Prologue

It is an enormous privilege to practice the work of writing as a life; not a life style, but a life. I was never talented enough to get away with any easy fictions not wrought out of the viscera of my own life; never gifted enough to find that the unsaid statement between the line was rendered so beautifully by the line itself, that my reader would return to the poem to unravel my covert message. No, for most of my life, I have been worker writer, always trying to catch the reader by the literary shirttails before she rushed out the door on a errand, an ex-girlfriend’s plea, a mission, a meeting, a night at the club; always trying to get my would-be reader to stay home and away from the TV long enough to consider the prospect of a change of heart (mind). I have used my body, my sex, my love and relations to get the reader to pay attention. But most of all, I have used my mother.

“I am a white girl gone brown to the blood color of my mother,” I wrote in 1977, “speaking for her.” Thirty-five years later, I see that perhaps my writing was never really about me. Perhaps it was about “she” all along -- she without letters, she the mother of the first generation writer, the “she” that is our history and our future with every new MeXicana female worker who comes to or is born into these lands of an ill-manifested destiny. The she that could have been (and is) me.

Elvira Isabel Moraga was not the stuff of literature, not the stuff of movies. My Mother was not Julie Christie, the gracious amnesiac of the 2007 Alzheimer-themed film, Away from Her. She did not have blue piercing translucent eyes that emerged from an alabaster and radiant complexion, eyes which Dr. Zhivago froze his mustache off to track down some forty years earlier in the hinterlands of Russia.

She did not wear, as Ms. Christie had in the film, tasteful ivy-league wife sweaters nor make meaningful love upon parting from her husband. Nor could she enjoy a good work of literature or say words like “decorum” in referencing the quiet elegance with which she intended to enter her own private amnesia.

Few bemoan the memory loss of the unlettered. My mother – and her generation of Mexican American women – was to disappear quietly, unmarked by the letter of memory, the memory of letter. But when our storytellers go, taking their un-recorded memory with them, we their descendants go, too, I fear. So, this is not a book about Alzheimer’s. It is a book about memory. My mother’s failing memory convinced me of the body’s ability to remember, which long surpassed the logic of her ninety years and her ability to tell of it. It seems that when the body goes, memory resides in the molecules about us. We breath in the last exhale of our mothers’ breath. This is what they bequeath to us.

As they also bequeath their stories, if we, ourselves, are allowed to remember: this story of a one Mexican mestiza woman, born in 1914 in Southern California, just as the Mexican revolution came to a close. Hers is the story of our forgotten, the landscape of loss paved over by American dreams come true. Maybe that’s the worse of it, that Mexican dreams can come true in America at the cost of a profound senility of spirit.

Most Recent Book: From Duke University Press

Biografía

CHERRIE L. MORAGA PLAYWRIGHT, ESSAYIST, POET, ACTIVIST EDUCATOR . . .

Cherríe L. Moraga is playwright, poet, and essayist whose plays and publications have received national recognition, including a TCG Theatre Artist Residency Grant in 1996, the NEA's Theatre Playwrights' Fellowship in 1993, and two Fund for New American Plays Awards. In 2007, she was awarded the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature; in 2008, a Creative Work Fund Award, and in 2009, a Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation Grant for Playwiting.

Creative Non-fiction/Poetry/Essays . . .

Moraga is the co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which won the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1986. She is the author of the now classic Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (1983/2003) and The Last Generation (1993), published by South End Press of Cambridge, MA. In 1997, she published a memoir on motherhood entitled Waiting in the Wings (Firebrand Books) and is completing a memoir on the subject of Mexican American cultural amnesia entitled Send Them Flying Home: A Geography of Remembrance. This year Moraga also completed a new collection of writings -- A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000-2010, published by Duke University Press in 2011.

Plays/Theater

Moraga has also published three volumes of drama through West End Press of Albuquerque, NM. They include: Heroes and Saints and Other Plays (1994), Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt (2002), and The Hungry Woman (2001). In 2010, WEP will publish a volume of Moraga’s children’s plays, entitled Warriors of the Spirit. A San Francisco Bay Area playwright, Moraga has premiered her work at Theatre Artaud, Theatre Rhinoceros, the Eureka Theatre, and Brava Theater Center. Brava's production of "Heroes and Saints" in 1992 received numerous awards for best original script, including the Drama-logue and Critic Circles Awards and the Pen West Award. Her plays have been presented throughout the Southwest, as well as in Chicago, Seattle and New York. In 1995, "Heart of the Earth," Moraga's adaptation of the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation myth, opened at the Public Theatre and INTAR Theatre in New York City.

In 2005, "The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea" opened at The Pigott Theater at Stanford University, directed by Moraga and Adelina Anthony. In the years following, Moraga developed several new works, including: "Mathematics of Love," "Digging Up the Dirt" and “La Semilla Caminante/The Traveling Seed.” "Semilla," conceived and designed in collaboration with Alleluia Panis and Celia Herrera Rodriguez, opened in a workshop production with Campo Santo Theater of San Francisco on April 23-25, 2010. On July 30, 2010, Moraga's "Digging Up the Dirt" opened to a sold-out audience five-week run at Breath of Fire Latina Theater in Orange County, CA, in a co-production with See-what (Cihuat) Productions. Her most recent play, New Fire -- "To Put Things Right Again" was produced by cihuatl productions and Brava Theater in San Francisco in January 2011. A collaboration with Celia Herrera Rodriguez and the winner of the Gerbode-Hewlett Foundations Playwright's Award, the play was witnessed by over 3,000 people over its 12-day run.

Day Job

For over ten years, Moraga has served as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Drama at Stanford University and currently also shares a joint appointment with Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. She teaches Creative Writing, Xicana-Indigenous Performance, Latino/Queer Performance, Indigenous Identity in Diaspora in the Arts and Playwriting. She is proud to be a founding member of La Red Xicana Indígena, a network of Xicanas organizing in the area of social change through international exchange, indigenous political education, spiritual practice, and grass roots organizing.