Cher on Lorna Dee Cervantes

“One of the deepest wounds Chicanos suffer is separation from our Southern relatives. Gloria Anzaldúa calls it a "1,950-mile-long open wound," dividing México from the United States, "dividing a pueblo, a culture." This "llaga" ruptures over and over again in our writing, Chicanos in search of a México that never wholly embraces us. "Mexico gags," poet Lorna Dee Cervantes writes, "on this bland pocha seed." This separation was never our choice.”

“In speaking from that personal place, and in considering the political questions regarding state-sanctioned death and its dealers-urban poverty and its consequent child abuse; the prison of drugs and apartheid-style education; illegal land occupation and war for profit-I am most concerned about my own inability to control the warring inside me. My beloved and I speak almost daily about the cost of internal occupation. We witness it from the most mundane to the grandest displays of what the poet Lorna Dee Cervantes calls "that nagging preoccupation of not being good enough." As Chicanos, I see it in the often timidez and assimilationist politeness of our writings.”