A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness writings 2000 – 2010.”

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"In Gloria Anzaldua’s imaginings, her “nepantleras” would reside as (meta)physical “mestizas” within the matrix of a “new tribalism” a “borderland” free of that wounding “edge of barb[ed] wire” separation. This is a beautiful vision, but should not be mistaken as a strategy for resolving the disparities between economic classes, ethnic communities and women and men within a capitalist patriarchy. From my observation of sectors of the academic, and (even self-ascribed radical_ white queer and feminist communities, many are more than happy to subscribe to a politic like “new tribalism”, for it rejoins them with women of color and native peoples purely by virtue of their shared experience of “otherness” In it there is little explicit requirements for them to look at personal politics (that is, their own life) in relation to the historical and institutional exclusion by privileged whites of lower economic classes and people of color." Cherie Moraga, “A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness  writings 2000 – 2010.”

"I often wish that Gloria had examined more thoroughly in print the political implications and consequences of the philosophical tenets she forwarded as foundational for a new social activism. Her “new tribalism” is especially problematic in this sense. In 1997, Gloria stated that the first stage of her apprenticeship as a writer required “detribalization.” Knowing a bit of Gloria’s life, I understand this to mean that she had to leave home because its cultural restraints would have killed her – body and spirit. Freedom resided elsewhere. Her autobiographical writings remind us that, as Xicanos and Xicanas, our home tribes are so infected by colonialism – the Indian woman raped, our lands pillaged, our self-governance dissolved – that we are forced into psychic and physical displacement. These acts of colonialism were al sites of visceral knowing for Gloria and are a daily occurrence for tribal indigenous peoples all over this planet. Why then would she write of a “new” culturally inclusive tribalism when the culturally genocidal detribalization of Xicanas and Xicanos and other Indigenous peoples has occurred in part because Indigenous sovereignty has been virtually eliminated from the national discourse on both sides of the border? Perhaps, in this sense Gloria and I walk different roads as Xicana scribes; especially in the way in which such political contradictions, for me, often circumvent utopian imaginings. What I have come to believe through my own political and spiritual practice is that as marginalized peoples, we all have to make our way back to the home sites that have rejected and deformed us in order to reform them." Cherie Moraga, “A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness writings 2000 – 2010.”