Interviewed by Alice Evans, CSWS Managing Editor; Gabriela Martínez, Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Communication; and Dena Zaldúa Frazier, CSWS Operations Manager
Born in 1952, the year of the dragon, Cherríe Moraga has long been recognized as maestra among her many fans, friends, students, and colleagues. Fiery feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright, Moraga has served for nearly twenty years as an artist-in-residence at the Stanford University Department of Theater and Performance Studies and in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is coeditor of the seminal anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which won the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1986. Her most recent work, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000 – 2010, was published by Duke University Press in 2011. A memoir is forthcoming . She is the recipient of the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lambda Foundation’s “Pioneer” award, among many other honors.
Speaking on the topic, “The Last Exhale of Our Mother’s Breath” — The ‘Work’ of the First Generation Writer, Maestra Moraga delivered the 7th annual Lorwin Lecture on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the Crater Lake Rooms of the newly remodeled Erb Memorial Union on October 13, 2016. The next morning, she taught an Activist Methods Workshop at the Many Nations Longhouse on the UO campus.
This interview took place following a lunch in her honor held at the Knight Law Center.
Q: You’re at a time in your life where you can authentically be looked upon as a wise woman. What does the older Cherríe Moraga have to say to the younger self?
CM: Sometimes the first thing that comes to my mind is “Ay, pobrecita,” which literally means “poor little thing.” When I look at some of those early works—I don’t think about Bridge this way; Warriors, for example—it was just so damn hard. I felt like I was this voice. And I think because I teach these young people, I don’t even see it as me anymore. I think of this voice, and just trying to have the right to write. The words to me, sometimes, they’re being pushed. My class and background is very evident to me. I was never a good reader, and I could see this young person with no access to language that you read, very little literary language that had been integrated into me. Poetry, yes, however young poets find language. But I’m writing essays in there, too. So I feel like a failure trying to find the words, and being not confident yet to write to it. There’s resistance in the writing. It’s war. Living Warriors is wartime. I don’t know what I would say to her, but I feel an enormous amount of compassion for her. And I even forgive my mistakes; there’s lots of mistakes in those things. I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say, with the full understanding with how I see those things now. But I get it. I certainly get it. I just have compassion for her. And for young people that age, the world may have changed, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t young queer people of color, first generation people like that, writers and thinkers and just human beings, that aren’t struggling the same ways.
Q: That takes me into your memoir, The Native Country of My Heart. I notice you also have a theatrical conversation planned, The Mathematics of Love. I imagine it may be younger versions of yourself from different parts of your life talking to one another. Does it speak to that last question, you talking to your younger self?
CM: I didn’t start out wanting to write a memoir. I was writing a book about the experiences I had of my mother’s Alzheimer’s. So when she was diagnosed with it—she’s like the family cuentista—I’ve always written about her; we were very close. When she lost her stories, I thought it was the most horrible thing in the world, to realize that she had this disease. And it ended up not being. It was painful. But to her last minute she kept teaching me. I referred to her as sort of my Zen master, because all you had was the present with her.
So I started writing about her memory loss, which took me back to deeper stories that I had never told fully about her life, particularly her young life, and her relationship to desire, like what I learned at her breast and in terms of my relationship to desire. But her private amnesia ended up being about cultural amnesia. Also, the politic in the work is asking ourselves why, as Latinos, we’re required to forget to be American. I’ve seen that in my own family. In doing that it took me way back to things I thought I had already written about in the War Years. Really looking at the formation of my cultural and gender and sexuality identity. Now people talk so much more about gender, distinct from sexuality. People that came out, of my age, just conflated them all the time. You were a butch, and so you were queer. Like that. Somehow in my imagination as a child I felt like what made me queer is because you were a butch, you were a tomboy.
The book looks at that period of time, the formation of all those things as a young person, until I left home. Then it goes to my mom’s illness. It ends up, ironically, being a lot about patriarchy, which I thought I was so done writing about. And I got mad all over again. The subtleties and intimacy of patriarchy in your own family. How that connects to white myths. The memoir is driven by themes.
The play The Mathematics of Love came about while I was writing this. I was commissioned to write a one-act along with a number of Latino playwrights in L.A., and it was supposed to take place in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel. Just ten minutes long. All the other playwrights did that, and I wrote one that was 25 minutes long. So it’s about this old couple, being in the Biltmore Hotel, where my mom and I, in fact, had relatives who worked there in the ’30s and the ’40s. So this old couple is waiting for Da God, you know, Waiting for Godot, and Da God is their son. Old white man; old Mexican lady. The woman has Alzheimer’s. One of the plays, the playwright wrote a 10-minute play about Malinche. And Malinche came into the Biltmore. I was required to put all these plays together, and the only thing that stuck was Malinche. Because she time travels. So Peaches, the old lady, has an encounter with Malinche. Peaches has a past life with Malinche. And they discover in the course of the play that Peaches was Malinche’s mother who sold her into slavery.
It’s just a story, an encounter these two people had. The point being, I’ve been wanting to write about betrayal between Mexican women for a long time. And the play was an opportunity. It takes place in one night. The material—I’ve written about Malinche before, but in the play she comes up a few times—the line that came up first in the play, and it’s in both texts, she says, “They made me a slave and then condemn me when I act like one.” That’s what I’m looking at in Latinas, Mexicanas, in terms of patriarchy. In that we become sell-outs. We betray other women, all these kinds of things, because of a particular breed of sexism that we’ve suffered. There’s cultural specificity to patriarchy and also to sexism; these are the kind of things I thought I was done with. But with my mother’s passing, too [she died in 2005], a once and for all kind of moment, I didn’t think I’d be revisiting some of the same moments I wrote about when I was young.
Q: Thinking about your trajectory, personal and professional, at what point did you start developing a sense of identity or identities, and defining whether you are a Latina or mixed race, or taking ownership of your identity and the development of that identity? Considering the politics of that time, how would you speak about that to a younger person in this time and era with everything that’s going on right now?
CM: One of the things that’s different right now is that there is a lot more conversation about bi-raciality or multi-raciality in one person, right? When I was growing up, I didn’t know many Mexicans who married Anglos. We were the only ones in the family, and I had a huge family. So, by the next generation bunches of them were marrying whites, some not. So for me, in that period of time, I was coming to political consciousness about a variety of things. Particularly, the Chicano movement was everywhere, and I didn’t feel like I had any place in it. One, because I was mixed. And two, because I knew I was queer. I wasn’t being that articulate, but it wasn’t going to happen. But I was drawn to the política; I agreed with the política, and I was terrified. And so, I admired the fierceness, the courage. I was a bystander. In my family we’re not Chicano, we’re Mexicans. What happened, it was only really through women of color feminism that I found my way to be able to articulate being Chicana, in a way I could live with. Through women of color feminism, through intersectionality (we didn’t use that word then) we were looking at where all those things came together. You’re allowed your shades, you’re allowed to have mixed blood, you just had to line up all those things that were happening simultaneously. And there was a politic that came out of that.
I came to doing that because as a feminist, as a lesbian feminist, I tried the white women’s movement, I tried the LGBT movement, but mostly the women’s movement. I thought it was just class that kept me separate. Particularly in the Bay Area. There were some wealthy divorcees who wanted that money from their men. And so I thought it was class, the connection around that. I started some groups with working class women, but they tend to be white women. But then, I thought, this isn’t the whole thing. So then, black feminism was just growing like crazy, in terms of publishing, so all that time I was thinking, That’s us, that’s us, just change it to the specificity of Chicana. And it’s also that I was raised by a Mexican mother; I have a Mexican family. Young people move quickly though, I realize. That took several years, and then Bridge was right there. So it was very new.
Talking to kids nowadays is different. There is a lot of interest in being mixed blood, and sometimes, some of it is also related to class. Even my children have different takes on their identities than I do. They’re not like, law-abiding Chicanos. You know what I’m saying. They have to rebel against me, and my partner, but I respect how—I’ve learned a lot from my son—how he’s putting together race and class and all this stuff. He’s obviously a man of color, but the biggest difference is that he’s not working class. He has professional parents. We’re professionally Chicano lesbians. And his father, as well, is a college-educated person. And whether we have money—we don’t have money—but we have access by virtue of that. It’s different for him. The given is, he’s going to go to college. Those were not my givens. I’m learning stuff, not just from him but also from my students, how they’re putting together all these elements. I try to understand how, even to say that I am biracial or something around that, to say it in such a way that it doesn’t become a liberal politic. That’s always my issue. A lot of times people will come to me and they will say, Oh, I’m like you. And then they say, It makes me feel so good. But then I talk to them, and it’s like, I get to be both; isn’t it cool. I get it, and I always say to them, You gotta deal. You gotta deal with the specificity of that collision. You think I ever get to get away with just being Chicana? I don’t. I don’t care how many books I write.
There is an incredible disquiet I continue to live with all the time. That’s what I tell them. And guess what? You want to be a political person, you get to deal with that. But that's not what they want to hear. It doesn’t go away. To say that you are a woman of color, or a Latina, there is a responsibility in that. And if that’s not how you identify, that’s also fine. I don’t please them sometimes. I can see their faces kind of fall a little bit, you know. Because I’m not going to say, oh yeah, isn’t that great. Because I feel like when I wrote “La Güera” [her much anthologized essay], even just to write that, and the life that it brought forth. It’s the only time I can say that when I wrote something, I was throwing up the whole time I was writing it. And I’ve written scary stuff. Somehow that admission that I rode the wave of my white privilege as far as I could take it, just felt horrible. And I know it’s more horrible sometimes … the shame, the shame … we feel shame for being colored and we feel shame for being white. Guess what? That’s your road. What else is new? There’s a part like, over the years, yeah, there you go, that’s it, that’s your gift, yeah, whatever. You just give it back to everybody. And that’s what I think with my students now.
There was a young woman I was working with for some time, possibly white, I think she was quarter, I forget. She had a grandmother or something, quite distant, and I’m saying, that’s pretty distant, about how much might be going on for her in that; in the best of her writing suddenly she falls into this stuff about how she’s loved, how she felt this love from her grandmother, and these few words in Spanish that she remembered. It was such an opening in the work. I was scared for her, because it’s all loss. Who wants to open that? When you open things up, you open up loss. You don’t just get to say, Oh good, I’m a woman of color now. It’s not fun. And if it were fun, then it’s stupid. If it were fun, then that’s just using things. It’s using language, too. It’s useless. It’s a hard conversation to have with them.
Sometimes … I see the opposite thing happen where, you see somebody that’s mixed, but then you can see that they’re very much a person of color, a woman of color, but then they’re always doing that white thing, which is, I don’t have a right, who am I, black people are the ones who have suffered. It’s a rhetorical response, it’s not authentic. It’s not authentic about black people either. It’s like, Oh, my oppression is nothing compared … It’s all that language. It’s the language that obfuscates, that covers what’s really going on. I’ve encountered that quite a few times in my students, where it’s really hard to get people under all the topicalness and everything, to get them down into what is really going on.
Q: We’re at this moment in time. There’s always been this much violence going on, but we see more of it now. We’re more afraid. There are fear mongerers running for president. I feel like we’re sitting around this metaphorical table; there are lots of us who want to change. It’s not that the system is broken; it’s that the system was built to do exactly this. And we have to step out of the system or change the system or whatever, and half of the table is women or people of color, who are like, We are tired, tired of explaining, or educating, you all are going to have to figure that out for yourselves, go to a SURJ meeting or whatever and then we can be allies and work together. The other half of the table is white people; they want to do the right thing, but they are uncomfortable and scared of saying the wrong thing. I feel like we’re sitting around the table and staring at one another in silence. Even though we want to move forward and we have these goals and we want to fix things, we’re stuck. We’re stuck in our goals, and maybe in our exhaustion on one side and our fear and discomfort on the other side. I don’t know how to get past that.
CM: There’s something in how we make decisions about where we work, where we put our energy, and where we put our work. There’s no reason to have that table like that. It’s useless. Each of those people just has to get to work. You have to get to work, and you have to be wrong, and you have to make mistakes. And you have to realize, I’m not wanted here, or I am wanted here. Because I have a skill, or I have this to offer. People stay on these “what if” places, as opposed to just doing things. It’s in the doing that you learn everything. I have had people call me out, sometimes unfairly, but sometimes in it there’s such a truth resonating that you can’t look away from it. And you say, What the hell were you doing there anyway? You had no business being there. You know, that’s not your work. And what is your work? What’s motivating your choices? When you look at young people, too, you say, What’s motivating your choices? Where are you going to place yourself? Are you doing it because you want to be cool; are you doing it because you want to be politically correct? You can’t even say it now, because Trump talks about political correctness. You see people doing stuff for not genuine reasons, you know. It’s in the work; it’s in the practice, that all of that stuff becomes clear. Sometimes I feel like it’s not sexy. A lot of privileged white people have a lot of skill, and you say, If you don’t have anything in common but you believe in the movement, do give the skill and go home. And hang with your people.
Q: Where do we find the courage in the world? We find it in activism, but also in art, right? It speaks across all kinds of languages. If it’s deep enough, it goes right to the center, where we do intersect, truly. You’ve worked in many genres … sounds like poetry was the first … then essays, and theatre came a little bit later. I wonder if you can talk about your art. Of the art you have produced, what is your favorite, what did you struggle with most?
CM: Sometimes, for example, in recent years, I have more difficulty feeling like I have the right to be my age, and to know what I know from my age, because sometimes you’re coming to these situations, and people are 40 years younger than me, and even more, right? And, I realize, it takes a lot for me to not give, to not have myself be commodified. I’m not going to give the people buying the ticket what they want. One has to work against that. Because you also experience, you’re howling in the wind. The thing about Waiting in the Wings, I was reminded … that there was a place finally I was coming to where I experienced the birth and near death of my son, that as a Chicana I had the right to be a philosopher, I had the right to wonder about existence, that I had the right to say, I am a human being. I have the right to ask that through the lens and specificity of class, race, sexuality, all that stuff. And the minute you write all that stuff, that’s what they’re thinking about, that’s what they’ll package. But in fact, we’re young; we’re a young body of work.
When I was writing, there was barely even a generation in the U.S. of male [Chicano] writers before me. It was the movement that brought up the literature, mostly by guys, and it wasn’t even until the mid-’70s Chicanas showed up in any significant way in writing. It wasn’t until the early ’80s that there was a body of work, right? But we are still so young. And also, the pre-condition of our colonization has also, I feel like I read native women’s work sometimes more than I would read Chicanas because their relationship to the United States, they don’t believe in the nation state, you know. So I say, Where did I sign? We have the right to ask all the forbidden questions, including the right to ask about birth and death, and we are such a young body of writers, a young body of literature. Gloria [Anzaldúa] was certainly beginning to ask some of those questions. That’s what I want. I want to go out having, using, moving along in my age. I want to age in my writing. I guess what that means is … young people will get old, and they will need [guides]. Today was really beautiful, and I thank you for that [referring to the luncheon in her honor, where faculty paid tribute to the value of her work in their formation as scholars] … because you look at what people are reading, and they needed it; I mean, what a great thing. That is such a privilege. So I just think, I’m going to keep doing my thing there … and not just me personally, one has to do one’s thing because somebody might need it. I’m also interested in the way we gather information, what we experience, what we read. For me, because of questions of life and death, I began to read a lot of Buddhism. I never say I’m a card-carrying Buddhist … I can’t do that, I’m a lousy meditator. But I know that’s true, I know that to think about impermanence, to know that when you wake up, is a great thing. When you tell young people that, they say, What? They don’t want to think about that thing. Maybe in some very philosophical way, but I don’t mean like that, I mean visceral. And that’s okay that they feel that way.
I was teaching a class on indigenous identity and diaspora in the arts, and there was a student, a young man, and he said, I’m sorry maestra, I just don’t want to be thinking about death. And I said, I hear you, brother. But that was where the work was going. I think in terms of art, though, it’s all about the individual artist. If you’re writing within a collective body, you want to go to those opportunities, those little openings, of where we haven’t been yet, what’s opening up to you, and you become the guide. But you’re not trying to be a guide, you’re just following the trail, so that when somebody else comes along maybe there are some footsteps there.
Q: Who do you count as your mentors? Because clearly there are people who count you as a mentor, whether they’ve ever met you in the flesh or not.
CM: I always say that, I worked as a playwright with María Irene Fornés, who now has Alzheimer’s and is quite old … she was my playwrighting mentor when I was in New York in the mid-’80s; she’s Cuban-American, lesbian, and internationally recognized and has won dozens and dozens of Obies. But she was a very untraditional writer. She started as a painter, so she just kind of opened up possibilities on stage that other writers weren’t doing, and she was fiercely a woman. She wouldn’t, she showed me, well she let me be a poet, she didn’t give a damn about your progressive plot line, you came in, and she let you find your voice, and she taught me how to teach, and I think that was one of the most important things. She really taught me something about how you find the writer in the student. The way she found the writer in me; I mean, I was a writer, but she found me as a playwright. I had never thought about playwriting. I sent her these monologues, and she saw it. But also because she did, what I really love about her is, that she was a horribly hard person to work with sometimes. She was just so demanding. She directed one of my plays, and I thought I would die. She could be so hard, and not an easy person to be with; loving and kind and generous and all those great things, too. But just hard. She didn’t know how to lie. She wasn’t nice like that. Now years later, so [many] people thought bad about her. If a man does that he’s brilliant, he’s a genius. If a woman does that, she’s a bitch. And that really has helped me. Because years later, I just feel like when I’m trying to be nice and I don’t feel nice... What I really feel impassioned about, and they’re going to say—and I’ve had some of my Chicano counterparts say, Oh you’re just being Cherríe—and I know what they mean by that … someone saying you’re just being a bitch.
There’s something incredibly important about her disregard for estupideces. She just would not tolerate people wasting her time. She was great.