[In the following interview, Moraga discusses her writing and her position as a Latina writer in the United States.]

I interviewed Cherríe Moraga during the summer of 1985 at her home in Brooklyn. By then her book Loving in the War Years had been published and I was particularly interested in the essays included in the collection. I was also interested in having Cherríe Moraga herself do a self-portrait of her life as a Chicana and a Lesbian.

[Umpierre:] Artists should be allowed to do self-portraits of themselves; so, in that spirit, who is Cherríe Moraga?

[Moraga:] First of all, I am originally from Los Angeles and I am Chicana. All of my family are Chicanos. My father is Anglo, so I basically grew up in the cultural experience of Chicanos because toda la familia era chicana, but with the presence of my father throughout. I was born in 1952; I am going to be 33. I am living in New York City, where I am trying to make a living as a writer. I have lived in New York for four or four and a half years. But before that I was in California. I spent about four years living in the San Francisco Bay area. I have been seriously writing for about ten years. I wrote somewhat in college, but primarily my experience in college, in terms of writing, was terrible. I mean, they did plenty to convince me that I could not write.

Do you come from a large or a small family? What kind of environment did you grow up in?

Well, in my immediate family, I have a brother and a sister, so my immediate family was five people, but my grandmother, who just died last year, left maybe like ninety something people from her, and the majority of them live in the Los Angeles area, and many of them live in the same town. My family was basically a family of cousins and aunts and uncles, and people que siempre está ahí en la casa. And also, sometimes we had people taking care of my grandmother, you know, like mejicanas, who were also living with us, who took care of my grandmother. My grandmother lived next door for many, many years, and for a short time lived with the family. So it was like a huge family.

So it was like an extended family.

Yes, definitely, that's how you would describe it, like an extended family. Everybody in everybody's business.

Where did you go to college?

I went to college in a private school in Hollywood. Real small, it used to be like a Catholic college, and then when I went there it looked like it was very progressive. It was in the late sixties, so I went there because it was very liberal, you know, policies, etc., and I began to take some writing there, and I wrote some terrible short stories.

Why were they terrible?

Well, actually, one of the reasons why they were so terrible is because I felt very much that I was writing with secrets. I saved them to remind me of who I am and where I came from. I remember one story in particular which was about this woman who was losing her mind, and there was this homosexual seduction scene in it, and the woman, you know, the protagonist, freaks out, and it was the most homophobic thing you would ever want to read in your life. It was actually when I came out as a lesbian, which was also ten years ago, that I really felt my writing took a real major shift because it was like something had been lifted in me. If I could reveal that secret to myself, then there was very little else that was going to be more scary than that, because that was very traumatic. That made a major change in my writing and I primarily began writing as a poet.

What books have you published up to now or what books do you consider your major works?

In 1981 I published This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which is a collection of writings by women of color here in the United States, so it has contributions by Native American women, Latinas here, African-American and Asian women. I started working on that in 1979 with Gloria Anzaldúa, who is a Chicana writer, and that work is primarily a collection of essays. Many of us have been working, doing a lot of work very isolated, sort of the token women of color in a predominantly white women's movement. So that book was an effort to really bring together the voices of women of color in the same position as me and Gloria, but all across the nation, and to some extent to begin to define a kind of feminist politics that included our own race and identities as well. That was published through The Feminist Press and soon after that I got involved with Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press. We began to work on trying to build a press for women of color. In 1983 one of our first projects was to put together a collection of writings by Latinas in the U.S. Basically the Press' dedication has always been to try to publish the works that would not be published elsewhere or would not traditionally have visibility and one of the things that struck me was that, particularly for Latinas here in the U.S., there is a huge amount of censorship and very little space left in which to put our work because we either write in Spanish and they want it in English or we write in English and they want it in Spanish or we write in both and nobody wants it. And we did a book too that came from a perspective that really took very seriously the conditions of Latinas, and which wanted to create an interest in fiction in this case. So that book is called Cuentos/Short Stories by Latinas and that was published in 1983. I edited that with Alma Gómez, who is Puerto Rican, and Mariana Romo Carmona, who is chilena.

In that same year I also published my last book which is called Loving in the War Years (Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios). That book is basically one that I had been working on for over seven years. I mean, the work covers that span of time, but the very last work in that book was an essay called "A long line of vendidas." I had originally considered the book as all being poetry because that was my major form, but there seemed to be certain things that needed to be expressed, that necessitated the form of essay, so that's like fifty pages in the book. That's a lot! What happened after doing Bridge which, as I explained, was a lot of different voices of women of color here, I found that that opened me up very much to wanting to be even more specific about my identity. It was not enough to say that I was a Third World Woman or a woman of color, that my particular experience as a Latina and even more as a Chicana was very different from that of an Asian woman or a Black woman; so that, from the first secret being revealed, it was necessary to go on. And Loving in the War Years is very much to me about being specifically Chicana and a lesbian together. That book freed me up a lot. It is very much an autobiography, but with different forms. It was the kind of book that allowed me to finally put on paper some things that needed to be down, and opened me up to being able to write things that were less specifically centered on my actual biographical experience and more about identifying with the lives of others. From then I basically started working in the theater. This form has allowed me to give voice to a lot. There have been numerous plays about Chicanos, but none particularly about Chicanas, and giving voice to all these women that I know from that very extended family gives me a greater enjoyment in writing; more than I have ever had in my life.

What in particular are you writing now? You were talking to me about the theater, do you have something already written down?

Since Loving in the War Years came out, I have three theater pieces by now, none of them are finished. They are in various stages of work. The first one I began is called Giving up the Ghost. This may end up being fiction. There are so many monologues that it's just like an oral history but with fictional characters. It's very much about the life of a character named Gorki, a girl growing up in East Los Angeles. I didn't grow up in the barrio. Everybody thinks I did. Being a Chicana, you had to grow up in East Los Angeles or in el barrio. But that was very much the world that I observed, that I was close to, and the kids I grew up with and things like that. About this little girl, Gorki, I think the whole point of this particular work is that I really need to get into the forces that form any young Chicana, in terms of sexuality and identity, and how much sexuality is so fundamental in us, seeing ourselves both as women of color and as Third World people. This girl's story starts at puberty, that's when a lot of trouble starts for us; it focuses on that and goes all the way up into her adulthood and, at this point, all happens through monologues. So that's one thing, and this tentatively may be published in the spring by Western Press, who are now in Los Angeles.

The other work is called The Shadow of a Man, which is not the title that it's going to eventually have. This play is about a Chicano family and very much about the mother of that family, and I love this. It's only in its first draft form but it's really a play. And I think at the heart of it, it's really very much about how women protect men, that the women and the daughters really have the pulse on the family, and how the men are protected and mothered by the mother, and even by the daughters and that the relationships are really much more, from what I see, in the family among Chicanos. That there can be great love between husband and wife, but the real relationships are between mother and son, and mother and daughter and father and son. There is a way in which husband and wife are often very strange to each other. I am very excited about that work because I think that there is enough outside of me that is really a pleasure to go into.

And on the last piece, I actually finished the first draft yesterday, it's called La extranjera. This is a musical, which I have never done in my life, so it's a lot about playing. It's about a relationship between a man and a woman that are married, Chicanos. The woman actually transports refugees, and deals with issues of bi-culturalism. The husband being more assimilated, and the woman being more attached to Mexico and a political refugee, a Salvadorian woman, an old lady, who arrives and moves into their home and what happens to them.

From what you are saying, what I see then is a progression.

Oh, the critic on the spot!

No, I'm just trying to pull the strings together. You are trying to deal with themes that are very much inside of you because you have lived through them and in this last description of this play, in particular, what I see is still very much the issue of the family, its importance and the divisions in the family, which of course, you experienced as a child being torn between two different parents as well as two different cultures. Is that correct?

Yes, that's correct. You know, I can't make a living just writing. I always feel that writing is so isolating that I need to be doing also work that involves me with various communities of people. In the last couple of years I have been doing work around violence against women of color, specifically rape and incest, and I never in my life thought that I would ever be involved with those issues. But there is always a connection, and somehow, organically, your writing gets involved in this kind of stuff too. Although my particular focus is the theme of the Chicano family, the Latino family, what happens in families, punto, is the heart of everything. The family is this private place, so anything is allowed to happen there, any kind of power exchanges, any kind of control; it's like the place you first learn to suffer. To me, since it's the heart of everything, it's like its own little drama, and for theater this is wonderful, because the dynamics of the family are endless. I think too, as a writer, you are very focused on your private voice, the voice inside you, so I have always gone back to where does that voice get formed? When did I first hear this little voice that separates me from all these crazy things happening around me? And that's the voice you end up writing from, and, if you don't go back to the source, you are going to be a bad writer.

Since we are talking about voice and speaking, we can certainly step to something that I want to bring out, which is the subtitle of your book Loving in the War Years, which to me is more important than the title, Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. How did you come up with that subtitle?

The first title was the original title of the book, and that was very much when the majority of the poems dealt a lot with being a lesbian, so literally it was about your love being in battles, that nobody is letting you do this. So you got to love in opposition. But towards the latter half of the book, both the poems and the essays were dealing much more with family issues, since that's the first place where you learn to suffer and also the first place where you learn to love. So how can you talk about whether you are heterosexual or gay or whatever, about loving, unless you talk about your home? My reason for writing that book was the overpowering sense that what I was writing was valuable, and specially in the last few years, to see that I had never read what I was writing about in any place. So that I was writing about things that I perceived in my family or violence that I experienced against me or people I loved. I knew the whole thing was completely taboo, and I experienced that when I was writing it because everything I began to write I never thought I would publish. And I had to tell myself that I wasn't going to publish it so I could write it. And afterwards, I would put it away, thinking that it was possible, that maybe it could be published. If I didn't read it to myself after being written, then I thought that it wasn't appropriate to be read by others.

Or it wasn't appropriate to be said.

Or it hasn't been said. That's what I'm saying, if it hasn't been said, it's not supposed to exist, so you're making it up anyway. So lo que nunca pasó por sus labios is like trying to make it be said, to come out of your mouth because it has never been said, that was the major thrust of the line; that's how I felt.

So if I were to tell you that writing to you is a vicarious experience, that it comes from the experiences that you have lived in the past, and that that's what your writing is about, would that be correct?

Well, I'm only 33 years old, what I'm seeing happening now is that I feel that there are certain chronological limitations. I'll be writing something when I'm 60, that I could never conceive of now, so in some level I don't feel that is just because it happened to me. I felt that that's what Loving in the War Years was, but that's not what my writing is now, because what I'm finding is that I believe in racial memory. Like for instance, when I go to Mexico, there are certain things that come up for me that I think I'm not supposed to feel because I was born in L.A.; I am Chicana. Why do I feel like I know how to act in Mexico? And it comes from someplace else.

Like a collective memory.

Exactly, so I believe in that and I believe that what I need to do as a writer is to continue opening my heart bigger and bigger, and bigger, so that my capacity to identify increases: so everything is possible to be written. That makes you a better writer because you then know that on some level you should be able to empathize with your enemies in order to write that conflict as the conflicts experienced in life. You don't have to like them or even agree with them, but if you are going to show what really happened, then you need to do that. I feel that for me it has been expanding and expanding what I'm capable of experiencing in my writing.

Do you consider yourself part of a tradition, a literary tradition or a non-literary tradition?

That's a very hard question to answer. Norma Alarcón asked me that question before, but she was asking more in terms of literary tradition. I think in this country, in the U.S., the tradition with which I feel most affinity—it's funny, because it really doesn't exist now—is the tradition of writers from the 30's who were largely from the working class, and they wrote out of the Depression. That's the only time in this country in which Blacks and Chicanos had a cultural movement of writing. But the thing that was very particular about this group was that it occurred at a time when lots and lots of people were nationally mobilized and that there was this literature that was coming out of it that was really not necessarily from educated people. It came out a lot from telling stories. But it was done with the consciousness that the way things were was not the way things should be. They were outside writers. I think it's really weird to be a U.S. writer. I can't identify with a U.S. writer, because that picture doesn't describe me.

When you go to Mexico and they ask about North American writers, they are thinking of white people. They are not thinking of Chicanos, they are not thinking of Black people, so on some level I can't identify with that tradition at all, neither in content or form. And I am not a Latin American writer, the main reason being that I write predominantly in English, but also because it's not my world. And yet, I can see elements in my writing, particularly in my last production of La extranjera, which are Latin American. There was a certain sensibility in it that had a lot to do with indigenous influences and also a kind of emotional sensibility that is puro latino. So in some level, that's part of the tradition I grew up from, and I think it's also somewhat like different levels of reality; there being an internal reality, and an external reality. So I see that as being very latino, very Latin American, and I have it.

There was this woman that looked like a real theater person, this white woman, that saw this production of Giving up the Ghost, and she came after me and said to me. "Have you ever read," its name slipped out of my mind, but it was a play by Garcia Lorca. And I said no, and I had only read then Bodas de sangre; that was a couple of years ago, and since she told me, I started reading more of Lorca's. To a large degree as a writer, I am not that well read, do you know what I mean? She found it very hard to believe that I had not read Lorca because then she said: "This is the first time that it really occurs to me that it's true, that there is a cultural sensibility, it's not just that you copied it, but that in fact it's in your blood, that you experienced it." I think too that saying that I'm not well read, also makes me not know if I come from a literary tradition. I am very literate in English and I am not as literate in Spanish, and I refuse to read translations any more, so for me, like right now I'm reading Rosario Castellanos; for me to read a novel in Spanish, is like being in the fourth grade. It's very hard to see that your mind is already in one place of development and the language barrier slows you down. It occurs to me that I have things in common with some Latin American writers. Like the first time I read Pedro Páranto [Juan Rulfo], it blew my mind because there was a sort of sabor that was in it that was very familiar to me, that in fact even reading that novel, I felt like it kind of went into some place inside me that won't come up.

So you are talking about having read Rosario Castellanos, Pedro Páramo; so you are not as illiterate in Spanish as you are trying to convince me.

No, but what I'm telling you is that this is a very late development, and it is hard to explain, because I feel too like, for a lot of it, I had to study. You know, I went to school, and I graduated from college, but that's not the issue. But it is a fact that when I went to high school, I never read a book. I like to read, but I could never read a book from front to cover. I wasn't a reader, which a lot of writers are. I was like a doer. Our family was the first generation to go to college. So I am sitting in the classroom and all these kids have read everything; it seemed to me that they had read everything and I had read nothing. In my first year of college I read 30 books. I just sat down, like work, and read them. I don't even know what I got, but it was just that kind of thing, and there has always been that sense of catching up.

I already told you my reasons for not writing well in college. But it also had to do with not really being seen as the type of person to be a writer, because I was a woman, Chicana, and you know, I wasn't their type. The people who were writers were the white males, and some of the white women, and then when I got involved in Feminism, the same thing happened. I went into these women writers' workshops, and I started writing in the voice of the people that I knew, and I was told that I needed to read because I didn't have a big enough vocabulary. This totally beat my spirit. It was very ironic. And also I had written a love poem to a woman and in the middle of the poem I said "she" and the women at the workshop told me that wasn't right, because you are a woman writer, and the readers think that you are writing to a man and so you can't do that. You have to prepare your reader and not use "she" in the middle of the poem. So in both of those counts, what I remember was: one, that I didn't have enough words, which was the class thing; and two, that I couldn't write a poem to a woman. So I packed my bags and I moved to San Francisco, to the Bay area, and started collecting unemployment. And I decided that I was going to give it a year, and I was going to read my ass off. I was just going to read and read and I was going to write.

What did you read?

I read all white literature.

From what you read, what things did you like?

I read a lot of lesbian literature, because I had never read any lesbian literature, so I did a lot of investigation on that—because that was going to take care of both things, you could be a lesbian and a writer—and also I was reading. I also read a lot of Adrienne Rich, and I wrote. That was the year in which, at the end of it, I came up with that poem that is in Loving in the War Years, "For the Color of My Mother." I basically decided that I would give it a year and make these readings and, if by the end of the year I was shit, I would never write again, which I think has a lot to do with class stuff. Because I basically felt that if I was no good, I was not going to spend my life doing this. You have to make a living; you have to have a life, and if you are not going to make it, you can't be bullshitting around. So everything kind of rode on that. I did these readings and it was great. There were at least two poems in all the things that I wrote that I knew were good poems. And they ended up being things like "For the Color of My Mother" that had everything to do with the seeds of other things that I'll be writing later. So what I am finding is again the same kind of problem: that as a Latina writer, I am being exposed to people who are Latinos, but for one thing, very well educated in the language that I basically know on a familiar level.

It seems that you have a great deal of anguish over the problem of language, and I want you to talk about that.

Well, that's what I was going to say, that when that woman told me that I didn't have enough words, the irony of it all was that I was right from the jump, but I didn't know it. You have to go through your journeys to find that out. What gets me is that I feel that there are a lot of potentially good writers along the way who are burnt so bad, they don't get it out. What I am finding, particularly doing theater, is that my ability to remember verbatim how people talk, to remember the poetry in using Spanglish, to really know those voices is not a question of having more words. It was a question of deepening into the words that exist. So in the theater it comes out because I have a lot of characters doing one line in English and one in Spanish and there is really a lot of switching back and forth. In the theater that I have been involved with, nobody else does it; it's all a Latin American group of people that I'm working with and basically everybody, for the purposes of the theater, needs to write predominantly in English and so everybody writes completely in English with a few exceptions.

When I first started coming out with this English and Spanish, people started saying, "Wait a minute, what is this?" and it kind of became an issue, not a controversy, but it brought up a lot of discussion among us. I felt very defensive about it because I could not have, for example, this character, Hortensia, talking completely in English. It would not have worked. In this last play I did that more and I think it was less effective. It takes all this conviction to believe that the emotional comprehension will be there, even if somebody misses a line because they don't understand English, or they miss a line because they don't understand Spanish. So in terms of the issue about language being important is that to me that's the only way of refining, of having a fine tune, to what is close and what I know. It's like even in the essays that I write, like knowing that is all right to put in a journal entry. If that journal entry had the heart of whatever it is that you needed to say. I am not anti-intellectual, I've never been anti-intellectual, but it's that that kind of language is not necessarily the only language to use to talk about an idea.

That's very important because I think that the problem that some people are having in dealing with your work and the works of other women writers, especially of Hispanic origin in this country, is that you don't fit boundaries of genres. That you cannot be pinpointed and they cannot say this is totally a poem, because a poem of yours may be an essay, and an essay may turn into poetry. Therefore genre boundaries are broken here. I think that's an important issue that has to be dealt with.

Yes, but then you think, who invented the genres anyway? and what really gets me is that it would be different if I had a choice, but I don't have a choice. Anytime I have attempted to write at those other ways, I am a lousy writer. That's the way it comes out. Just because I'm mixing genres, it doesn't mean that it's not right. It's a different criteria about what should be omitted in the editing process, and since I've worked so much as an editor too, particularly for women of color, I have a different set of criteria. What is important for me is how to get the best part of the voice alive and keep it alive.

That's an important point that you are bringing out, the question of who determines what is artistic and what isn't. That is at the core of this issue of genre that we were talking about. In regard to the essays in Loving in the War Years that you have mentioned before as having been more difficult to write than the poetry—even though, in my opinion, the essays in that collection are a cornerstone and the closest we have been to having a political voice in writing as Hispanic lesbians in the U.S.—why were they difficult to write?

Well, I think some of it is actually a very practical problem, because I feel that when you are working in creative writing, like poetry or theater, there is an organic kind of organization of materials that happens. But when you are also trying to combine ideas and particularly when you are not just keeping with ideas, but you are also involved with poetic combining, like the journals, I have a real hard time. I think that has something to do with training. I know that somehow not having the training has helped me because then I value kinds of writings that may have gotten x'd out. But not having the training also hurts me in the sense that I always feel that I have more to say than I'm ready to deal with. What happens is that in that particular essay, which is only 50 pages, when you think about all the ideas that are in there, it could have been much longer, and emotionally what it took me to do that was so immense that I had to say: I am not willing to. The way I look at it now is that I think that in many ways it's like an outline. An outline which the only way in which it is going to be developed is through the other writings that I am doing.

One of the things that really hit me, that came to me as a revelation when I was writing "A long line of vendidas" was that I understand oppression; I understand what homophobia is. I know the kinds of oppressions people go through, I have gone through as a lesbian, but the answers to what it means to me to be a Latina lesbian, I would not find out unless I understand the sexuality of heterosexual women as well as lesbians who are Latinas. We came from the same family. It does not serve me to be isolated from them, either theoretically or politically. They would not want me as a sister, but the fact of the matter is that I am their clue. Lesbians are their clue to who they are as heterosexual women, or as simply sexual women who have put their attachments to men, and I put mine to women, but we are like the same breed, whether we want to see or not. That to me was a great revelation. One which can be analyzed or explained on paper, but doesn't move me to the degree that having Hortensia living it in the play does. I change through that, I am relieved, I can go on. I needed to write that essay out of a political necessity, but it did not bring me the joy or the relief of finally having Hortensia in the play.

The man in Latino culture comes and goes; he puts his thing inside, but that doesn't make him a father. And the mother, her sexuality and independence are so apparent. Even though they think we are submissive, we are incredibly independent. Inside our private lives, we were never voiced. It's like Hortensia is not someone who is going to, by any stretch of the imagination, consider herself a Feminist. She lies constantly, gives the man his little things, puts him up. She lives her life, but she is not full. And to write her talking, I love it, I am completely relieved, I feel very vindicated on some level. It's like saying yes, these women exist, I wasn't nuts. But to analyze that is different. I could not have given Hortensia voice until some of those things were put on paper in the form of an essay. And there are times always for that form to come up again, it will come up again, but it's not a form that I feel comfortable with, that I enjoy. It's very drenching.

Well, it may be drenching, but it's incredibly important. When you write, do you think of an ideal audience? Do you think of someone that you want to communicate with, some particular audience, some particular reader, or is it more a writer trying to simply get things out of her system?

I think it depends on what I am writing. I think primarily the basis of it is my relationship to myself. If it works for me, if it moves me, or it reflects back something that seems true. I mean, I discover my writing, I don't plan it. If I discover it, then I know it's true. So I am the audience. The other thing is that depending on the form, like for instance with "A long line of vendidas," there were definitely times when I had a certain audience in mind, and you can almost see it from section to section. There was one point, when I talked about la Malinche that I am definitely talking to a Chicano audience, heterosexual male. I'm still keeping my own voice, but clearly they are the people that I am trying to explain it to. There is another section where I feel that the audience is white Feminists.

Speaking of Feminists, what kind of feminism do you purport?

That is also hard to answer because I think I have been very discouraged by the Feminist Movement, so, you get me on one of my bad days and I'll say "those feminists." I remember what Feminism meant to me when it occurred to me that there was an analysis on sexual oppression. I would never say I was not a Feminist. I thought feminism made visible a lot of very invisible kinds of oppressions that happened indoors. The kind of feminism that I believe in, I guess, is one that is almost so integrated into other struggles that it almost threatens to become invisible again, but it can't. What I mean by that is that just me, as a person, for instance, if I'm working in a Latino situation that's dominated by men, it's like you are bringing in the missing element, your consciousness as a Feminist. If I'm working with white women, it's like feminism isn't the issue to me there. I'm bringing other elements like racism, etc.

The thing that I value about feminism is that it is hooked up with the personal life and most of the movements have never done that, so I feel that I have to hold fast to that, and I don't care where I go, nobody is going to tell me that what happens in our personal private lives is not a political issue. I think feminism on some level has beat that to death and it has made a lot of excuses around that, made trivial lies of very powerful notions. I am concerned about, in any given situation, who has the power and who doesn't, and to examine that with a political analysis and how does that affect us personally. My enemy might look just like me, if for some reason or another, he or she has the power. Feminism is the only movement that has allowed the so called "invisible oppression" to become visible. The analysis and the practical implications of that have to be integrated into all struggles: imperialism, etc.

Do you have much contact with other Latina writers?

Mostly friendship networks, more than anything else. It depends on the projects, when I was writing Cuentos, I had a lot of involvement with other Latina writers.

What I am trying to get at is do you consider yourself a part of a group of writers or a generation of writers?

No, not yet. I feel very isolated as a Latina and a writer. I feel that it really is about writing in resistance, trying to go into places, like for instance, working in the theater, which is a Latin American theater, and to go in there to learn skills that other people might have, but to try to keep my own voice and my own vision. I feel that I am a part of a movement of women of color writers. I feel that I have gotten a lot of inspiration from Black women writers in this country. I think that in English they are really writing the hottest thing around, and I admire their kind of bravery for the issues that they bring up. I get a lot of courage from their work, but we are culturally very different, so it's not like I can turn to them, particularly the more Spanish I use, and say "Can you give me support for this?" I am in a writing group that has two working class white women, two black women and myself, and they are wonderful people and they support my work very much, but there is definitely this place where I am not going to get the feedback and the push I need, and the only place I get that is from friends. But even the Latina writers I know who are writing are suffering under the same thing, so we even have this sort of self imposed isolation as well. You feel so bad about what you are doing, or it's so hard for you to feel that you have a right to write it that you would not even be telling your friend that you need her to read it.

There is another question which is something that I normally ask, at least to the writers that I talk to, either formally or informally, because sometimes I feel that I live a double life in which, on the one hand, I have to speak like a critic because, if not, I will not be able to live in an academic world and gain food for my own subsistence; but, on the other hand, I have my heart where it really is, which is in writing, so sometimes I think that that's one of the things some critics lose track of, that we should be asking writers to tell us what can we do in order to let them be more visible, what are we doing that is wrong. This is something that I feel, that, as a Feminist critic, it is important for us to get feedback from the writers.

Well, I thought a lot about reviews and criticism ever since Loving in the War Years came out, because the book has gotten very little visibility, which has made me then kind of aware of what the problem is with criticism. I feel that mine is not a book that can easily be played back, and that it also involves some kind of involvement from the critic to deal with the issues that the book brings up. I feel for the most part that's not what most critics are willing to do. When I read a review, I look to the critic to give me kind of like a sign pulse, also to be sometimes like this bridge between me as a writer and the audience because criticism has worked that way for me. If I like a work, then I go and I read a review about it. It sometimes helps me understand it and gives the book more depth, so I feel that in the scholarly sense, in the sense of studying, in the sense of the criticism, it really is taking the book to heart and then being able to say to some people, "Look at this," and "You see this?" Like for instance. Mirta Quintanales has done a study in which she was saying how many times I mentioned the word "mouth" in Loving in the War Years. She has made this connection with what that meant, and I am so excited, because I am not consciously putting in "mouth" every so often. But it also teaches me about what it was I was after. And when that is played back to me, it makes me realize that my expression has some kind of organic cohesiveness, and that's very exciting and also very helpful. What it does to me is that it gives me a lot of confidence, that if I stay close to the bone of my work, that it will have an organic whole, that it will make sense, my conscious makes sense, and that's all that really matters.

So it's that, and also, I'll like to see, and occasionally it has happened, somebody saying what's missing, and not just "The writer should have done this," but "This is where we need to go from here," "This is what is missing here," and "Why is this missing?" "Is the writer chickening out?" Writing is such an isolated thing, and I have always had this fantasy of writing in a community, and that seldom happens, but the critic can be a part of that. So it's not incumbent upon me to answer everything, but the critic's role is to say "This is not an answer."