"A New Connection, a New Set of Recognitions": From This Bridge Called My Back to this bridge we call home

By all accounts, 1981 was a turning point for women's writings. This was the year the first edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, was published by Persephone Press, a Massachusetts-based, white feminist press. Bridge began in 1979 as a response by Anzaldúa to feeling like an outsider, as the token woman of color at a women's retreat just north of San Francisco. What began as a retreat conversation of encouragement between two individuals turned into group activism, bringing together the voices of women of color as a response to the Left's "shaky and shabby commitment to women" and white feminism's exclusion of issues of race and class (Moraga, Preface xiii [1983]). Bridge was a revolutionary statement in its formation and in its intention. "This Bridge Called My Back," wrote Moraga and Anzaldúa in the introduction to the first edition,