Elizabeth Martinez on Cherríe Moraga

“The most striking change during the past 20 years can be seen in attitudes toward homophobia. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an almost total silence hung over gay and lesbian advocacy. No openly gay person could be a movement leader. Today homophobia persists; most progressive, straight Chicanos as well as Chicanas still fail to see gay and lesbian rights as another struggle of other oppressed people. Too still fail to see homophobia as a sometimes murderous force of discrimination. But the situation has improved, especially in some major cities, in academia and among youth. A lesbian caucus of NACCS was formalized at its 1992 national conference in Albuquerque, thus establishing an official rejection of homophobia toward lesbians. Gay and lesbian Raza groups and individuals are out there now, as they never could be before. The work of Chicana lesbian artists and intellectuals such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga has been crucial to this liberation, with benefits going beyond las lesbianas. Wherever one finds strong voices for women among Chicanas, they often come from Lesbians.”

“Cherrie Moraga's first book, co-edited with Gloria Anzaldúa, was This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and it made history when published by Kitchen Table Press in 1981. The two pioneering lesbian authors passionately celebrated relationships between women, and their dream, as they said in their foreword to the second edition, was of "a unified Third World feminist movement in this country." Up until then you heard little, if anything, spoken publicly in Chicana/o circles about feminism, much less lesbianism. Such taboos weakened as Chicana feminism evolved in its varying forms and different camps.”

“Today Moraga's love poems, her commemorations of love between women, include silver laughter, tear-stained despair and homegirl entanglements. Through these and other writings she presents us her vision of a Queer Aztlan: a Chicano homeland that can embrace all its people, including its gays and lesbians.”