As promised, in honor of Latino Books Month, I am choosing books by Latinos from my own bookshelf that I think are must reads. Today’s book has changed lives. Cherrie Moraga’s book Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Paso por sus Labios, originally published in 1983, is a collection of poetry and essays that follow Moraga’s coming of age and coming to terms with the intersecting dynamics of being a chicana and a lesbian. An excerpt from the poem Passage:

there is a very old wound in me
between my legs
where I have bled, not to birth
pueblos or revolutionary
concepts or simple
sucking children
but a memory
of some ancient
betrayal

This book is an inspiring call to speak what was never to be spoken, of an identity three times silenced: woman, chicana, lesbian, and how speaking and bleeding them together can be revolutionary.

You can buy it via South End Press