Cherríe Moraga


Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Chicana Indígena which is an organization of Chicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.

Early life

Moraga was born on September 25, 1952 in Los Angeles County, California. In her article "La Guera" Moraga wrote of her experiences growing up as a child of a white man and a Hispanic woman, stating that "it is frightening to acknowledge that I have internalized a racism and classism, where the object of oppression not only someone outside of my skin, but the someone inside my skin." Moraga has cited her mother as her main inspiration to become a writer, stating that she was an eminent storyteller.
She attended Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, gaining a graduated bachelor's degree in English in 1974. Soon after attending, she enrolled in a writing class at the Women's Building and produced her first lesbian poems. In 1977 she moved to San Francisco where she supported herself as a waitress, became politically active as a burgeoning feminist, and discovered the feminism of women of color. She earned her master's degree in Feminist Writings from San Francisco State University in 1980.

Writing and themes

Moraga has been credited as one of the few writers to write and introduce the theory of Chicana lesbianism. Themes in her writing include the include the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race, particularly in cultural production by women of color. Moraga's work was featured in tatiana de la tierra's Latina lesbian magazine Esto no tiene nombre, which sought to inform and empower Latina lesbians through the work of writers like Moraga.

Sexuality

Moraga is openly gay, having come out as a lesbian after her college years. In "La Guera" Moraga compared the discrimination she experienced as a lesbian to her mother's experiences being a poor, uneducated Hispanic woman, stating that “My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most about silence and oppression, and it continues to be the most tactile reminder to me that we are not free human beings”. After coming out, Moraga began writing more heavily and became involved with the feminist movement. In Loving in the War Years, Moraga cites Capitalist Patriarchy: A Case for Socialist Feminism as an inspiration when realizing her intersecting identity as a Chicana lesbian, saying, "The appearance of these sisters' words in print, as lesbians of color, suddenly made it viable for me to put my Chicana and lesbian self in the center of my movement."

Career

Literature and writing

Moraga co-edited the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with Gloria Anzaldúa. The first edition was published in 1981 by Persephone Press.
In 1983 Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Moraga started, which has been credited as the first publisher dedicated to the writing of women of color in the United States. Kitchen Table published the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back. In 1986, the book won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for that year. Along with Ana Castillo and Norma Alarcón, Moraga adapted this anthology into the Spanish-language Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos. Later that same year Moraga's first sole-authored book, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios, was published.
In 2007 Moraga was named a 2007 USA Rockefeller Fellow and granted $50,000 by United States Artists. She won a Creative Work Fund Award in 2008, and the Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation Grant for Playwriting in 2009.

Still Loving in the (Still) War Years

In 2009 Moraga published the essay “Still Loving in the War Years: On Keeping Queer Queer", which critiqued the mainstreaming of LGBT politics through an emphasis on same-sex marriage. During the essay she also discussed transgender people in queer communities and critiqued the increasing inclusion of trans issues in LGBT politics. She argues that young people are being pressured into transitioning by the larger queer culture, stating “the transgender movement at large, and plain ole peer pressure, will preempt young people from residing in that queer, gender-ambivalent site for as long and as deeply as is necessary.” Some community members such as Morgan Collado and Francisco Galarte responded by emphasizing how this invalidated and dismissed the lived experience of young people who decide to transition. In this essay Moraga goes further to lament what she sees as the loss of butch and lesbian culture to those who choose to transition, stating that she “ not want to keep losing macha daughters to manhood through any cultural mandates that are not of our own making.” In response to this, Galarte argued that “Moraga’s text forces transgender folks to bear the burden of proving loyalty to a nation as well as being the figure that is the exemplar of race, sex, and gender abjection and liberation". She was also criticized for her refusal to address transwomen in the essay.
https://openjournals.neu.edu/nuwriting/home/article/download/58/44/

Theater

From 1994 to 2002, Moraga published a couple of volumes of plays through West End Press of Albuquerque, NM. Moraga has taught courses in dramatic arts and writing at various universities across the United States and is currently an artist in residence at Stanford University. She has written and produced numerous theater productions. She is currently involved in a theatre communications group and was the recipient of the NEA Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award. In 2009 she received a Gerbode-Hewlett foundation grant for play writing.
Watsonville: Some Place Not Here
Moraga's 1996 play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here was commissioned by the Brava Theatre Center with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and had its world premiere at the Brava Theater May 25, 1996. It won the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and was winner of the Fund for New American Plays Award from the Kennedy center for the Performing Arts.

Select bibliography

Books