my deepest sense of myself has not quite "caught up" with my "woman-identified" politics - Cherríe Moraga

I urge my students que se aprovechen el momento of their college years; to look beyond conventional career-oriented concerns toward something deeper, toward the discomfort and wonder of real conciencia, which comes, as the educator Paulo Freire understood, through a self-determined, self-defined education. I never let my students forget that their elite education wants them to do otherwise, to look away from the pueblo-self as the source of knowing. Through the practice of creative writing, I have found students uncovering glimpses of knowledges heretofore obscured and untouched.

The challenge is to remain as culturally specific and culturally complex as possible, even in the face of mainstream seduction to do otherwise.

…It’s more that the conventionality of the model makes it a domesticized view of desire and also that really what we want is the same things as heterosexuals: the nuclear family, marriage; all of these components which from a feminist perspective we’ve already critiqued. Not every lesbian is a feminist, but if every lesbian were a feminist they shouldn’t want this either, because it really contradicts a whole movement that critiqued the nuclear family and the hierarchy of the nuclear family…