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About
Julia Alvarez’s statement about the place of Cherríe Moraga’s work in Latina letters refers to a series of remarkable, blazing accomplishments in the distinguished artistic and scholarly career of this writer. It would be difficult to think of any individual in the general field of Latino culture whose work and influence covers as many disciplines and interests as Moraga’s does. Beginning with two key publications which Alvarez surely means to reference—This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983)—Moraga and her women of color feminist cohort began the work of solidifying a movement that permanently disrupted the dominant narratives of gender, indigeneity, race, sexuality, feminism and literature itself. Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, founded by Moraga along with Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Hattie Gossett, among others, published the two aforementioned books. The press was the first publishing company run autonomously by women of color. This Bridge Called My Back, co-edited with the late, influential Gloria Anzaldúa and including a foreword by Toni Cade Bambara, is the now-classic collection of writings that first declared the ways in which hegemonic feminist thought had ignored how women of color—Latinas, indigenous women, black women, Asian women, among others—were integral to feminist work. Its first edition sold nearly 100,000 copies. Before the coinage of the term intersectionality, Bridge brought the complicated multiplicity of oppression and resistance to bear in creating a new definition of feminism as well as a new framework for activism. In The New York Times in 2015, Gloria Steinem named Bridge one of the best books on feminism ever written. It is indeed one of the key texts of the modern movement and Cherríe Moraga’s “La Güera,” an account of wrestling with her own mixed race identity and how it led her to a politic of anti-colonialism, is one of its most oft-referenced contributions. Ask any Latina writer of a certain age who it was that introduced her to her sisters and she will name Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, also co-edited by Moraga, which was the first such anthology and one of the early signals to isolated writers around North America that they were not alone. Partly via access to university educations, a “first generation” of Latina writers was able to turn the cuentos their mothers told them and their own stories into literature, beginning the long road toward mainstream publication and the canon. Moraga’s first solo publication, Loving in the War Years (South End Press