Cherríe Moraga

• Name — Cherríe L. Moraga • Born — 25 September 1952 • Birthplace — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Occupation — * playwright • writer • poet • activist • distinguished professor • Subject — * Feminism • Chicana studies • Education — Immaculate Heart College • Alma Mater — San Francisco State University • Notable Works — This Bridge Called My Back (1981) • Partner — Celia Herrera Rodríguez • Awards — Critics' Circle; PEN West; American Book Award

Moraga was born on September 25, 1952, in Los Angeles County, California. In her 1979 article "La Guera", she wrote of her experiences growing up as a child of a white man and a Mexican woman, stating that "it is frightening to acknowledge that I have internalized a racism and classism, where the object of oppression not only someone outside of my skin, but the someone inside my skin." Moraga has cited her mother as her main inspiration to become a writer, stating that she was an eminent storyteller. As an adult, she changed her surname from Lawrence to Moraga because the name was not hers by blood, and she identified more with her mother's side and culture. Moraga attended Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, gaining a graduated bachelor's degree in English in 1974. Soon after attending, she enrolled in a writing class at the Women's Building and produced her first lesbian poems. In 1977, she moved to San Francisco, where she supported herself as a waitress, became politically active as a burgeoning feminist, and discovered the feminism of women of color. She earned her master's degree in Feminist Writings from San Francisco State University in 1980.

Themes in her writing include the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race, particularly in cultural production by women of color. Moraga's work was featured in Tatiana de la Tierra's Latina lesbian magazine Esto no tiene nombre, which sought to inform and empower Latina lesbians through the work of writers like Moraga.

Moraga is openly gay, having come out as a lesbian after her college years. In "La Guera", Moraga compared the discrimination she experienced as a lesbian to her mother's experiences being a poor, uneducated Mexican woman, stating that "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". After coming out, Moraga began writing more heavily and became involved with the feminist movement. In Loving in the War Years, Moraga cites Capitalist Patriarchy: A Case for Socialist 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."

• Illustration — Moraga speaking in 2000

From 1994 to 2002, Moraga published a couple of volumes of plays through West End Press of Albuquerque, NM. She 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. She has written and produced numerous theater productions. She is currently involved in a theatre communications group and was the recipient of the NEA Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award. In 2009 she received a Gerbode-Hewlett foundation grant for play writing. Watsonville: Some Place Not Here Moraga's 1996 play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, was commissioned by the Brava Theatre Center with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and had its world premiere at the Brava Theater May 25, 1996. It won the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and was winner of the Fund for New American Plays Award from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

• Giving up the Ghost (1986) • Shadow of a Man (1990) • Coatlicue's Call/ El llamado de Coatlicue (1990) • Heroes and Saints (1992) • Shadow of a Man (1992) • Heart of the Earth: A Popol Vuh Story (1994) • A Circle in the Dirt (1995) • Watsonville: Some Place Not Here (1996) • The Hungry Woman (1995) • Circle in the Dirt (2002) • Digging Up the Dirt (2010) • New Fire: To Put Things Right Again (2012). • The Mathematics of Love (2016)

• "Art in América Con Acento" (1994). Anthologized in Women Writing Resistance: essays on Latin America and the Caribbean (2003). Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press.

• Alarcón, Norma. "The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism." Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology. Eds. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991. 28–39. • Allatson, Paul. "'I May Create a Monster': Cherríe Moraga's Hybrid Denial." Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies 11-12 (1999/2000): 103-121. • Allatson, Paul. "Cherríe Moraga." The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Vol. 3: 1520–23. • Arrizón, Alicia. "Cherríe Moraga." 50 Key Figures in Queer US Theatre. Eds. Jimmy A. Noriega and Jordan Schildcrout. London and New York: Routledge, 2022. 170-174. • Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. • Ikas, Karin Rosa. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. • Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. "Cherríe Moraga." Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Ed. David William Foster. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. 254–62. • Vivancos Perez, Ricardo F. Radical Chicana Poetics. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. • Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. "Cherríe Moraga." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 82: Chicano Writers First Series. Eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley. Detroit: Gale/Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1989. 165–77. • Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. "De-constructing the Lesbian Body: Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Ana Barale and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 595–603. • Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.