chicana

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.

Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students-the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated-turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.

We__e afraid the others will think we__e agringadas because we don__ speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be __eal_ Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience.