A self-described "Chicana lesbian," [Cherríe] Moraga earlier published Loving in the War Years, a collection of stories, poems, and essays notable for their passion and intelligence. In her latest work, a two-act play entitled Giving Up the Ghost, Moraga develops explicitly Chicano contexts and characters: the play is set in the East Los Angeles barrio and her characters speak authentically in the English-Spanish patois associated with the pachuco culture of urban teenagers. The two main characters, Marisa and Amalia, come to accept the superiority of homosexual love after Marisa endures a brutal rape as a schoolgirl in a Catholic school and Amalia experiences the death of her male lover. At several points in the play, Marisa appears as her "younger self," the pachuca Corky who recognizes, after her rape, that her pretended toughness not only cannot protect her against predatory men but violates her instinctive tenderness. Only in their lesbian relationship can Marisa and Amalia realize their full potentialities as loving human beings.

Giving Up the Ghost represents the most radical element of contemporary Chicana writing. Moraga portrays heterosexual love as inherently abusive, an act of violent penetration which in the context of the excessively masculine culture of Mexican Americans becomes more brutal still. Her location of Marisa's rape in a Catholic school suggests her distrust of the Church's traditional patriarchy and its promise of protection to innocent and virtuous women. What is perhaps most remarkable about Moraga is her unwillingness to abandon Mexican American culture as hopelessly misogynistic; she clings to her ethnic identity fiercely, demanding in her work that the culture transform itself in behalf of women's rights of self-determination.