About this item
From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherre Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother's decline, and also tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora.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, Cherre 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 well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother's memory fails, Moraga is 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.
About the Author
Cherríe Moraga is a co-editor of THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK: WRITINGS BY RADICAL WOMEN OF COLOR, republished in a new edition by SUNY Press in 2015. As a political and literary essayist, she has published several collections of writings, including A XICANA CODEX OF CHANGING CONSCIOUSNESS -- Writings 2000-2010. Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lambda Foundation's "Pioneer" award, among many other honors. Her most recently premiered play, 'New Fire: To Put Things Right Again,' which she also directed, opened at Brava Theater Center in San Francisco in 2012. A collaboration with visual artist, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, over three thousand people witnessed the work. In 2017, Moraga will premiere a new work, the award winning 'The Mathematics of Love," a theatrical conversation with her forthcoming literary memoir, THE NATIVE COUNTRY OF A HEART - A GEOGRAPHY OF DESIRE.For nearly twenty years she has served as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies and in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She has mentored a full generation of published writers and playwrights who credit Moraga as one of their most influential teachers. Cherríe Moraga is an activist writer, who sustains an engaged schedule of appearances on college campuses, conferences and community settings both nationally and internationally. She is also a founding member of La Red Xicana Indígena, an advocacy network of Xicanas working in education, the arts, spiritual practice, and indigenous women's rights.
