Cherríe Moraga
BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY                                                                                                                             |
| Cherríe L. Moraga | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 25, 1952 Whittier, California |
| Occupation | Playwright, activist |
| Nationality | US |
| Subject | Feminism, Chicana studies |
| Notable works | This Bridge Called My Back,Heroes and Saints |
| Notable awards | Critics' Circle; PEN West; American Book Award |
Cherríe Lawrence Moraga[1] (born September 25, 1952) is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at Stanford University in the Department of Drama and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her works explore the ways in which gender, sexuality and race intersect in the lives of women of color.
Early life
Moraga was born of mixed blood parentage on September 25, 1952 in Whittier, California located approximately 10 miles southeast from Los Angeles[2] Raised in California’s San Gabriel Valley, Moraga felt the effects of her mixed ethnicity—Mexican and Anglo—from an early age. Her early writing acknowledges the complex relationship of being able to "pass" for white, while emotionally deeply identifying with the non-white part of her identity and her extended Chicano (Mexican American) family. Her family has remained a large focus of her writing—her Mexican American mother, specifically, who was forced to leave school at an early age to support her younger siblings. As a working class writer, Moraga's acknowledges that the main inspiration to become a writer was her mother, who was an eminent storyteller.[3] Moraga earned her Bachelor's degree from Immaculate Heart Collegein Los Angeles, California, a nonsectarian college, which Moraga describes as "Radical Catholic." She graduated in 1974 earning a Bachelor's Degree in English. Soon after attending Immaculate Heart College, she enrolled in a writing class at the Women's Building and produced her first lesbian poems.,[2][4] In 1977 she moved to San Francisco where she supported herself as a waitress, became politically active as a burgeoning feminist, and eventually found her way to women of color feminism. She earned her Master's Degree in Feminist Writings from San Francisco State University in 1980. This was the same period of her association with Gloria Anzaldúa, and the project of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which would be published in 1981.
Biography
Moraga was one of the few writers to write and introduce the theory on Chicana lesbianism. Her interests include the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race, particularly in cultural production by women of color. There are not many women of color writing about issues that queer women of color face today: therefore, her work is very notable and important to the new generations. In the 1980s her works started to be published. Since she is one of the first and few Chicana/Lesbian writers of our time, she set the stage for younger generations of other minority writers and activists.[5]
Lesbianism
After her college years, Moraga openly accepted her lesbianism, after hiding it from others and herself, and was then when she compared those feelings and emotions she was experiencing to her mother’s feelings. She was making a connection between the way that the society was discriminating her by being a lesbian and the feelings her mother faced by the oppression of being poor, a women of color and with a lack of education. “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” describing lesbianism as poverty, just as being dark, women or simply poor. Her own acceptance as a lesbian made her embrace her ethnic background and sexual orientation, which later helped and guided her through the struggles she faced. She understood that even in her generation, women continued to be discriminated against and were not free since there are still many standards that the U.S society has constructed and strengthen throughout the years.[3]
Moraga began writing early in her life, but did not get serious until after she “came out” as a lesbian. She then got involved with the feminist movement. She writes about having to choose between referring to herself as a “Chicana lesbian” or a “lesbian Chicana”–linguistically, only one of these two identities can serve as the essential part of her being, while the other can only serve as a modifier. Knowing and being proud of her sexuality was easier for Moraga to express her feelings and thoughts on writing. Her work has been part of who she is a women that identifies as a Chicana and a lesbian. In Loving in the War Years, Moraga cites Capitalist Patriarchy: A Case for Social 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." [6]
Moraga's perspective on most of her work and writings exploring multiple intersecting identities as a “Xicanadyke” in the U.S., which composes the “raza” identity and sexual orientation, and how this has shaped her interactions with both the gay and lesbian movement and the Chicano movement. Nevertheless, the oppositional consciousness that she brings in her work has served as one of her most important characteristics. This “oppositional consciousness” is in stark contrast to the assimilationist core of many of the activist movements that Moraga criticizes.[7]
Books
She is perhaps best known for co-editing, with Gloria Anzaldúa, the anthology of feminist thought This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 1981; which was one of her most successful books that won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1986.[8] Along with Ana Castillo and Norma Alarcon, she adapted this anthology into the Spanish-language Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos. Writings in the anthology, along with works by other prominent feminists of color, call for a greater prominence within feminism for race-related subjectivities which included her complex bicultural position to Anglo and Chicano culture, and ultimately laid the foundation for third wave feminism or Third World Feminism in the USA. Her first sole-authored book, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983), a combination of autobiographically modulated prose and poetry, is also an influential critical work among Chicana feminists and other feminists of color, and among scholars working in Chicano Studies.In this book she establishes the connections between her mother and herself, her sexuality and the influence her mother had on her life[9] Her play Giving up the Ghost, published in 1986, focuses mainly on Chicana lesbianism and the main heroine embracing her lesbianism rather than denying it. The play was presented and premiered at the Theater Rhinoceros in San Francisco from February 10 to March 12 in 1989; it was directed by Anita Mattos and Jose Guadalupe Saucedo. In a plug for the show, political activist Angela Davis recently said, "[Ghost] is an emotionally haunting encounter that asks us as women to look back over our shoulders and face the unforgettable. Cherrie Morgan drums up the pulse of the past in all of us." It is important because during this time, the civil rights movements were at its climax. Integrating all women’s issues into one and cooperating in solidarity.
She published A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010, in 2011.[10][11] Her play New Fire: To Put Things Right Again had its world premiere January 11–29, 2012, in San Francisco, California.[12][13][14] Cherrie Moraga was named a 2007 USA Rockefeller Fellow and granted $50,000 by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists. She won a Creative Work Fund Award in 2008, and the Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation Grant for Playwriting in 2009.[12] The Last Generation (1993) is a politicized and intensely personal collection of poetry and prose that argues for a reconceptualization of on gender, sexuality, and ethnic identity, race, art and nationalism and the politics of survival.[15]
From 1994 to 2002, she published a couple of volumes of drama through West End Press of Albuquerque, NM. The first one was Heroes and Saints (1994), which won an award. This play focuses on the issues faced by the large immigrant population working in the fields poisoned by pesticides.[16] The Hungry Woman (2001) she makes the links between the mystical and the Chicano politics with her own perspective as a queer feminist. Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt (2002) these plays bring together the struggles of farmworkers and their resistance to cultural domination as well as the threat of economic enslavement. Her plays have been shown throughout the Southwest, in Chicago, Seattle and New York. Another work was done in 1995, "Heart of the Earth," where her adaptation of the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation myth, opened at the Public Theatre and INTAR Theatre in New York City.[17]
Work
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. Her play,Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, performed at the Brava Theatre Company of San Francisco in May, 1996, won the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Fund for New American Plays Award, from the Kennedy center for the Performing Arts.[18] Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Moraga started Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1983, a group which did not discriminate against homosexuality, class, or race. it is the first publisher dedicated to the writing of women of color in the United States.[19]
Moraga is currently involved in a Theatre communications group and was the recipient of the NEA Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award[8] Her plays and publications have won and received national recognition including a TCG Theatre Residency Grant, a National Endowment for the art fellowship for play writing and two Fund for New American Plays Awards in 1993. She was awarded the United States artist Rockefeller Fellowship for literature in 2007.In 2008 she won a Creative Work Fund Award. The following year, in 2009 she received a Gerbode-Hewlett foundation grant for play writing.[3][5]
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