Playwright, poet, and essayist Cherríe Moraga sees the world as a place where the body knows and “the land has memory,” as she states in this interview.
Moraga was born and raised in Southern California in the days when the civil rights, queer, antiwar, feminist, and environmental movements were changing the terms of public and private life. Her childhood home was just one long block from the San Gabriel Mission, established in 1771, and within view of the San Gabriel Mountains, smog allowing. Her mother was Mexican-American and her father Anglo-American, and this mixed identity factors into her work.
Her writings have shaped fundamental aspects of contemporary woman of color feminist thought, including debates on ethnic nationalism, indigeneity, sexuality, and social justice.
Interviewing Cherrie is Priscilla Solis Ybarra is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Texas.
PSY: Is environmentalism ultimately about justice, or is justice ultimately about our relationship with the earth?
CM: How do we write about environmental issues if not about injustice? Take Standing Rock, for example. The Sierra Club didn’t do that. This is not what they had in mind. And to act like somehow the Sierra Club members are better guardians of the earth than native people is to me one of the biggest lies. It is completely unconscionable. Their formula to protect so-called native land or pristine land absolutely has no relationship to the people that have a history of knowing how to guard the earth. Once you get consciousness and make political connections, you see that something like the Sierra Club is single-issue. As long as you have a progressive movement that’s a single-issue movement, it’s never going to be an effective movement. If you can’t deal with the impoverished conditions of the people who are living in the environment that you want to protect, it’s not going to work.
PSY: To what extent is our responsibility as writers, thinkers, and teachers to connect with those movements going on in other parts of the world? How do we balance our connections to the wider movements with our local efforts?
CM: I think those connections happen organically. My partner, Celia, and I belong to a group called La Red Xicana Indigena. Through that group we became aware of the Winnemem Wintu and their struggles around water rights. They are fighting for access rights to the McCloud River, which is the Winnemem River, where they have lived since the beginning of their existence. They are protectors of the salmon, that’s how they identify as a people. Through a series of connections, they began to work with aboriginal folks from New Zealand, who are also protectors of the salmon. Their elders are my age now, and those elders talk about how, back in the day, their elders described how the rivers used to be so thick when the salmon were spawning, you could walk across the river on the backs of those salmon! That’s such a great image. Talk about metaphor. But now, because of all of the diversions to take water to the Central Valley and to L.A., the salmon can’t even make it up to spawn.
The Winnemem are a very small nation of people, but they had this great moment when they learned that the eggs of their original salmon had been exported more than a century before, to the rivers of New Zealand. And so they journeyed to visit the Ma¯ori there and to bring their salmon home to revive the population here. It was this beautiful thing. That’s transnational environmentalism among indigenous peoples. There’s incredible progressive consciousness that comes with seeing how all of it is related.
To read more of Priscilla Solis Ybarra's article, please click here.
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