Cherríe Moraga

"A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness features essays and poems by Cherríe L. Moraga, one of the most influential figures in Chicana/o, feminist, queer, and indigenous activism and scholarship. Combining moving personal stories with trenchant political and cultural critique, the writer, activist, teacher, dramatist, mother, daughter, comadre, and lesbian lover looks back on the first ten years of the twenty-first century. She considers decade-defining public events such as 9/11 and the campaign and election of Barack Obama, and she explores socioeconomic, cultural, and political phenomena closer to home, sharing her fears about raising her son amid increasing urban violence and the many forms of dehumanization faced by young men of color. Moraga describes her deepening grief as she loses her mother to Alzheimer's; pays poignant tribute to friends who passed away, including the sculptor Marsha Gómez and the poets Alfred Arteaga, Pat Parker, and Audre Lorde; and offers a heartfelt essay about her personal and political relationship with Gloria Anzaldúa. Thirty years after the publication of Anzaldúa and Moraga's collection This Bridge Called My Back, a landmark of women-of-color feminism, Moraga's literary and political praxis remains motivated by and intertwined with indigenous spirituality and her identity as Chicana lesbian. Yet aspects of her thinking have changed over time. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness reveals key transformations in Moraga's thought; the breadth, rigor, and philosophical depth of her work; her views on contemporary debates about citizenship, immigration, and gay marriage; and her deepening involvement in transnational feminist and indigenous activism."--Back cover.

"The Hungry Woman, grounded in the Medea legend and Mesoamerican mythology, reinvents the story of Aztlan in the "near future," visualizing a world in which the Chicano/a nation has won a living space but betrayed the principle of equality of the fighters for the revolution. Passionate, earthy, and tragic, full of heroism and villainy, the play calls on a new audience to deal with an imagined political reality." "The Heart of the Earth is a feminist revisioning of the Quiche Maya Popul Vuh story, with lessons for modernity about the evils of racial doctrine, patriarchy, and greed. Moraga's improbable heroes, vatos locos returned from the deadly underworld, reveal that the real power of creation was always closer to home. The script, a collaboration with puppet maker Ralph Lee, was created for the premiere production of the play at the Public Theatre in New York in 1994."--BOOK JACKET

"In this third volume of plays by Cherrie L. Moraga to be published by West End Press, we confront the changing California landscape of the 1990s, as anti-immigration, anti-youth, and English Only legislation sweeps across the farmworker towns and urban communities of the state." "Both plays were developed through interviews conducted with residents in the two towns of Watsonville and East Palo Alto. Both towns stand in the shadow of the first culture of the University: East Palo Alto is a poor neighborhood of Stanford University south of San Francisco, while Watsonville, further south, has seen the University of California at Santa Cruz devour the nearby Pacific coastline." "These plays document the incursion of the white world of power and authority into poor, racially mixed communities. But they are more than reports of the times. In vividly realized drama, Moraga shows the communities mounting their own bold resistance to cultural domination and the threat of economic enslavement. The indigenous and feminist consciousness of the two communities brings them together to struggle against their oppressors, from within and without."--BOOK JACKET.

Heroes and Saints & Other Plays is Chicana playwright Cherrí¬e Moraga's premiere collection of theatre. Included are: Shadow of a Man, winner of the 1990 Fund for New American Plays Award; Heroes and Saints, winner of the Dramalogue, the PEN West, and the Critics Circle awards, as well as the Will Glickman Prize for Best Play of 1992; and Giving Up the Ghost, first published by West End Press in 1986, and now presented here in its revised stage version.

At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o'clock and she is getting the cabbage on. 'Hello, Our Ilary,' she says; my family has named me aspirationally, but aspiration doesn't stretch to the 'H'.Giving Up the Ghost is award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel's wry, shocking and uniquely unusual five-part autobiography of childhood, ghosts, illness and family.It opens in 1995 with 'A Second Home', in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, a death which leaves her deeply troubled by the unresolved events of childhood. 'Now Geoffrey Don't Torment Her' begins in typical, gripping Mantel fashion: 'Two of my relatives have died by fire.' Set during the 1950s, it takes the reader into the muffled consciousness of her early childhood, culminating with the birth of a younger brother and the strange candlelit ceremony of her mother's 'churching'. In 'The Secret Garden' Mantel moves to a haunted house and mysteriously gains a stepfather. When she is almost eleven, her family flee the gossips and the ghosts, and resolve to start a new life. 'Smile' is an account of teenage perplexity, in a household where the keeping of secrets has become a way of life. Convent school provides a certain sanctuary, with tacit assistance from the fearsome 'Top Nun.' In the final section, the author tells how, through medical misunderstandings and neglect, she came to be childless, and how the ghosts of the unborn, like chances missed or pages unturned, have come to haunt her life as a writer.

This groundbreaking collection reflects an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color. from Google Books