An updated edition combining two classic works of Chicana and queer literatures, with a new introduction by renowned writer and luminary, Cherríe Moraga.
In celebration of the 40th anniversary since its original publication, this updated edition of Loving in the War Years combines Moraga's classic memoir with The Last Generation: Poetry and Prose, resulting in a challenging, inspiring, and insightful touchstone for artists and activists--and for anyone striving to foster care and community.
Cherríe Moraga's powerful memoir remains as urgent as ever. A classic in Chicana as well as queer literature, Moraga's book explores the intersections of her Chicana and lesbian identities, moving gracefully between poetry and prose, Spanish and English, personal narratives and political theory. Moraga recounts navigating the world largely as an outsider, circling the interconnected societies around her from a distant yet observant perspective. Ultimately, however, her writing serves as a bridge between her cultures, languages, family, and herself, enabling her to look inward to forge connections from otherwise inaccessible parts of her interior world, to show how deep self-awareness and compassionate engagement with one's surroundings are key to building global solidarity among people and political movements.
What People Are Saying
“Cherríe Moraga is a literary giant and spiritual genius whose visionary and courageous work and witness constitutes a prophetic light in our dark times of imperial decay!” Cornel West
“When future generations look back at the first generation of Latino/a literature, Cherríe Moraga's formative work will be one of the cornerstones of what by then will be American Literature. Without her work, many of us would not have felt the solidarity and power or had the critical vocabulary or understanding to give voice to our own stories.” Julia Alvarez
“[Loving in the War Years is] an important book of the purest perception, courage, intensity, power. Innovative, heartachingly beautiful at times, deeply honest—it can act as a change-making book.” Tillie Olsen
"Sophisticated, visceral, rigorous, and relentless, Cherríe Moraga’s writings are as essential as ever. Bridging poetry and politics, her interrogations of the self and society are a lifelong project she has gifted new and returning readers. Even in her earliest writings, Moraga reaches to the future through the bifurcated paths of her personal journey in queerness, Chicanidad, and solidarity with all colonized peoples. Moraga’s indispensable interrogations of language and art demands nothing short of complete freedom for all bodies. It is a war cry that continues to liberate as it echoes across decades and generations." Carribean Fragoza, author of Eat the Mouth That Feeds You
About the Author
Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, essayist, and playwright whose professional life began in 1981 with her coeditorship of the avant-garde feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000–2010 and the memoirs—Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood and Native Country of the Heart. Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, a Lambda Literary Foundation award and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award among many other honors. As a dramatist, her awards include an NEA, two Fund for New American Plays Awards, and the PEN/West Award. Moraga is a Distinguished Professor in the department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where, with her partner Celia Herrera Rodríguez, she co-founded Las Maestras Center for Xicana/x Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Praxis.