Espejos de Aztlan; Cherríe Moraga

Oh, you were never an instructor. Okay, this is an interview with Shuri Muraga on May 30th, 1989. Did you want to start with an excerpt from... Yeah, I'll do an excerpt from Shadow of a Man and the scene that I'm going to do is sing for the play and this will be an excerpt of the scene. Shadow of a Man is a play about a Chicano family and particularly how the men in the family are on some level shadow figures in the play and how those male figures affect the lives of the females in the family. And this particular scene that Dia, the aunt Rosario and Lupe, who was the youngest daughter are having a conversation and Lupe is about 12 years old and is obsessed with the devil and God and the like, so the scene deals with that.

So I'll be doing those characters. It begins in the garden of Dia Rosario and she enters Chewin on Echele. I still say Keleos, Cheles, no Savain, Winosaki. I think it's a smog. A Keelos Angelis, the sun has to fight its way down to the plant as the people too. A separate Zatrevidos Comoteur, Mana, Kavanagh, La Playa, and Ghemaas Prieta's Keleos, Negros. Then he loves the ocean. She takes another bite. No Savain, Nada. Tomalo, try one. No, those things are like fire, prevaloga yina, Lupe does. Hmm, that's so bad. She swallows.

I, Dia, you tricked me. Eres gringita. I swear, I don't know how you can eat them like they were nothing. What's up, Ed? Your tea is gone and kicked the bucket. You'll be there as you know tortillas, you'll chill in no mass, but a record, that may. Even your big Hollywood mansion. Or maybe you'll get like the other mehikana to do it. I won't have a man. I don't believe in him. Eres trabajo, like anything else. They'll always be Ricos, and the rich people will always need someone to clean up after them. Salas que? And mehiko have the women from Kriades. Not like an Eres tapaisa. Yeah, you don't have to be Rico to have one. Yeah, that's why it's better here. Aunci donde la tiara no mehlao, niu, chile en dada, daro. Mehita. I don't know why I let them go so long, see nawa. Gracias mehha. Make sure you take your mommy a few of these parallamis and manyanis domingo, talking to the roses. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, they don't have it. That's called me. Go to mehlao. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you talk to them, dear? To who lets plant us? Yeah. Because they have souls the same as you and me. You believe that? It's true. The church doesn't say that. You think the church is always right? I guess so. God is always right. Not the church. The church is full of men, men, men, mistakes, I don't know. Do you think everything they say is a sin? Is a sin? Some of the priests here have more sins and both of us put together. Ah, povere, sis, tas que mala madre, sos, mis povere, sos, sis, tas tumulilahua, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah. See? You know how they say that when you get that shield that goes through your body and is called a freer, a scale of the abloth, tetoka. Yeah, like the devil just comes up and kind of brushes past you touching you on the shoulder or something, right? Sipres from dicho no mas.

No por que saveche diya. A verses I really do feel him. And they have on me entra me. He's not like a real devil, but like a shadow, a shadow man. I can barely tell he's there, just kind of get a glimpse of him like a dark spot out of the corner of my eye, like he's following me or something. But when I turn my head, he's gone. I just kind of feel the brush of his tail as he goes by me. The ene cola, si, el liao lo. I told you, and I get a chill out over. No Alice, a si, hanoa, scorecto. I don't know what those monhas teach you at school sometimes. The nuns never told me this stuff, well, take it out of your head. It's not good for you. Well, it's not like I'm trying to think about it. It just keeps popping up in my head. It's like the more you try not to think about something, the more it stays in your head. I mean, your mind just thinks what it wants to doesn't it? No, you have to train it. If you don't, it could make you a very unhappy girl. But I can't. And now when I'm asleep, that's when it's so worse, because that's when it catches me

of guard. I tried to stay awake to keep him away. I keep praying and praying, but dear, then I get so tired, and sooner or later I fall asleep. And that's when he sneaks inside me. I wake up contanto me either, it's like my whole body's on fire, and I can hardly breathe. I look over to Leddi, and she seems a million miles away. I tried to call her peto, love us, don't make it, it's a leer. Peto, it's so not pessa, dia no mas, no, I'm awake, tada, digo. You got to stop thinking like this. To mama yo, we had a cousin once, Vina, a very good looking girl. But she thought about Leddi, a blue Leddi, the religion, he told her so so much until she went crazy, said, well, we all look at her. And now she will walk the streets of her petalito. She needed air, she said she couldn't breathe in like ass, and no wonder, kids pile all on top and eat of each other in every room. I don't know why I might do it, I want so many chamakos. She was my man that she said, what's gaga to do with it?

Of course the girl wanted to get away from there. Alamadru gaga, before gaga you stretched his throat to sing. She would come back to the house, Sudan to pull kal order, the sirtu is sufievery, supassion for gaga she said. But it wasn't gaga to give her that fever, it was the nuns. And now the muy metida connes, they put that in her head, they told her to read. We didn't go to school regular petafina, comatu sister was always consunos in her book. I, her eyes were light up like flames, condiment contabolo stories from the Bible. She wanted to join them and they'll convince them. She begged my tea every day, but her not appended, y'all. Why not? He was against him. He said, passando tanto tiempo, contum many women together was already made her crazy. And finally they let her go. Okay, so she put some muy in femma, she was going to die, cheese, one of us. I went to senior commento, she changed her line.

I saw her in lasala where they wait for the people to come and visit her. He installed a centado con lasmanos, I sleep underneath that climb, what you call like a tent and I came in front, a scapular sea in scapalario, y la coso que me effecto muy cho que himi, real hard, fueren los ojos, her eyes had last told you to su passione. Ah, yes, ojos, ojos, wear this. Later I found out they had to separate her from one of the monas. They sent it to another convento. She was in la with the woman, like a man loves a woman. Did they find them kissing plus, no say, I guess, so it's gay. She was not a strong person, she led too much influence her, well, I'm not like that. No, the okeres, I see only you got to be careful where your mind goes. Why should you worry about God so much, you should enjoy your childhood, you have plenty

of time to be miserable. Do you want, well, let me ask you a few questions about that, okay, okay. It seems to me that the voices are coming from, they're not quite you, exactly, but they're coming from inside you. Do you feel possessed or anything, possessed by the devil, I think, right, well, where the voices coming from, well, I think the difference for me between writing theater and writing poetry is it, for the most part, my poems are my voice, you know, directly or me, you know. There are on some basic level autobiographical, but theater, which I started writing, I've been writing for 15 years and I really started writing theater and I'd say about five years ago and when I started doing that, that's when character took over, you know, so it's different, you know, in the sense that in order to, you know, in order to be the character,

to write the character, you have to be in their body and fill them in, you know, every little corpuscle, you know, and, but it isn't, it isn't me, you know, and so it's, what I do, you know, though, you know, with most of my theater is that I draw from, you know, my observations, my own experience, you know, like on, in terms of doing this Thea, for example, she's a, I have about seven ants, so she's a composite of different ones of them, including my mother. So it's kind of like you take an arm from one ear from another, you know, and you make a new human being, you know, but trying to make who they are consistent psychologically, you know, and Lupe is, you know, in the plays, her obsessions with God and all of that, being raised Catholic is very close to me, but she's, you know, her, she's just Lupe, you know, but it was not, it was through her, it was a good way for me to really look at kind

of how being raised very, very strict Mexican Catholic, how that affects a young girl's sense of herself and, et cetera, you know, so it's always ultimately that the process is always even a healing one for, you know, me as a writer, even if they're not people that I necessarily know, you know, you want to read a couple of poems, yeah, I'll do that. Yeah, upon my road a few years ago, about three years ago, when I was, I lived in New York for a number of years and returned to California, where I'm from, and this was written soon after my, my return home. It's called the en route by the Los Angeles one. After a while, it comes down to a question of life choices, not a choice between you or

her, this sea town or that bruising city, but about putting one, can I ask you to stop and let me get them to, yeah, they're a little loud, alright, you're just going to edit this, yeah, I want to do nice and clean, yeah, okay, alright, en route by the Los Angeles one. After a while, it comes down to a question of life choices, not a choice between you or her, this sea town or that bruising city, but about putting one foot in front of the other and ending up somewhere that looks like home, Salinas is not my home, although the name is right in the slow curve of road around the fence where farmworker buses are kept in prison over night, outhouses, trailings, stinking after them.

I am always en route through that town, but manage five years in New York, where the name doesn't sound right, even spangly size, it's cold, yanky, blue bruised. Your body couldn't be the land, only made me want it more, because indoors everything could be Mexico, if I close my eyes and imagine the hot breath beneath the blankets in winter, rivers of apartment sweat in summer, was that country I had abandoned with my womanhood awakened to. On the grapevine of the interstate, I first turned my back on my Los Angeles, my head to a future Miss America Mexican legacy. Now I return, nodding off a greyhound, dreaming of you and the trail of small deaths behind me. Are you a dreamer, too? It is a kind of dying, this parting one we imagine freely chosen in the way one chooses a wife, how far apart to space the children, three.

Nightly, before I left you I dreamed of dying, not my own, but others loved and abandoned. Figured it the one I beat dust tracks to find, figured that lover covered in wounds was calling me in my sleep, but it was you. Running through my cupped palms as I brought you to my lips, you I mourned with the dead, you never get a chance to say goodbye. I thought somebody somewhere wants me to get wind of this, Gil Camino, real, is full of these rude awakenings unto death. Is that a recent? No, as I said, I moved back to California about over three years ago and I wrote it just upon my return, can I ask you another question that I'm planning to ask, let's see, L.A., New York, Berkeley, is that our route?

Well, it's more like L.A., Berkeley or the Bay Area, right, it was L.A., than Berkeley, the whole Bay Area, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, then New York and then returning back to the Bay Area. So, I live in the Bay Area now, so I see, yeah, but I'm from, I'm from Southern California, specifically, San Gabriel, San Gabriel. What it seems that, well, I guess what I want to ask you is, how would you define your community because there seems to be a sense of community in your writing, a sense of belonging to and speaking to and representing and being embraced by and supported by a community, and yet you have lived in these various different physical communities. Is it a different kind of connection than geography? Well, I think that it has to be on some level, but I think that, I mean, since I've lived so many places, but, I mean, I think fundamentally that, I think at various times, also

in my own political development and stuff that I define my communities differently, you know, when I first began writing, kind of like the major thing that really was a breakthrough for me in terms of my writing, whether I was in college and stuff, I was very, I was writing with a lot of secrets, you know, and that always makes for a very poor writer, you know, when you're keeping secrets from yourself and others, and so at the point in which I really began to first write and read my work publicly, I did it within the context of a feminist community, which was largely Anglo, you know, and I did that because I was about the only place where I felt safe to be able to write specifically about being a lesbian, and that was like in the, you know, early 70s, mid 70s, and so I think in the period of that time I would have sort of defined my community as that because the urgency to be able to write, you know, a love poem to a woman was paramount to me, you know, on some level,

and it was really through that that I also discovered an incredible amount of loneliness, you know, and that that community, in fact, although I think that the women's community on some level has been supportive of me in the sense of, you know, buying my books and inviting me to do gigs, you know, which supports one as a writer, you know, fundamentally I don't feel embraced or supported on a deeper level, you know, that one needs as an artist, you know, which has to do with that sense of affinity, cultural affinity, and, you know, so it was like actually through those early years that my need and consciousness about my own chikanyismos, you know, like came out like, it's very strongly, you know, but I think all of the travels kind of what it's done is sort of help me define more clearly what my community is because when I went to New York, I was doing a lot of political

work, a lot of political organizing rape crisis center and a woman, third woman's publishing house, and I was doing it all with women of color, but, you know, it's a long ways from the Southwest, right, you know, so there I really, and I started to write theater, and my characters were so chikano, you know, and I was writing there, you know, and I was working for this theater Latin American theater and called Enter, and it's on 42nd Street in Broadway, you know, so I'd go right there in downtown, you know, where the theater, you know, theater role is, and I'd come out of these, you know, afternoon sessions of writing, you know, with my, you know, chikano characters and then I'd walk outside there would be, you know, downtown New York City, right, I'd go, what am I doing here? This is crazy, you know, and I feel very lonely, you know, and so the journey has been one of, you know, really that sense of return, you know, so I feel like probably more strongly than ever, you know, when I think about, you know, really I think that, you

know, my audience is anybody who will respond, you know, but on a very fundamental level what I feel that closes to, you know, are chikangles, and, you know, I think particularly Muhedas, you know, and I guess the more and more specific you get, you know, particularly since I do deal specifically with issues of sexuality, not just lesbianism but, but chikana sexuality, how, how being Mexican, being a Mexican woman influences our perception of ourselves and our bodies, et cetera, you know, that it's very, very specifically, you know, the woman, you know, the Mexican woman that chikana that I think about when I'm writing and that I need, then when you were talking about like, you know, embrace, you know, that embrace and stuff, you know, that, you know, like I feel like we need each other and that's the, and I also feel like I'm writing a community of writers that way too, other chikana writers, you know, that are after some of the same things I am. So I feel very lucky because, you know, I think that some of the split about identities

taking you to different communities, environments had to do with how split in terms of as chikanas, we were, that we weren't allowed to express our femaleness and, you know, our cultural identity at the same time, and I think now in 1989 that's not the case, you know, that there is a place to do that, you know, and that we're about trying to make that more possible for others, you know. So that kind of leads into another question I wanted to ask about, or sort of in the waning days of the 80s here, 90s are, you know, right in our face. What I see around me is the challenge of new strategies for empowerment in my community. Do you see that too? Do you, do you, are you, have you latched onto new strategies? Well, I think that, you know, one can have a certain, I think that the world view is one of great urgency, you know, I mean, and the strategy, you know, it's like very difficult

to figure out how you're going to strategize around the fact that, you know, there's very little oxygen left on the planet, you know, I mean, what do you do about, you know, trees being cut down in the Amazon, you know. So it's very overwhelming on one level, you know, but to me what is very, what the promise that the 90s has is that by virtue of, you know, the very things that we abhor, you know, like, you know, transnational, you know, capitalism, you know, imperialism, all that, that by virtue of all of that, you know, that the world is now a world community, you know, and I mean, like for that, you know, it's like, you know, everybody is connected because everybody's sort of suffering under the same monsters, you know. So I think that in geographical boundaries begin to have less importance, you know, because we're all connected in a sense that like, you know, in every major city in this country

now, I mean, they're turning into third world cities, you know, and it comes out of, you know, the very acts of, you know, that the very involvement that U.S. has in all those places, you know, whether it's Guatemala or, you know, Cambodia, one time, et cetera, you know. So I feel like that's such a negative thing and I feel like that there is a positive thing about that. I feel like a lot of, you know, the melting pot never worked, you know, in this country. And so the fact that the face of this nation is changing, you know, in terms of it becoming, you know, it is not a white nation, it wasn't in the beginning and it never, you know, it will be in less and less is it being that, so I feel that to me has a lot of promise, a lot of potential, you know, in terms of, you know, when you're talking about empowerment that that, you know, numbers help, you know, and that sense about a kind of the underclass in this country, the third world people in this country, you know, changing the impact,

you know, of this country, you know, they will have an impact, we will have an impact. So you know, in terms of strategically, you know, I feel like a lot of that ends up being, I said, one level, that's kind of a worldview, but for me personally, I feel like the strategy, you know, you know, I have just been in recent years, very, very focused on accepting the fact that I feel like the best work I have to offer is, you know, is my writing. To try to figure out how to make a connection, you know, what's the connection between the fact that you're, you know, I am a writer and the majority of people, you know, the very people I'm talking about, the majority would never read anything I ever wrote, you know, and so, you know, those are, those are contradictions and things that one deals with, but I really believe in the power of art, you know, I really believe in theater to me has great potential because you don't have to read it, you know, and so then it comes into

questions about what are the issues you're going to write about and also, what are the taboos that you, I really believe that one has to keep writing the taboos, you know, because that's where the changes happen, you know, so, but no, I don't have a specific strategy at all, but I have great, ironically, I have great hope, you know, it makes sense. Do you have another poem that you'd like to read? Well, I will read it. This is poem is being published in a magazine and over there in Berkeley, a Berkeley review and I wrote it just a number of months ago, I guess in the early part of, I mean, the late part of 1988, it's called Blood Sisters. I remember a love once germinated outside the womb, no blood ties that not and strangle

the heart, but two soul sisters instantly joined pressing wound against wound and tribal solemnity. The first already opened beginning to scam, the other, the braver, the young yieldy lamb performing the ritual with any object capable of cutting flesh. She, I did get it, esta a vida vieja, reminded to bleed this time with your name upon its lips. She, obsidian, emana, you, the dark mirror that splits my breast, love has always been a sacrificial right surrendering one's heart to a merciless mother God who never forgave us, our fleshy mortality, our sin of skin and bone, our desire to meld them into miracles of something else, not woman. So let me just read one more, and then the last one I'll read is called New Mexican Confession.

I always, I like to read it here since it was inspired here. I wrote this at the New Year, 1988 in Hem of Springs, and it's, there's a little epigram that says, upon reading Whitman 15 years later, one, there is great joy in the naming of things that mean no more than what they are, cottonwood and winter's nakedness frozen black skeleton against the red rock canyon walls, converging onto this thin river of water and human activity, Los O'Hosbar, hilltop hotel and cafe, the grain and feed shop. These were the words denied me in any language, bignon, gagnon, or royal, except as names on street signs growing up in California, sprawl, boundaries formed by neat, cement, right angles.

Two. I have come here to look for God, but make no claim of finding the quest, a journey of righteous and humble men, strangers to their bodies, photographers to the contour of woman flesh, a border between nature and its lover, man, I am a woman who walks by the motherhouse of the sisters of the precious blood, sleeping beneath the snow, and can as easily see myself there, my body sleeping beneath the silent smell of fresh press linen, the protection of closed doors against the cold, against the foul breath and talk of a last-kind pipe-liners passing through, against the vibrant death this land is seen, who do they pray for? Do they pray for this land? The sister ventures out into the cold of noon to play the Campanas. They sound of tin, a flat resonance as I pass, no even twelve strikes but a sporadic three strikes here, another two, rest again, three, and I imagine she calls me as I always feared to join her in her single bed of aching abstinence.

I am the nun as much as I am the Josua Indian woman across the road, who three hundred years ago with mud and straw and hands as delicate as her descendants, now scribbling on dead leaves, while up to Spanish religion, built temples to enclose his God, while the outer kanyon enveloped and pitied them all. My sin has always been to believe myself, man, to sing a song of my self that inhabited everyone. I fall to sleep contemplating the body of the poet Whitman at my age one hundred years ago, and see his body knew the same fragility, the desire to dissolve the parameters of flesh and bone and blend with the mountain, the blade of grass, the boy. I bleed with the mountain, the blade of grass, the boy, because my body suffers in its womb.

The maternal blood that courses this frozen ground was not spilt in violence, but in mourning. I am every man more than man. This is my sin, this knowledge. That's an interesting poem, in a sense, well, for me personally because of New Mexico and because I really identify with that canyon, with him is beautiful. It's pretty deep. What's also interesting to me is the reference to Walt Whitman, who's probably at the center of American poetry. I wouldn't say that you're at the center of American poetry, not in terms of literature itself, not in terms of the art, but obviously in terms of the process that surrounds literature and the capitalism. It's the politics of it, how does that contradiction make you feel as a writer? Is it deflating or is it motivating or is it in raging?

The fact that you seem to feel some attachment to Whitman, but there's obviously some difference politically. That's the point of the poem too. The thing of it is that I was reading him, again, because I was staying in a place that had leaves of grass there, and I hadn't read it since I was in college, because I had like 15 years later. I picked it up, and I just picked it up in the middle, and I'm reading it, and in his own time, they thought he was a nut. He wasn't in at his own time on some, he broke a lot of rules, and they don't know what I said to deal with it, but he was definitely homosexual, and so it's like I was reading parts that were reaching me on a human level. I think fundamentally I believe that we can reach each other on human levels through those

barriers, those sometimes impenital barriers of race and sex. But I also thought while I was reading it, he gets to be universal, because he is a man. That's the whole point of the poem. He gets to blend with the mountain, the blade of grass, and the boy, he gets to be the nature person, and the history of writing poetry about nature has been a white male prerogative when people of color, women, have always had this connection, but it's like somehow in literature, that process, that universality is only a loud of white men. And so as a Chicana female, Chicana poet, I'm a non-event, I mean it's like I am not allowed to be universal, and so the whole thing about I am every man more than man, and that's

my sin, and I obviously don't believe it's a sin, but the point is to say that this is something that has been considered to have that knowledge, for women to have that knowledge, for women of color to have that knowledge, is a sin, is a violation, is a taboo in a society that tells us we don't exist, and it's like a hidden knowledge, a hidden information secret we have. So the poem does both of that. I meant it when I said, and I was writing, I see that his body had that same fragility, that desire, you know, to blend, you know, that yearning, you know, and I think that's a human desire, you know, but at the same time, you know, all of what I just said, you know, defines this differently. I think in bridging that, or in breaking that taboo, as you said, it's important for you to do in claiming that symbolism at one level of nature, you become more powerful,

you're writing becomes much more powerful, that must be threatening to, at some, well, that must be threatening to, let's say, the poetry elite, or, you know, certain people who might hear it and find and make the observation that you've made emotionally, I guess, even don't have a right to that language, that's, you know, that's, well, I think that you're allowed to do, you're allowed to write an inch of poems, you know, it's a woman, you're allowed, you know, a certain amount of, you know, breath there as long as you don't point any fingers at the same time, you know, so it's like, yes, you know, you can, I mean, it's like you can write, you know, a meditative poem on nature, but don't for God's sake say that it has anything that even nature has on some level been defined by man, because that's what, that's what you, and see the very politicization of poetry

is what the powers that be say is lesser poetry, you know what I mean? You know, it's, it's the, the same way in the visual art world, you know, that if you have, if you have a painting that has a political message, it becomes in their eyes propaganda as opposed to art, you know, and the, the same value system holds true in terms of being, you know, a poet or, you know, a writer of theater or whatever, you know, so, and they always do that with, you know, third world women and people of colors, artwork, you know, anyway, I mean, that's, that's the major thing. So like I said, as long as you don't threaten, you know, you don't rock the boat, you know, so it's not just a question of writing about nature, but at the same time you're saying, wait a minute, you know, you know, you've had the market on this and, you know, I'm just calling it like I see it, you know, so then somehow that that makes it lesser work,

you know, so, well, struggle with that. Does that lead to architecture and table press? Is that the kind of, is that what I think, yeah, I think fundamentally, you know, I think that both, you know, women as a community, including women of color and also, you know, our various, you know, people of color communities, you know, African-Americans, et cetera, that, you know, since the 60s have been aware of the fact that, you know, one has to then, if we're going to constantly be ignored, you know, and they, and since the powers that be have access to the grants and to the, you know, the support, the economic support, the one needs in order to produce, you know, and, you know, the publishing, et cetera, they own the theater houses, all of that, then on some level, we have to be able to create the means to produce it ourselves, you know, so kitchen table press as a, as a women of color press came out of that, came out of the desire not to, the desire to allow there

to be a form in which somebody could, could be both black or brown and female at the same time and not be censored that that actually be a plus, you know, a reason to get published, you know, a work that addressed that in important, you know, in original ways, so yeah, you know, and, and, you know, that's only one example, you know, a lot of other ventures like that, but I think, you know, there is a, you know, I'm particularly as a Latina, you know, it's kind of, you know, there is some things in recent years opening up, you know, and it is kind of like that, it has its pros and cons and the level of that it's kind of one could look at it as a kind of phase, you know, like the decade of the Hispanic and all this kind of stuff, you know, and, you know, it's sort of like as a, a friend of mine

says, you know, it's kind of like you feel like they open up the, they put down the, the mo, and a few people get to come by and then they close the mo and anybody who comes to get in and that, you know, span of five years, you know, you know, because it's all still on the level of tokenism because fundamentally the institutions haven't changed, but you know, I think that like my other Chicana and Latina counterparts, you know, riders and artists, you know, things are opening up somewhat for us, you know, on that level of professionalism, but also I think it might have, I mean, due to the fact that we've been writing for 15 and 20 years, you know, so, right. Well, along that vein there, I imagine there are women, Chicana's writing who have been writing for probably longer than, than you, obviously, and I imagine that you respect them and, and are aware of them and supportive of them. It seems that you've sort of leapt ahead of them in terms of acceptability or popularity or, well, see, one thing I think that is, it is not, there is, in terms of, there has,

I think probably for quite some time there have been Chicana's writing and a generation before me of Chicana's writing, but there wasn't a generation before me of Chicana's publishing and when I say they were writing, I mean that they were writing in journals and they were writing letters and they were, you know, this really, with the exception of someone, for example, like Estella Portillo, who is probably about 20 years older than me, a generation older than me, who did publish in the Chicano, in the, in the, during the early part of Chicano movement, like in the early 70s, the only people being published were men and that had everything to do with, you know, the, the sexism of the movement, you know, so now we have a generation of male writers, you know, we've got, what I know, you know, Jose and Rudy and I, and my favorite, I mean, those are the old, you know, stalwarts, you know, of like, on some level, consider the fathers, the patriarchs of Chicano literature, you know, and a young Chicano, today, writing, can look to them as, as their fathers, you know, but we as Chicanas didn't have that, you know, so we didn't,

you know, and I don't, you know, and I think that that has to do with, you know, the historical conditions in which that now in the 80s, you know, in the late 80s and we have come to a point that has a result of the third world moments in the, movements in the 60s and the women's moving in the 70s, you know, and the game movements, all of that, that all those things have kind of, you know, worked on one level and there's also, there really has been a black women's movement and Chicano movement and, you know, that that's happening, that there's a relationship between the cultural production and political change, right? So no, I don't have a generation ahead of me that I can read and say, you know, I drew from you, you know, I don't, you know, and it just doesn't exist, you know, and there are people now, for example, critics, et cetera, that, you know, feminists, that are going back and trying to dig up those things like journals and, you know, letters and stuff

that are, and trying to, to claim this as our literary legacy, you know, and I think that definitely, it is a kind of literary legacy, but, but the point I'm making is that as a Chicano writer, when I sit down to write and I still feel this way, I don't, I feel like everything that I'm writing has never been written before, you know, and I don't think that, for example, my students, I teach in Chicano studies at Berkeley, the young women that are writing aren't going to feel that way. Oh, I think that obviously because you will be and are a role model for, for them and for Chicano's writing in Albuquerque, certainly I'm aware of several people who would would look to you as a role model. And what I'm saying is that there's others, other, other Chicano's, you know, my, you know, we, Ana Castile, San de Cisneros, you know, Elena Vito Montes, I mean, the, the list goes on, you know, there's, I would say right now, I love you in web, et cetera,

there's about, possibly it's like about 10 women, Chicanas who are at this point publishing, to the extent they publish more than one book, you know what I mean? So there's, and that's what I'm saying is that there's kind of a sense of a community that one's writing in, you know, and, but it's not a legacy, you know, that's the difference. And I, so I think that like I was saying like my own students, you know, who are 20, whatever, but they are reading all of those women now, you know? So what their task will be to, to go, you know, further than we'll be able to go, because I feel like on some level, we're so busy trying to sort of break the taboos, you know, lift the sensors, that there's a certain kind of writing that can be done in that, that I think is very, very significant and has its own kind of power, but I also, but when you're not in Lucha, like, you know, there's another level that one can get to as well, but I'm very interested to see, you know, what's going to come up.

When you talk about breaking the taboos, I mentioned a little bit about my son's reaction to your poem about rape, that I guess what I want to ask, what is your, what is your purpose in bringing that material out or choosing those voices to present? Do you have any thoughts about moving beyond that, about recovery, in a sort of collective sense? Well, I feel like, I mean, I definitely feel like all of my work is, all of my work is about healing, it's all, it's about, so that's what's about, you know, and, but I always feel like, in terms of, in terms of, whether it be theater, poetry, whatever, you know, like, but thinking specifically about, for example, and giving up the goals with that rape scene, my concern was to really show that, that on some level, you know, how viciously womanhood has been defined, you know, how negatively, particularly for Mexican women,

both within our culture, and then outside of our culture, you know, the images that are imposed upon us, and that there's no, really that sense about that, and one of the poems address that, that there's no woman to be, you know, no real woman to be, if all you can be is, you know, mother, desufre, you know, living in the world, what a lupa and one, and mother virgin, and, you know, or the, you know, the puta and the other, you know, that's very stereotyped images, but there is a way in which that is very ingrained in our collective unconscious, you know, and the whole thing about the rape is that I wanted to show both in that piece, both that character's ultimate, ultimate victimization, and also her resistance, you know, and how you take pain, how you take moments like that, that have reduced you in her words, reduced you, you know, make you convince it, or 100% woman in the most

negative ways, and how you take that and you use it, how you can make survival out of it, you know, but the, that character by the end of the play really discovers that she has to save herself, you know, and the very last line is, you know, you know, she talks about, you know, that it wasn't right, that she got beat down so damn hard, that all those crimes had nothing to do with the girl she once was two, three, four decades ago, and then she talks about that being with a woman is about healing. It's like making familia from scratch, in other words, if our families have been the place too, because we have incest in our families, we have violence in our families, et cetera, if our families has been the place that have contributed to our own, our own pain, you know, our own lack of considering ourselves valuable, she then says, okay, I'm going to make familia from scratch, I'm going to start all over again, and then the very,

very last line, as she says, you know, you know, I have this determination, you know, and then she talks about putting her fingers to her own forgotten places, and that image for me is one of, then her turning to the place where she can reclaim, you know, her own body, touch her own self, you know, and therefore heal herself, you know. So I think that, you know, ultimately I always feel like that the message of my work is about that healing process, you know, but I don't feel that as a people we have arrived there, you know, so I feel like the bulk of what I write is about how we have not arrived, but with the vision that that's where we need to go. Great. I mentioned briefly, kitchen table press, what's happening with it today? Well I'm really not, you know, I haven't been a collective member for that, I was a collective member for four years in the early 80s, so I really since about 1984 I haven't been active

with the press at all, but they produce, they publish two of my books that I co-edited, Guental Stories by Latinas and this bridge called my back, and they're continuing to do that, and they're developing, expanding, you know, as a press, and so I guess they're alive and well. Can you give me any more information about how they're expanding? Well in the sense that they're continuing to publish books, you know, and also their distribution list, in addition to the, they can't, they don't publish really more than one or two books a year if that, but they do distribute, they have a really good list of books that they distribute by women of color, United States, so you know, they do like a male or a house too, and so, you know, that's, so in that sense I think, you know, they're still at it, you know, presses don't really last very long, but so it's pretty

good since it started in 81, yeah, it's great, it's great. I guess in, I'm going to say this in his diplomatic ways possibly is, I guess the people that brought you here to Albuquerque, the women, women to best people, and yet it seems that the most kind of like hunger to see you and talk to you and be with you has come from the, that Chicana community, sort of outside of that sort of mainstream, well, what mainstream, you know, relative, women fest group of people, and in a way that's kind of a microcosm I think of the larger audience maybe, that fact that the white, that the Anglo women's movement seems to support you, maybe they, because they have the resources, and yet emotionally there seems to be almost like a kind of fans sort of thing going on between you and then Chicanas in this community, anyway, does that seem like a contradiction

to you? No, it's no contradiction at all, you know, I mean, I think that the thing is is that, for example, when I did the reading of women fest, I, you know, there were numbers and numbers of Anglo women that came up to me and were very responsive to my work, and in general reading there, I felt it was a great audience, you know, and they were really very receptive and that's very important to me, I mean, you know, like I said, anybody that is touched by my work, you know, that gives me something, that's why I'm at it, you know, I mean, you know, the same thing when I did my play giving up the goals, which is a very specifically lesbian play, Chicana lesbian play, that many men responded to it in a very original ways, you know, but ways I wasn't, I didn't even know quite what they would think of it, and it's, you know, been overwhelmingly positive, and so to me, you know, that's great, you know, that's great, and it was a good reading, I think that the fact that I think the difference is that there is a specific hunger that Chicanas have to not only, I mean, what

we have in common as women, you know, is multilevel, you know, and definitely, you know, if you read something about the kinds of oppressions that we share in common, whether it be rape or, you know, that you could do a scene about rape and the characters Chicana, but if you're specific enough about the rape, then, you know, black women can get to it and white women can get to go to Sarah, et cetera, et cetera, right, well, we know that, you know, but the important thing for Chicanas is that, is that the images are things that they recognize, so when you recognize, when people are using a language and imagery that is familiar to you, it opens your heart, you know, and if it opens your heart, then you can receive the information, you know, you can be transformed, you can be, and you see your own reality echoed, so fundamentally, you realize I am not crazy, and when you realize that, you know, nobody can stop you, you know, that's a great thing, and so I feel,

I don't think it's about fans, you know, I think it's about an incredible hunger and that, you know, and that I too, you know, that their response means the most to me, you know, like I said, I, you know, I really feel good about all the women that, you know, that responded so well, but when a Chicana comes up to me in certain things I've met, you know, I have particular value to her, you know, that means more than me than anything, you know, because that's where it's at, you know, because we don't have it, we don't have it, you know, we don't have anything reflecting our reality, and so the same thing is like in theater to me, it's very powerful because like in shadow of a man, most of the play just has female characters up there, down, you know, down stage, and they're talking the way our families talk to each other and that he is and the, you know, the otters and the mother, all that, and the kitchen and watching the veil as I mean, all of the things that are just

things that we recognize as our home, and the thing to me that's very powerful is that through theater, these women are given validity as human beings, you know, and nobody's even ever, you know, outside of ourselves, no one thinks twice about us, so I said we're non-events, you know, we're insignificant, but you put them down stage, man, you know, center stage, spotlight, you know, and the woman's talking about her reality and her language, and she becomes, you know, talking about empowerment, I mean, it empowers her and she because she becomes human, that's it, just human, in a world that doesn't, you know, a think of women of color, Chicanas as human, Indian women as human, you know, so, sort said. Do you feel that the mainstream feminists would have, uh, senior in a different light if you were not also lesbian writer? Well, it depends on which mainstream feminists you're talking about because for that, there's mainstream feminists, I always think of sort of like all the, you know, the national organization

of women or, you know, you know, that sort of thing, Ms. Magazine, that sort of thing, and so I think that as a, to be a lesbian within that context is a hazard, it's a liability, you know, so if you're talking about that, no, I think being a lesbian, they ignore me, you know, but when you're talking within the context of, for example, women fest, which is not the mainstream movement, but it's a movement that fundamentally still is very much with its own limitations, very much committed to still working on a community-based level, you know, so there's still doing bookstores and rape crisis centers and that, you know, where it's still oriented on the level of meeting specific needs within various communities. So that's not mainstream, but within that community, within that, the history of that grass, level of grassroots organizing, even though it has been oftentimes very racist and

classes in its analysis and practice, those grassroots women's movements, et cetera, they have always been spearheaded by lesbians, you know, they have always, lesbians have been the backbone of that, of the grassroots movements, women's movement. So in dealing with them, yes, being a lesbian is a plus, you know, so it depends on which community you're talking about. And I still really love that I love reading lesbian, I love reading and writing things that are specifically about what it is to be a lesbian, about our desire, you know, and I think for the most part, I'm very disappointed, you know, by the majority of lesbian literature that I read, you know, and I've kind of stopped reading it, and the majority being written

is by angle of women and it's sort of like everything happens in political meetings, you know, and, you know, the sensuality is missing, it's very rhetorical and, you know, I just want to, you know, so to me, I'm very committed to writing it the way I live it, the way I feel it, you know, and I think sexuality is such an important aspect of one sensibility and it needs to be expressed, you know, so I like it when they, I feel good to read lesbian, out lesbian stuff to lesbians who will appreciate it, you know, regardless of their racial identity and I think they do, you know, and the thing about giving up the ghost which is very, very specific in its sensuality, the majority of people that went to see that play outside of the Chicano lesbians and Latino lesbians, because San Francisco has a huge Latino lesbian population for as most cities go, they were always there, you know, but also who came since it was a gay theater were, you know, majority were white lesbians and

they really responded to this stuff because it talked about, it was specifically sexual, you know, and at the same time, you know, trying to transform that into, you know, something deeper, you know, and they love, you know, they really loved it and I think that's great, I think we need that. Well, I think that's all, those are all the questions that I have unless there's something that you want to add. Nope. Oh, great. Well, I appreciate you taking so much time to talk about this, yeah, it's fun for me too. It's a real pleasure to meet you. I'm meant there. What are you doing, stuff, so are you going to be, are you going to be an advocate for you to hold your eyes the same, but I have nothing to do with it too.