The initial idea to put together This Bridge Called My Back stemmed from a women’s retreat that Gloria Anzaldúa attended in 1979; she had been extended a scholarship as a Third World woman to attend the retreat for free. Once there, she realized she was the only Third World woman in attendance, and she felt uncomfortable and tokenized by the white women at the retreat. This experience was not new, but it became the catalyst for Anzaldúa and Moraga to begin articulating their need to expand the concept of feminism at the time to address the racism against, and exclusion of, Third World women and women of color in the feminist movement. The issues they address are twofold: Third World women are treated as invisible, or “other,” by the largely middle-class, white feminism of the era, and the impetus to educate and justify their experiences as women is unjustly burdened on these Third World women and women of color. Moraga clearly lays out the issue of mainstream feminist ideology:

rather than using the privilege they [white feminists] have to crumble the institutions that house the source of their own oppression—sexism, along with racism—they oftentimes deny their privilege in the form of ‘downward mobility,’ or keep it intact in the form of guilt (58).