SOURCE: "(Re)Claiming the Race of the Mother: Cherríe Moraga's Shadow of a Man, Giving Up the Ghost, and Heroes and Saints," in Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Twentieth-Century Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, 1996, pp. 95-116.

In the following essay, de Foor Jay examines mother-daughter relationships in Shadow of a Man, Giving Up the Ghost, and Heroes and Saints.

Cherríe Moraga's courageous voice first emerged in the 1980s and has since become a significant one for Chicana, feminist, and lesbian studies. It has been heard in several genres: poems, fiction, essays, and plays,¹ sounding the theme of betrayal, informed by various myths and legends in the Chicano/Chicana culture. She focuses, in particular, on the myth of La Malinche. In the pattern of Malinche, a woman who does not conform to prescribed roles is labeled La Vendida, the "sell-out," or La Chingada, the "traitor" (also...