ABSTRACT
As we celebrate Bridge’s impact on feminism and in our own lives, we must continue challenging ourselves to build upon the stories, theories, and poetry both told and untold. We continually struggle with the expectations of asserting a politicized, gendered, classed, racialized, sexual, linguistic, spiritual identity and are more at peace when we do not meet those expectations. Complexity is our reality. Our life struggles have taken us across the bridge of feminism and back home again to a fuller understanding of who we are. With Respect, Alicia and Susana
s ix
Dear Editors, Your back is my mother’s back, a back, as your volume indicates,
despised by the sexist, white supremacist, classist, heterosexist dominating culture of the United States. Your back, my mother’s back, is a back I learned early in life to turn my back on. Now, though, after reading your book for years, reading that has helped me outline some of the contours of the hate and tyranny I had childishly internalized and so directed against my mother/my self, and reading that has encouraged me to move ahead on the strength of your book, your back, I have bridged my way back from the grim terrain of white hate to my mother’s vibrant alluvium of iridescent love.
