Native Country of the Heart

Moraga, Cherrie

ISBN 10: 1515936341 ISBN 13: 9781515936343

Publisher: Tantor Media Inc, 2019

Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherrie 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 gender-queer body and lesbian identity. As her mother's memory fails, Moraga is also driven to unearth forgotten remnants of a U.S. Mexican diaspora, its indigenous origins, 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.

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