Cherríe Moraga

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 Mexican 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”.[7] 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."[11]

Moraga co-edited the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with Gloria Anzaldúa.[12] The first edition was published in 1981 by Persephone Press.

In 1983 Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Moraga started Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 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.[13] 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.[14] Later that same year Moraga's first sole-authored book, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios, was published.[15]

In 2007 Moraga was named a 2007 USA Rockefeller Fellow and granted $50,000 by United States Artists.[16][17] She won a Creative Work Fund Award in 2008, and the Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation Grant for Playwriting in 2009.[18]

In 2009 Moraga published the essay “Still Loving in the (Still) War Years: On Keeping Queer Queer", which critiqued the mainstreaming of LGBT politics through an emphasis on same-sex marriage. In 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.” (184) 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.[19][20] 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 “[does] not want to keep losing [her] macha daughters to manhood through any cultural mandates that are not of our own making.” (186) 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" (131-32).[20] She was also criticized for her refusal to address transgender women in the essay. https://openjournals.neu.edu/nuwriting/home/article/download/58/44/

From 1994 to 2002, Moraga published a couple of volumes of [[plays through West End Press of Albuquerque, NM.[21] 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.[13] In 2009 she received a Gerbode-Hewlett foundation grant for play writing.[7][2]

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.[22]

• Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983). Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-195-8.[23]
• Cuentos: Stories By Latinas (co-editor, 1983). New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. ISBN 0-913175-01-3.
• This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1986, co-editor)
  • Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos (co-editor, 1988). San Francisco: ism press. ISBN 978-0-910383-19-6.
• The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry (1993). Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-467-1
• Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (1994). Albuquerque: West End Press. ISBN 0-931122-74-0.
• Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (1997) Ithaca: Firebrand Books. ISBN 1-56341-093-1.
• A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010 (2011)[24]
• Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir (2019). New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girox. ISBN 9780374219666.

• Giving up the Ghost (1986)[25]
• Shadow of a Man (1990)
• Coatlicue's Call/ El llamado de Coatlicue (1990)
• Heroes and Saints (1992)
• Shadow of a Man (1992)[26]
• Heart of the Earth: A Popol Vuh Story (1994)
• A Circle in the Dirt (1995)
• Watsonville: Some Place Not Here (1996)[22]
• The Hungry Woman (1995)
• Circle in the Dirt (2002)
• Digging Up the Dirt (2010)[27]
• New Fire: To Put Things Right Again (2012).[18][28]
• The Mathematics of Love (2016)[29]

• "Art in America Con Acento" (1994). Anthologized in Women Writing Resistance: essays on Latin America and the Caribbean (2003). Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-708-5.
• The Sexuality of Latinas (co-editor, 1993). Berkeley: Third Woman Press. ISBN 0-943219-00-0.