Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: The feminist movement in the U.S. has tended to overlook Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years or to assimilate it into a more universal perspective on female equality which tends to ignore class and race distinctions. I view Moraga’s situation in U.S. society as causing her hysteria. Her moment of writing is a session of psychoanalysis. By reading the text this way, I take emphasis away from the idea of a universal identity of the female, and I am able to argue that what the text really presents the reader with is a heteroglossic moment of unrepressed language.

Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: In the foreword of Watsonville/ Circle in the Dirt, Cherríe Moraga, a lesbian Chicana poet, essayist and playwright, states that “the southern descendants of Native America” and their children, Chicanos (Xicanos), first “learn to swallow” the sentence, “No tenemos papeles (I have no legal documents),” when they cross the U.S.-Mexican border (vii). This statement signals that Moraga is conscious that Chicana/os, just as Native Americans in the U.S., are the indigenous, the dispossessed, and those who struggle to reclaim their connection to their homeland in which they will never be required to show legal documents. In the 1960s, Chicano/as as La Raza began to articulate this process of reclaiming their physical and spiritual homeland, Aztlán. The movement of La Raza to establish Aztlán was both political and aesthetic; however, it was also masculine. Chicana writers and poets, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Pat Mora, Ana Castillo, and Moraga herself, therefore, sought to express their different sense of place and community with their sexualized visions of “borderlands” or “nepantla (in-betweenness).”

For those Chicana writers, reclaiming their homeland was synonymous with recovering the body and language of women with mixed heritage—mestiza—as Anzaldúa theorized in her Borderlands/La Frontera. However little attention has been devoted to the concept of “borderlands” in terms of this process of recovery and rediscovery of the female body with its place with the natural environment, as seen in the writings of, for example, Terry Tempest Williams, whose prose and short stories often draw the critical attention of the ecofeminist readers.

The central themes that Moraga explores in her plays, such as Watsonville, Circle in the Dirt, and Heros and Saints, are inspired by actual social and environmental issues in San Francisco Bay Area. Like urban Indians who came to reside in urban areas through the government relocation program, Chicana/os in the Bay Area had to seek a relationship with la madre naturaleza (Mother Nature) in their diasporal situation in an urban environment. It seems to me that Moraga’s plays can be read as a form of ecofeminist praxis. Her sense of the “border” and her identity as a lesbian Chicana—also resonant with Anzuldúa’s theory of “the mestiza way,” are integrated into her performance on the stage, and this performance can be seen to represent Moraga’s activism against environmental injustice seriously affecting the physical and spiritual health of Chicana/os and other socially marginalized people in Bay Area in 1980s. Reading Moraga’s plays from an ecofeminist perspective, I wish to explore the ways in which her plays, converging language and bodily performance, are at the crossroads of Native American literature as the literature of indigenous consciousness and that of Chicana feminism in its repossession of the female body as a site of cultural and environmental resistance.