Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherrie L. Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation. 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. As Moraga charts her mother's journey-from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer's-she traces her own self-discovery of her genderqueer body and lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother's memory fails, Moraga is driven to unearth remnants of the Mexican American diaspora and an American story of cultural loss. Poetically wrought and filled with insight into intergenerational trauma, Native Country of the Heart is a reckoning with white American history and a piercing love letter from a fearless daughter to the mother she will never lose.

From the editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherrie Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother's decline, and also tells the story of the Mexican American diaspora

About the Author
CHERRIE MORAGA is a writer and an activist. 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. Moraga is a professor in the Department of English at UC-Santa Barbara, where she will institute Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought & Art Practice. She is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts and Rockefeller fellowships.


Book Information
ISBN 9781250251176
Author Cherrie Moraga
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint St Martin's Press
Publisher St Martin's Press
Weight(grams) 232g
Dimensions(mm) 201mm * 124mm * 19mm