Overview

Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherríe Moraga's love letter to her unlettered mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherríe and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline. As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. While Moraga reflects on her mother's journey--from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer's--she traces her own discovery of her queer body and lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother's memory fails, Moraga unearths shards of what it means to be Mexican in the United States, of her diaspora's Indigenous origins, and of an American story of cultural loss.

Full Product Details

9781665216630

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Reviews

A sympathetic portrait of Mexican-American feminism (both in mother and daughter) . . . Poignant [and] beautifully written.-- Kirkus Starred Review A sympathetic portrait of Mexican-American feminism (both in mother and daughter) delivered in a poignant, beautifully written way. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Expertly told in Moraga's lucid prose. -- Los Angeles Times Moraga waxes poetically, philosophically and politically about the importance of memory, treating its preservation like a Holy Grail. With this book, Moraga is keeping her mother on her earth, capturing her, tethering her to the living. -- Ms. magazine [Written] with a poet's verve...This memoir's beauty is in its fierce intimacy. -- New York Times Book Review

Author Information

Cherrie Moraga is a writer and cultural activist whose work serves to disrupt the dominant narratives of gender, race, sexuality, feminism, indigeneity, and literature in the United States. A cofounder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Moraga coedited the highly influential volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 1981. After twenty years as an Artist-in-Residence in Theater at Stanford University, Moraga was appointed a professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018, where, with her artistic partner Celia Herrera Rodriguez, she instituted Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought and Art Practice. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award and a United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature. Cherrie Moraga is a writer and cultural activist whose work serves to disrupt the dominant narratives of gender, race, sexuality, feminism, indigeneity, and literature in the United States. A cofounder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Moraga coedited the highly influential volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 1981. After twenty years as an Artist-in-Residence in Theater at Stanford University, Moraga was appointed a professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018, where, with her artistic partner Celia Herrera Rodriguez, she instituted Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought and Art Practice. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award and a United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature.

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