Cherrie Moraga and the Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

Cherrie Moraga the writer began her career as a poet, writing specifically lesbian love poems. Her work as a lesbian activist eventually drove her to a reexamination of the political implications of her racial and sexual identity. In the late 1970s, she began to express the vital connection between her experience and identity as a lesbian and as a Chicana and all discussions of these aspects of her identity have remained inseparable.

The publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 1981 catapulted Moraga and her work into the political spotlight. The volume was published specifically to address the sexism and racism inherent in contemporary political movements and in publishing. The book was a spiritually uplifting achievement for Moraga personally, allowing her to find an avenue for the expression of the conflicts she had felt within herself since childhood. But the book also proved to be somewhat painful. "After Bridge . . . I felt like my communities were standing over my shoulders whenever I tried to write . . . . When one has to represent a community, you can lose the integrity and freedom of your own individual perspective" (Ward, 380). The specific goal of the publication of This Bridge is "to reflect an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color in the U.S." The book is divided into sections focusing on six major areas of concern: how visibility/invisibility as women of color forms our radicalism; the ways in which Third World women derive a feminist political theory specifically from our racial/cultural background and experience; the destructive and demoralizing effects of racism in the women's movement; the cultural, class, and sexuality differences that divide women of color; Third World women's writing as a tool for self-preservation and revolution; and the ways and means of a Third World feminist future. Finally, both Moraga and Anzaldua write that the anthology is intended to be "a catalyst, not a definitive statement on 'Third World Feminism in the U.S.'"

Moraga recalls "In 1984, I turned to theater in the hopes of finding a more direct form of communication between me and my people. I turned to theater when my own single voice as a poet could not contain the voices inside of me that wanted to be heard -- voices with their own tone, rhythm, their own special language blending English, Spanish, Mexican caló, American slang . . . it was a great revelation and relief to discover that I was not limited to my own personal biography as a writer, but that a much larger community of people could inhabit me and speak through me: La Raza."

Most critics of Moraga's work identity several major themes,including issues of ethnic and sexual sovereignty, indigenous women's issues, immigrant rights, health care, domestic violence, and the dominance of Catholicism in Chicano literature. A fundamental task in her work has been to seek a recuperation of language, reunion with family, and the retribalization of her people (Ward, 381). Another dominant personal theme in her work is the relationships between women, especially betrayal between women. Moraga's identity and her writing are founded on her relationships with other Chicanas, especially with her mother. In the Introduction to Loving in the War Years, Moraga writes that "The pull and tug present themselves en mis sueños. Deseo para las mujeres/la familia" (iv). Later, she writes, "Todavia soy la hija de mi mama. Keep thinking, it's the daughters. It's the daughters who remain loyal to the mother . . . . It is the daughters who are my audience" (vii). In Moraga's poetry, mother love creates lesbian love, or rather, lesbian love is modeled after the love of the daughter for the mother. The poem "La Dulce Culpa" is about the legacy of the mother-daughter relationship, loving she who can not love her back. A poem like "What Is Left" conveys the ambivalence that Chicana women feel toward each other. Does she love her mother or hate her? For both Moraga and Anzaldua, Chicanas live forever perched on a double-edged sword: to live fully as a Chicana is to deny one's own womanhood; to live fully as a woman is to deny one's culture, one's familia.

The whiteness of her skin proves time and again to be both a source of pain and a source of transcendence in Moraga's writing. "Leaving Watertown," she writes in the Preface to Bridge, "I board a bus and ride it quietly in my light flesh to Harvard Square, protected by the gold highlights my hair dares to take on, like an insult, in this miserable heat" (xiii). Later in the Preface, she writes: "A few days ago, an old friend said to me how when she first met me, I seemed so white to her. I said in honesty, I used to feel more white. You know, I really did. But at the meeting last night, dealing with white women here on this trip, I have felt so very dark: dark with anger, with silence, with the feeling of being walked over." In the Introduction to Loving in the War Years, she writes:

I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarassment to both groups. I sometimes hate the white in me so viciously that I long to forget the commitment my skin has imposed upon my life. To speak two tongues. I must. But will not double-talk and I refuse to let anybody's movement determine for me what is safe and fair to say" (vi).

Moraga's relationship with her father, although not so verbally expressed as her relationship with her mother, is important. She writes of her father in a short piece called "It Is You, My Sister, Who Must Be Protected": "But it is the queer I run from. This white man in me." For Moraga, the queer, the other, is embodied by her father. She describes her identification with him and his masculine position in cultural institutions. She finds she has no tongue with which to communicate with her father, he is too distant for her to reach: "That's all I could get out of the man, how nervous he was" (War Years, 9). This piece speaks of Moraga's "hunger for the first time to speak of my father with some kind of compassion" (11). She realizes that compassion in a conversation with her mother when she says "but daddy seems to love men" (11), implying that her father may be homosexually oriented. But even this instance creates a moment of sympathy with her mother as they both long for the feeling of desirability. She has no tongue to speak with her father. She lacks the empathy necessary to make language work for her in this case. Her lack of emotional connection with her father becomes a metaphor for her lack of emotional connection to other women at this point in her life, but while she feels the same lack of emotional connection to other women her father feels, but she cannot communicate her empathy for him.

Moraga understands race as a social construct and, as a social construct, capable of being reconstructed. "By representing skin color as something she has or becomes rather than as an essence, by detaching 'skin' and 'face' from the body or calling it a scar or an accident, Moraga displays the constructedness of 'race' in much the same way as her representation of the body undermines an essentialist reading" (Yarbro-Bejarano, 601). In "For the Color of My Mother," Moraga describes herself as "a white girl gone brown." In fact, the Chicana lesbian is defined by her "choice" of identity. Moraga's political commitment to anti-racist endeavors by no means prevents her from making criticisms of the work of some other antiracist activists. She laments the sexism and heterosexism of Third World people, describing these forms of oppression as reactions to white racism.

Another dominant theme, not only of her poetic imagery, but also of her political vision, is an understanding of difference as a potential site for understanding. This point was made explicity in "La Guera." Moraga's understanding of her own lesbianism marks the gateway for her understanding of other oppressions. In her youth, Moraga used heterosexual sex to kill the pain of the conflicts she felt in her life as a result of her conflicting senses of self and community. She became an outsider to herself. Only after she began to admit, honor, and cherish her lesbian desires did she begin to break free from the chains of her past. Her security in her own sense of lesbian identity allowed for the eventual development of her security as a Chicana lesbian. "Lesbianism is supposed to be about connection," she writes. Following a conversation with Black lesbian feminist writer Barbra Smith, Moraga recalls "It is not a given between us -- Chicana and Black -- to come to see each other as sisters. This is not a given. I keep wanting to repeat over and over and over again, the pain and shock of difference, the joy of commonness, the exhileration of meeting through incredible odds against it" (Bridge, xiv). Moraga rejects using sex as a primary identity category, like so many white feminists do. She argues that being a woman is only one aspect of her identity. The success of any anti-oppression movement depends wholly on a spiritual imperative. There must be a spirit driving the passion. This Bridge Called My Back is Moraga's challenge to white feminists to open their eyes, ears, hearts, and minds to the experiences of women of color: "the deepest political tragedy I have experienced is how with such grace, such blind faith, this commitment to women in the feminist movement grew to be exclusive and reactionary. I call my white sisters on this." Only then can we truly articulate and live a "theory in the flesh," the practical means of living a truly anti-oppression ideology.

Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano has noted that "Moraga's poetry constantly constructs, destructs, and re-constructs the entire female body in the recognition of how it has been appropriated and in the attempt to reclaim it" (596). In her interview with Moraga, Mirtha Quintanales connects the fundamental importance of the task of needing to speak the unspoken with the pervasive imagery of mouths, lips, and throats in Moraga's writing, especially her poetry. The mouth plays a crucial role in Moraga's sexual/textual project, fusing two tabo activities, female speaking and lesbian sexuality (Yarbro-Bejarano, 597). "In the other texts in Loving in the War Years, the pain of the body in pieces is associated wtih the conflicted relationship between the writing subject and her culture, particularly with the faith of the women in her culture and her family" (Yarbro-Bejarano, 599). "The dismantling and recomposition of the lesbian body in Moraga's writing is part of a process of making sense out of the rifts and splits of what Anzaldua calls 'our shifting and multiple identity" (Yarbro-Bejarano, 602).

One of the significant strategies which marks Moraga's writings on identity and subjectivity is her refusal "to isolate the 'self' and then divide it into neat and hierarchical categories" (Martin 284).

One of the political and literary strategies of This Bridge is a "critique of [the] reduction of politics to psychology [, . . . a critique made] manifest in the call for a 'theory of the flesh,' in the use of a language of the body's physical pains and pleasures and of the materiality of psychic and social life" (Martin 285). "This Bridge is a provocation to white feminists to educate themselves about racism, about the material lives and realities of communities other than their own, about the relationship between the histories of their communities or growing-up places and those of people of color in the United States and elsewhere. It also insists that we cease locating 'race' in those individuals or groups in whom it is supposedly embodied, that we abandon the notion that to be 'white' is to be unmarked by race. And further, it is a provocation to white feminists and lesbians to render their own histories, subjectivities, and writing complex by attending to their various implications in overlapping social/discursive divisions and their histories" (Martin 282).

Perhaps her most most powerful and broad essay, "A Long Line of Vendidas" speaks to a number of important issues in Moraga's life, as well as important issues for her politics. First and foremost is the "double bind" that many Chicana women feel with regard to both their culture and their sense of self.

Bibliography

Martin, Biddy. "Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference[s]." The Lesbian andGay Studies Reader. Ed. by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. pp. 274-293.

Ward, Skye. "Cherrie Moraga." Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: ABio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. pp. 379-383.

Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. "Deconstructing the Lesbian Body: Cherríe Moraga's Lovingin the War Years." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barabe, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. pp. 595-603.