all these multiple oppressions that you have, you were somehow more revolutionary than somebody else—which is not true. The ideology—each of those identities compiled representing truth—is a very revolutionary position but not necessarily the individual itself. You can have a totally reactionary lesbian of color. And yet people took the book so literally on many levels; some people still do. So, you know, had I rewritten it, then I would have qualified things more because I work smarter now, hopefully. But you can't. So people are going to do what they're going to do.

Have you ever thought about publishing a revised edition of This Bridge Called My Back or editing another volume?

I don't want to do that. Bridge came out of pure need. At the time we worked on it, we didn't even think that it was going to be published. Both of us—Gloria Anzaldúa and myself—were virtually unpublished writers. Most of the women in that book, with the exception of Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith, were unpublished writers as well. So everything started just out of pure hunger. We needed to know that there was some place in the world—and this place was at least between the covers of this book—where being a lesbian of color was not a contradiction in terms. It was given validity. Not just validity—it also had a vision attached to it. I always believe that the book did so well because the motivation of the book was very pure. So the only time I would do another book like that would be when the circumstances were such that I was called to do that. This means that politically the times were such that I had an insight about what we needed and what really had to be written. It would have to be the same kind of situation. But that doesn't exist. I never felt the same motivation in terms of collective voices. I've only felt it with regard to my own personal work, but certainly not to collect work by other writers. Not that I would never do that again, maybe sometime in the future. But right now I don't really feel the strong motivation I need to put out the energy that something like that requires.

What is most important for you at the moment? Is it theater? Or is it educating younger Chicana writers to get into that area and to teach them how to be successful in that genre?

I wouldn't say it is exclusively theater. For me the most important thing really is to continue to get better, to write better and better. I just want to write better and better and better and better and better. And that may mean different genres; that may not mean exclusively theater. I feel kind of disheartened with theater right now. I am working on a longer work now, the novels. This genre is determined a lot by my own kind of evolution as a writer. My bottom line is always that I want to get better and better and better, which means keeping an open heart and an open mind.

And I love teaching. That doesn't mean just teaching theater. I love teaching people to be artists, and that can be as actresses, as creative writers, that can be as teatrista [special-effects person], that can be a lot of things. I like teaching at the university setting as well as in the community. As long as I am doing that, for now there is a sense of sanity in my work.

Speaking of teaching, in particular teaching young children and kids, one genre that seems to be very popular among Chicano and Chicana writers at the moment is children's books. Gary Soto and Pat Mora do it; even Gloria Anzaldúa published two children's books not long ago. Have you ever thought about writing a children's book yourself?

Yes, just because I have a kid now. I mean, the youngest children I teach are high school kids. I just do best with college age and people past puberty. I like to teach adults, too. In terms of doing a children's book, I mean, just by raising my child, there is so much to make stories about all the time. So there is always the possibility. Especially if I get broke, that's an easy way to make money. They are really fabulous, so yes, that's a possibility. I would just do it because it would be fun. But there is not so much motivation for me to do it. There are people who teach young people, really little kids. They are so good at it, so they should do it. I think I am a good mum, but I am not about teaching little kids. My sister is wonderful at it. She just loves small children and has spent her life doing that. She has the patience that I would never have. So I know my limitations on that level. I have one kid and that is enough.

How important is your family to you?

My family is very important to me. But I keep them separate from my own professional life. I have a very good family. They really love me. Like any young writer, I had to go through a lot of stuff in order to separate the fibers that have formed me. But now as a forty-four-year-old woman, I certainly see my parents less now as my parents and more as human beings with their own faults and their own beauty. And I feel a sense of peace about that. I consider myself very lucky to have such a large family and such an extended sense of what love is. That has nothing to do with how good you are professionally, how much money you make, and any of that. It's just about basic blood and loyalty, and that is very strong in my family, also rituals around family and rituals of spirituality. There are a lot of things you have to learn, but there is a real base of strong values that I reinforce to my child now as well. So I am blessed in that sense.

Before finishing the interview, I would like to ask you about the goals you might have set for yourself as a person and a writer for the present and future.

I want to be a better and better and better writer, raise my child with love, be a good lover to my partner, to make family and to make art as well as I can do it, and as honestly as I can do it. That's it.

Note

1. Catherine Wiley, “Performance Review of Shadow of a Man by Cherríe Moraga,” Theatre Journal 47/3 (Oct. 1995): 412-414.