La  Despedida (A farewell)

I write this “despedida” in what is for so many the worst of times.  I admit that any youthful vision I once carried of a world (of nations) liberated from its deadly trajectory of hate and greed has long vanished.  Perhaps my growing despair began as early as the turn into the 21st century with the U.S. response to 9/11, ceaseless war predictably waiting in rubble.  Then, well into the second decade, we witness the Trump’s separation of families at the border— the unthinkable reenacted.  Today, in the third, it is genocide in Palestine.     

Borders are always culpably at work here. Nation-state ideologies and their ideologues drive a bloody knife-edged wedge between and among a people.  And the people always lose.  Death is so profoundly intimate; it can be never truly avenged.  So, one writes any way.  Not in retaliation, but in lament, the grief beneath the mask of rage and hatred.  And, perhaps in that truth, resides hope in our capacity to continue feeling in the face of so much loss and insistence on expressing it.

Personally, I feel very grateful for the right and responsibility of a public voice.  I could never have dreamed it as a muted Catholic school girl of the 1960s, when my censored thoughts wrestled madly within me.  Less censored now, thoughts of one’s own inabilities to actually “change the world” daily humble our efforts, if not, at times completely immobilize them.

Perhaps, as I close my time at UCSB and Las Maestras Center, I am most grateful for this last period of seven years of political and cultural engagement under the auspices of LMC because it allowed me to “DO SOMETHING”— to focus on one aspect of a progressive vision of change that I could abide; this has been the integral relationship of Xicana Indigenous thought, art and social praxis.  For that, I am especially grateful for Celia Herrera Rodriguez’ original vision, and grateful for the earlier organizing efforts of La Red Xicana Indigena  (2000-2010) that convinced us that we were not alone in our worldview and that the promise of movement among mujeres could reside within this radical framework.  

All this is to say that whatever wealth of knowledge, which both Maestra Celia and I received along the way, made LMC possible.  We both have walked hard and challenging roads in very distinct ways and it was this marriage of difference realized in shared conviction that proved valuable (and, in fact, needed) in the formation of Las Maestras Center.  Perhaps the “need” became most evident to us during COVID where our programming climbed over the walls of the University to freely enter the lives of so many “others, “especially women of color and queer folk.

In June of this year (2024), I retired from UCSB after seven years of employment there and after over forty years of teaching for a living and the real love of it.  I am ecstatic to be relieved of one major job in my life.  Already, I am free to imagine more, to allow myself time and space to do a different kind of writer’s work, perhaps less comfortable in that it may be less predictable in content and form.  But I look forward to it, even as I fear it a bit.

This year will be one of considerable transition for LMC.  In the best of scenarios, in the years following, Las Maestras Center will continue pa’delante, under new and visionary directorship, while keeping with its Xicane foundational values.  For my part, I remain in an advisory relationship with LMC, serving as part of a concilio of activistas and artists to help shape a broader future for the Center—across campuses and southern borders.

In closing I thank Dean Hale of Social Science and Dean Berry of Humanities and Fine Art for their continued engagement with, and support, of LMC, along with the Departments of Chicana/o Studies and English that have housed Celia’s and my position respectvely as Co-Directors. We thank our invaluable core staff that will continue on with LMC:  Mariela Aguilar Raya, our publicist/program coordinator; John Jairo Valencia, LMC community liaison; and, Alondra Bedoy, our undergraduate coordinator. Finally, of course, I am indebted to Celia for her inspiration, creative intelligence, and insistence on the harder truer road, always.  I will never stop learning from her. 

Gracias, above all, to our subscribers, gente, constituents -- who have supported LMC through your funds, presence and societal engagement in your own projects of common cause.  Feel free to take a “sentimental journey” of the LMC Archive of artists, writers, activists and visionaries LMC has hosted over the years in the good company of our students and public. We need you now more than ever. 

pan, paz y poesía,

Cherríe Moraga

Originally appeared in LMC Fall Newsletter

October 2024