Native Country of the Heart

"[Written] with a poet‘s verve.... This memoir‘s beauty is in its fierce intimacy." -Roy Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review 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, Cherríe 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 a 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 driven to unearth forgotten remnants of a US Mexican 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 her mother. "A masterpiece of literary art." -Michael Nava, Los Angeles Review of Books "Poignant, beautifully written." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review "A defiant, deep and soulful book about all our mothers, mother cultures, motherlands and languages." -Julia Alvarez, national bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies