I HEAR YOU SISTER: Women of Color Speak (to Each Other)

Racism, thick and oppressive, slapped me on the face from the first moment I set foot in the United States. From the streets of New York through Long Beach, Los Angeles, and finally Chicago, it continued to shock me every time I heard it or felt it. It still does. I arrived in the United States in 1970 and settled in Chicago's Southwest Side. Having come of age in the sixties, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I experienced, mostly through television, those stormy and radical years of demonstrations, hippies, and revolutionary changes in our everyday life. My classmates and I marched on the streets of Buenos Aires in solidarity with the Civil Rights marchers, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. We shared their struggles as well as their triumphs, albeit from afar. However, and paradoxically, nothing had prepared me for what I found in the U.S. and came to learn in the years following my arrival. It has been a long road but my journey continues. My own, personal struggle to bring justice to an unjust world, to dismantle racism and sexism, to break down myths and stereotypes about Latinas and African-American women continues. These days my activism centers on the classroom and the printed page. Through my teaching of literature, I instruct my students to look beyond the surfaces, to question what they know and see and hear. More importantly, I teach them that literature must be useful to their lives. I first read the collection This Bridge Called My Back (1) in 1981 for a class I took on feminist philosophy. At that time, I let it wash over me, I let it enter me. It was one of several texts we had to read for the class. But soon, it became the only book that mattered. I read it, then discussed it in class and, when school was over, took it with me on a long journey through Europe. It became my friend and confidante during lonely nights in strange cities. I identified with the women and their writing; they became my companeras who said the things I had been thinking of for years but had not been able to articulate. They showed me that what I had been and was feeling and thinking was not strange, unusual, crazy. They spoke for me and with me. Years later, in graduate school, I picked up This Bridge once again. It was for a class on African-American women writers and dialogics. And, when the professor spoke about Mae Henderson's essay Speaking in Tongues, (2) the proverbial light bulb flashed in my head. Anzaldua's Speaking in Tongues (3) came rushing out, flooding my mind with the connections between Latinas and African-American women, so obvious that I hadn't seen them until then, so obvious to me now that I don't understand why more work on this is not done. Gloria Anzaldua's Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers, one of the essays in the collection, was written over a period of five days. The first section serves as an introduction to the problems that Third-World women writers face in the United States. The second section intersects Anzaldua's privileged position as writer/teacher/publisher with her daily struggle against racism, sexism, and the Anglo-male-mainstream efforts to silence her. The third and final section offers readers a clear picture of the tasks at hand, the alternatives for the future. This essay is a conversation between Anzaldua's essay and the words of African-American women writers and scholars speaking through my elaborations and annotations. And, although dated, it is still relevant. Racism and sexism still live among us, still affect our daily lives. It is obviously a hypothetical conversation that needs to become a reality. For too long women of color in the United States have stayed in their communities, fought the same battles separately, and suffered similar casualties on their own. Yet, it is so transparently clear to me that we have much more in common than not. We are sisters in the struggle and must share the triumphs. Witness Anzaldua's opening line: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers: 21 mayo 80--Dear mujeres de color, companions in writing. …

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