Book
Native country of the heart : a memoir
Edition
First edition.
Publication Information
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
Physical Description
viii, 242 pages ; 22 cm
Summary
"Writer and activist Cherríe Moraga's love letter to her 'unlettered' mother is also an intimate understanding of the U.S.-Mexican diaspora by the celebrated coeditor of the groundbreaking anthology This bridge called my back. Moraga's memoir 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. As Moraga charts 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 self-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. "--Dust jacket.
Contents
- Prologue: una salta pa'tras
- Coyote's daughter
- Something better
- Little rascals
- What ever happened to Normal Rockwell?
- The other side of the tracks
- Just eat your chicken
- Body memory
- Martin
- Mission girls
- Mind-field
- Don't ask, don't tell
- Nothing México couldn't cure
- Training ground
- Old school
- A rolling stone
- Like the heron
- The mother of the bride
- "A very nice man"
- Halloween shuffle 2003
- A mother's dictum
- Elvira's country
- Sweet locura
- Send them flying home
- Sibangna
- Reunion
- Por costumbre
- Expressions
- Some place not home
- Now and zen
- When they lose their marbles
- The wisdom of dolphins
- Soft spots
- Sola con los dioses
- Coyote crossing
- Roundhouse
- For the record: an epilogue.