Moraga, Cherríe

Cherríe Moraga, Chicana playwright, poet, essayist, and lesbian activist, is one of three children of an Anglo father and a Mexican American mother. Born in Whittier, California on September 25, 1952, Moraga earned a Bachelor of Arts in English (1974) at Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, and a Masters of Arts in Literature (1980) at California State University, San Francisco. In 2007, Moraga was awarded the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, and in 2008, a Yaddo Artist Residency Fellowship. Moraga's groundbreaking prose has advanced knowledge on the intersections of race, sexuality, and nationality, with lesbian and Chicana feminism providing a focal lens for her work.

Best known as coeditor of the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), which won the 1986 Before Columbus American Book Award, Moraga exposes the contested spaces of marginality common to working-class Chicana queer identity in her writings. Family, particularly the power of mother in Chicana culture; opposition to dominant Anglo and Chicano sexism; race and gendered divisions within mainstream feminism; and social inequalities of class, sexuality, and place permeate Moraga's poetry and prose.

The autobiographical Loving in the War Years (1983) captures Moraga's intense bond with her mother; her father's initial desertion; her Mexican American duality; her exodus and return to her Chicana community; and her spiritual journey in locating her voice as Chicana, lesbian, writer, and activist. The Last Generation (1993), which, like many of her works, code-switches between English and Spanish, advances a heartfelt plea for a politics of survival among the disenfranchised. Moraga's self-described la guera, or “fair-skinned,” a conflicted attribute that contributed to her passing as Anglo in childhood and is an assimilated outcome her mother desired, is a prominent theme in her writing as is the Chicana borderland plight, which embodies the indigenous, class-based feminist struggles salient to her contemporary works.