The gold- and silver-colored crucifix that hung opposite my childhood bed was only one of many that adorned the walls of my home, my school, and, of course, the church I attended. On early-summer mornings the bright, filigreed metal caught the rays that leaked around a too-narrow window shade and the dying Christ glowed as if electrified. At age eight I understood the principle of reflected light but didn’t yet grasp the concept of an afterimage—the result of photoreceptors retaining an impression after the eye is closed or upon looking away from the object. After waking one morning, I allowed

In “La Guera,” her famous 1979 essay about coming to racial self-consciousness as a light-skinned, mixed-race Chicana, Cherríe Moraga identifies first and foremost as a daughter: “I had no choice but to enter into the life of my mother. I had no choice.” This is, of course, a natural fact about how we all are born. But it is also a kind of alibi—an italicized plea for forgiveness in advance. From the beginning of her career, she has scavenged her migrant mother’s story for material applicable to her own emerging politics as a lesbian feminist. Those politics came to be