“Consciencia” is not about “I” but “we”
Interview with Cherríe Moraga
MARCOS COLÓN: Your work has received increasing attention for its notions of identity and consciousness. I'd like to begin by asking how has your work developed over the years and what are the main social or political issues that you consider today?
CHERRÍE MORAGA: That’s a huge question. I’ve been writing for many, many years, over forty years, so in that sense, there are different writing epochs that one has. As a young writer it was a very different time because I was coming of age during the period of the movimiento chicano in the 1970s. There were a lot of sites of silences in that movement. At the time, I was beginning to question aloud what it means to be a woman in this world, and specifically a chicana, a Mexican-American in the United States. But I also was beginning to make connections around other more censured identity questions, specifically around lesbian and queer identities. In academic circles today, this is called “intersectionality,’ but in the late 1970s, during the making of This Bridge Called My Back we, as women of color, referred to this kind of connective tissue of oppression and liberation simply as “theory in the flesh.” I see now that “theory in the flesh” served as a precursor to recognizing embodied practices as a knowledge base: the idea that somehow within our bodies, if we’re paying attention and if we listen to our hearts and our intuition, we will see where the silences are and we will see where ignorances are. And from there we construct a living politic.