Reading assignment for Friday April 13, 2012. Your reply (under Comments) is due before class. Your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about both of the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.
Cherríe Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (1-77)
Moraga spends a good deal of her forward and first essay defining both terminology and her place in it. How does her positioning compare to others you’ve read? What terms would you use to define yourself?
In an earlier work, The Last Generation, Moraga wrote “An art that subscribes to integration into mainstream Amerika is not Chicano art.” How are these essays informed by, expand or under cut this theory?
How does Moraga conceive of generations in her writing? How does she connect her parent’s generation to her own? To her children’s? What is your reaction to her agreement with Sherman Alexie’s quote about his wife and children? To her discussions of grief and anger?
What are Moraga’s issues with feminism? What does she take from it? How does it inform her as a mother, a daughter, an artist? What does she call / name the “weapons of the weak”?
Moraga describes in the beggining of her book the struggles she faces raising mixed Chicano/a children. She writes, “I don’t know exactly how to teach counter courage to my children.” (8). Moraga understands that she must teach her children about their Indian heritage so they can be proud of their history, but at the same time she understands that the world will look down on their Indian heritage. Moraga has a dilema of teaching her kids to be proud of their history, yet not really show their pride of their heritage in public. Women have the same dilema when teaching their daughters how to be responsible, smart,and non dependant on others. Yet, their daughters must learn to be subservient almost, to men when they get out in the world so they don’t step on their toes.
When Moraga wrote, ” The United States does not need to be defended; it needs to be cured (33)”. She is feed up with America always being able to blame their problems on someone else, rather than take responsibility for their mistakes. America almost never admits to their mistakes, if they can get away with it. It seemed in the Chicano movement, when it wasn’t as productive as it should have been, the men and some women used the Chicana Feminist as a scapegoat to blame for their problems. What should’ve been does is, the Chicano movement members should’ve diagnosed their problem, rather then try to blame the women, because at the end of the day, the Chicano movement problems never got solved.
Moraga says”our bodies and our experiences are that complex site through which our political work is mediated (60)”. This I think explains the complexities of the Womens movement. Not only are their different races of women in the movement, they have different problems, they also have different views on their issues, then every woman has her own complex goal she wants to attain throughout the womens movement. Such complexity is misunderstood by men and even women in the Feminism movement.
Cherríe Moraga’s A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness is very candid and audacious. Unlike other Chicana authors, she embraces fear, betrayal, “inspiring hatred,” aging, etc., which are things that are not normally considered in that manner. Most Native Americans and other indigenous cultures don’t fear aspects of life like death because they recognize the ties humans have to the earth and nature. It is a much more healthy way of viewing life because presently everyone is apprehensive about aging more so than death. Even though she says one becomes fragile and weak, we keep evolving and changing which is also reflected through nature. Also death is at times a rebirth or the birth of consciousness. Moraga’s ancestry has immensely shaped her identity because she draws her strength from them and women who paved the way for other women of color especially, for her a Chicana Lesbian. When she says “May we continue to make art that incites censorship and threatens to bring the army beating down our desert door,” she is not advocating for futile rebellion but rather to continue questioning and challenging what exists because people should not take things at face value. Women of color come from a lineage of warriors who fought until the day they died and risked everything in the name of liberation. She further emphasizes dedicating one’s life to a cause by listing people who are in a way martyrs, famous activists and scholars, dedicated to living a life that is faithful to their beliefs. Moraga is not disturbed by the idea of death or aging because a life should not be measured by its length but what was done in that time which she expresses “we are born and die within a particular epoch and within that era we may affect, through small or grand acts of courage, whatever changes we can upon this pitiful planet” (32). Age should not be a barrier in regards to change because it can transpire through many forms. Moraga demonstrates that it can even begin through language. She chooses to spell “Xicana” with a X in order, to reclaim the Indian identity that has been erased and suppressed by the Western world. Also by calling herself queer, a term that is seen as offensive in the LGBT community, she is reappropriating it. Moraga finds beauty in everything that is called the “other” because it is proof of human resilience and heart.
Moraga seems to think of generations, for example hers, her parents’, and her childrens’, as groups of people who are not too different from each other since they face similar experiences in one way or another. A way to see this is in her casual mentioning of the types of values her and her parents have. She states, “we live as if our values shape the world at large…This may be the truest fiction we inhabit, but it sustains us. For now.” This intro into a completely separate story allows us to understand that she doesn’t have to point out similarities when she can casually mention them. Shared appearances is another way in which she ties generations as seen in her explanation of how she felt when seeing Linda’s troubled son, and how akin he was to her own son despite a major age difference. She compares the experiences in such as a means of cautiousness, for example: when she couldn’t take her eyes away from Linda’s son, she saw her own not only in appearance but also in possible future events that her child will face in his adulthood.
Her reaction to Sherman Alexie makes sense. I’ve been grateful for being who I am and the fact that both of my parents come from Mexico, but I’ve also felt guilt in terms of my own possible offspring. That is, I’ve felt guilt because I don’t think I will be able to give my children that experience of being of a single race, despite my own like of it. Like Sherman Alexie has said, having a child of minority status is a form of revolutionary act, I agree. But so purposefully arranging it can be said to have occurred through direct influence by the oppressors.
It is always interesting to be able to read a writer’s work from different stages of their life. It is even more interesting when the work is of personal and political nature, because these are inherently things that change over time. It is a gift to have come to know the Cherrie Moraga from This Bridge Called My Back, who helped kick the Chicana (and the Women of Color) Feminist movement into high gear, and to be able to revisit her in more recent years, because we can see in what ways she and the movement have progressed. Just coming off of reading Gloria Anzaldua, I was reading Xicana Codex very much through a Gloria Anzaldua colored lens. The two were the premiere Chicana Lesbian writers (though Anzaldua disliked the qualification) and already I can see the differences in their portrayals of their sexuality. The are alike in the way that they both embrace this othered part of themselves, this queerness, that does not fit into hegemonic white male society. But the manner in which these things are embraced is very different. Anzaldua was all for occupying those in-between areas, and holding up contradicting sides to arrive at something new. She was all about being on the fringe and refusing to define herself by the rigid binaries that are forced on all of us, so her queerness is a self-professed progression from that. Moraga doesn’t really have this gray area in regards to her sexuality. She is definitively a lesbian, born that way. She writes from the perspective of a lesbian, of a Chicana lesbian. This is not only a perspective that informs her work, her lens of Chicana lesbian is her work. There is of course nothing wrong with that, because we are what we are and our self-definition provides us a way to see the world. It is just endlessly interesting to see this juxtaposed with Anzaldua, who rejected the title of “chicana lesbian writer”, who rejected the notion she was born a lesbian. But thank god we even have both of their works to juxtapose, because their spectrum of queer Chicana views paints a fuller picture of the Chicana experience.