…The road that I have walked in my life as a mixed blood Chicana and as a lesbian has more and more put me…(pause) I am always the blood quantum that… - Cherríe Moraga

One of the deepest wounds Chicanos suffer is separation from our Southern relatives. Gloria Anzaldúa calls it a "1,950-mile-long open wound," dividing México from the United States, "dividing a pueblo, a culture." This "llaga" ruptures over and over again in our writing, Chicanos in search of a México that never wholly embraces us. "Mexico gags," poet Lorna Dee Cervantes writes, "on this bland pocha seed." This separation was never our choice.

Revolution is not only won by numbers, but by visionaries, and if artists aren't visionaries, then we have no business doing what we do. I call myself a Chicana writer. Not a Mexican-American writer, not an Hispanic writer, not a half-breed writer. To be a Chicana is not merely to name one's racial/cultural identity, but also to name a politic, a politic that refuses assimilation It acknowledges our mestizaje-Indian, Spanish, and Africano into the US mainstream.

Sometimes in the face of my own/our own limitations, in the face of such world-wide suffering, I doubt even the significance of books. Surely this is the same predicament so many people who have tried to use words as weapons have found themselves in-Cara a cara con el enemigo, qué valen mis palabras? This is especially true for Third World women writers, who know full well our writings seldom directly reach the people we grew up with. Sometimes knowing this makes you feel like you're dumping your words into a very deep and very dark hole. But we continue to write-to the literate of our people and the people they touch. We even write to those classes of people for whom books have been as common to their lives as bread. For finally, we write to anyone who will listen with their ears open (even if only a crack) to the currents of change around them. The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives. A privatism which keeps us back and away from each other, which renders us politically useless.