Talk to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
This Bridge Called My Back, first published in 1981 and edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, is a landmark anthology of writing by women of color in the United States. It collects essays, poems, letters, and personal testimonies from Black, Latina, Asian American, and Indigenous women who felt excluded from both mainstream feminist movements and movements organized around race alone. The book argues, in the editors' framing, that these women had to be bridges — spanning the gaps between struggles — and that this position was as exhausting as it was necessary.
The anthology's central argument is that identity cannot be neatly divided. The contributors write from experiences in which race, gender, class, and sexuality are inseparable. Audre Lorde's influence is palpable throughout, though the collection gives voice to writers less widely known at the time, including Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, and Mitsuye Yamada. The book predates the term "intersectionality" — coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 — but it describes the phenomenon with unusual precision and emotional force. The contributors are not interested in ranking their oppressions; they are interested in naming them all, and in the connections between them.
What it gets right
- 1.
Women of color occupy multiple, simultaneous identities — racial, gendered, classed — that cannot be analyzed one at a time without distorting their experience.
- 2.
Mainstream feminism in the 1970s often reproduced the racial hierarchies it claimed to challenge, centering white women's concerns at the expense of the coalition.
- 3.
The 'bridge' metaphor captures both the value and the exhaustion of mediating between movements: always translating, rarely fully claimed by either side.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana playwright, poet, and activist whose other works include Loving in the War Years and Heroes and Saints. Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004) was a Chicana cultural theorist and creative writer best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, published in 1987. Together they edited This Bridge Called My Back in 1981 when both were emerging writers working outside academic institutions. The anthology won an American Book Award and became a foundational text in women's studies, ethnic studies, and queer theory curricula.
