Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

Written by Cherrie Moraga

Narrated by Cherrie Moraga

Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie 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 Cherrie 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781977330994

Cherrie Moraga

Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English.

Reviews for Native Country of the Heart

[sriddell_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Moving mother/daughter memoir.

Mother Elvira is a Mexican American doing her best to raise her family. In spite of no education and a oddly distant relationship with her husband, Elvira manages to raise a strong family.

The daughter Cherrie tells the story of growing up being both and neither Mexican and American. She tells the story of discovering and coming out as a lesbian woman. And ultimately caring for her mother through Alzheimer's disease.

The writing is beautiful, but really meanders around a lot.

[mahallett · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

all about her mother. I am not interested in other people's mothers. her mom was crazy. . so was mine.

[librolindsay · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was awesome...devastating and awesome, the way Moraga explores so many facets of identity as well as the meditation on caring for ailing parents.