(Q: Did people in your family tell stories about their own lives?) A: Some of the stories had to do with animals. My father told about black ghost do… - Gloria E. Anzaldúa

When you go through a heavy difficult time, and you don't have the resources, you can't go to anybody in the society or in the community, you finally fall back on yourself. What I did was that I started breathing. I had to like breathing and to start meditating in order to get through the pain and that whole difficult period. And all that reconnected me with nature, from which I had gotten away. So this is why I like to live at the ocean, like I do now here in Santa Cruz. You know, to live near the ocean means that you just go there and then get another infusion of energy. All the petty problems you have fall away because of the presence of the ocean. It therefore is a real spiritual presence for me. I feel that way with some trees, the wind, serpents, snakes, deserts, too. So in the periods that I was going through, my very darkest times when there was nobody there for me, I realized that at least I had to be there for me.

May our voices proclaim the bonds of bridges.

I did participate in the Chicano Movement. Actually, I started out with MECHA, a Mexican American youth organization. Also I was involved with different farm worker activities in South Texas and later in Indiana. When I became more recognized as a writer, I started articulating a lot of these feminist ideas that were a kind of continuation of the Chicano Movement. But I call it "El Movimiento Macha." A marimacha is a woman who is very assertive. That is what they used to call dykes, marimachas, half-and-halfs. You were different, you were queer, not normal, you were marimacha. I had been witnessing all these Chicana writers, activists, artists and professors who were very strong and therefore very marimacha. So I named it "El Movimiento Macha" as the Chicano Civil Rights Movement kind of petered out. And there were women like myself, many Chicanas, who were already questioning, having problems with the guys who were ignoring women's issues. Therefore, in the eighties and nineties, there are all these women-Chicana activists, writers and artists-around, and I listen to them, read them and reflect their influence on my life as well. What you could say is that in the sixties and the early seventies the Chicanos were at the controls. They were the ones who were visible, the Chicano leaders. Then in the eighties and nineties, the women have become visible. I see a lot of Chicanas when I travel. They come up to me, and while we are talking I ask them about their role models. They mention names like Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa and other Chicana authors. It is, and will continue to be, women that they are reading, that they respect. Not the guys. So it-the Chicano Movement-has shifted into the Movimiento Macha.