Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

by Cherríe L. Moraga

From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe 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, 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 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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Feminism, Latinx, Biography Memoir

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 2, 2019

About the author

Cherríe Lawrence Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at Stanford University in the Department of Drama and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her works explore the ways in which gender, sexuality and race intersect in the lives of women of color.

Moraga was one of the few writers to write and introduce the theory on Chicana lesbianism. Her interests include the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race, particularly in cultural production by women of color. There are not many women of color writing about issues that queer women of color face today: therefore, her work is very notable and important to the new generations. In the 1980s her works started to be published. Since she is one of the first and few Chicana/Lesbian writers of our time, she set the stage for younger generations of other minority writers and activists.

Moraga has taught courses in dramatic arts and writing at various universities across the United States and is currently an artist in residence at Stanford University. Her play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, performed at the Brava Theatre Company of San Francisco in May, 1996, won the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Fund for New American Plays Award, from the Kennedy center for the Performing Arts. Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Moraga started Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1983, a group which did not discriminate against homosexuality, class, or race. it is the first publisher dedicated to the writing of women of color in the United States.

Moraga is currently involved in a Theatre communications group and was the recipient of the NEA Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award Her plays and publications have won and received national recognition including a TCG Theatre Residency Grant, a National Endowment for the art fellowship for play writing and two Fund for New American Plays Awards in 1993. She was awarded the United States artist Rockefeller Fellowship for literature in 2007.In 2008 she won a Creative Work Fund Award. The following year, in 2009 she received a Gerbode-Hewlett foundation grant for play writing.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Valerity (Val) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting memoir about growing up in a Mexican/American family in the US with a strong mother Elvira, also called Vera. Elvira tells of being hired out with her siblings by their father as a child to pick cotton in California in Imperial Valley. A mother-daughter story where the mother has quite a history as the backbone of the family for decades in both Mexico and America. It also tells of the author, Cherrie Moraga's, journey as a lesbian in that culture as she found her voice and began speaking out and getting involved in different issues. Then there are some problems many have as their parents' age but perhaps handled in her mother’s unusual fashion at first. I found it to be an involving enough read and learned enough on a number of topics to make it worthwhile, figuring that others would like it also. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author Cherrie Moraga, and the publisher for my fair review.

RATING: 3.5 of 5.0 Stars

Also seen on my BookZone blog:
https://wordpress.com/post/bookblog20...

[Moonkiszt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went into this book blind, with no background at all. It began with Californio / Mexicano memories, and having been born and raised in LA, that spoke to my little girl heart. Although we were not cut from the same cloth - there were many similarities to our remembrances.

Both my parents are white, but we were poor-poor-poor. Counting carrots, swiping oranges and avocadoes and pomegranates on walks. The library was the evening entertainment. There were loud fighting families on both sides of us, no matter where we lived, and all streets had a melodic sound: Galena, Granada, Benito, Calumos, Coalinga, Bodega, Cabrillo (don't pronounce the lls!), San Antonio, Lindero. In school we spoke English half the day, and the other spoke Spanish.

There was a poetical rhythm to the narrative, about the author's coming up in her family, finding herself, her natural proclivities opposed to the family's "party" lines - especially the mama's . . . .I remember finding myself landed, post-puberty, in opposition to all the things my mother wanted me to be. Later she said it wasn't so, but at the time it was very much that way. Not easy to stay, very easy to go. But as years roll on, we keep coming back to that nucleus, trying to convince it we are ok, we are justified in our differences from the family doctrines, whatever they are.

I was very moved as her mama began to lose herself. I was my mom's caretaker (among many) for lots of years as words fell out of her head, and some stories morphed into untruths, and some truths stayed put and inconveniently trotted out at odd times. I remembered as the author discussed this difficult time. I wept, remembering my own hands holding on to mama's that last night.

Overall it was not an easy book to read. It wasn't happy for me. But I felt a sisterhood, of a type, with Ms. Moraga. A daughter's story that echoed mine in many ways. I hope she's found hope and joy, and resolution that breeds contentment. I've found some, but in my persistent, massive flaws find a girl who's still out there lookin'.

[Lupita Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

“To disappear into Mexicanism is not enough; to disappear into Latinidad is even less of who we are; to disappear into Anglo-America, our colonization is complete. We were not supposed to remember.”

Something that has lingered over me in my parenthood journey was all the times my Mamá said to me growing up “Watch, when you have your kids, you will see how hard this is.” As the days turn into weeks and months I often come back to this thought with only one response “Things are hard but you could have done better.” Carrying a resentment I didn’t know I had & guilt about even thinking about it, is something that has plagued me.

In NATIVE COUNTRY OF THE HEART, I found my same feels carefully dissected as Cherríe Moraga unfolds the rich and complicated history of her Mamá along side her own story. Peeling back the layers of her own Mamás humanity not to try and understand her but to honor her as she begins to lose her to Alzheimer’s disease.

As I was reading this I often thought about how we in society are accustomed to honoring our loved ones, how we tend to share only stories of happy memories. I thought about only the great memories I have of my own Mamá growing up & how those might honor her but fail in truly honoring her as a human on this earth. Because to include the difficult moments as well would honor and paint a better picture of her life. In telling you the tough things it would show you everything she had to go through to give me the best childhood she could.

Cherríe Moraga captures the fine line between accepting a Mamá as someone who is like every other human that has made mistakes without dismissing her own experiences as a daughter and for that this Mother/Daughter memoir is truly something special.

[Queralt✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful memoir about Cherríe and her mother Elvira. It made reminded me big time about losing one of my grandmas to dementia (not what Elvira experiences, but some things were similar) - how heartbreaking it is and how we learn to appreciate when we get our loved ones back, even if for five minutes.

I loved the use of Spanish without translation too. All of it was just gorgeous.

[Ai Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really beautiful memoir, tracing Moraga's relationship with her mother and her mother's history. I think it didn't click with me entirely because of where I'm at in my life, and so some of Moraga's long mourning for her mother as her mother succumbed to Alzheimer's felt repetitive to me, but might connect better to someone who has had to go through something similar. Regardless, Moraga's explorations of her family's dynamics and what it means to lose a matriarch were really powerful, and this is a book I might return to in the future.

[Emma Colón]

cherríe moraga is truly a genius in queer chicana feminist thought and it was such a pleasure to get to read her memoir. i can’t even tell you the amount of times i cried while reading this. it’s about alzheimers, the fuerza + strain of latinidad in the US, losing personal and cultural memory, and the experience of being a lesbian daughter. so heart-wrenching and honest. it was exactly the story i needed.

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous and so very sad.

[Patrick Maloney · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! An absolutely beautiful story from Cherríe Moraga. First of all, Moraga’s voice reading this book was so calming and peaceful, I would definitely recommend the audiobook.

Moraga shares the story of her mother, Elvira, growing up on both sides of the US-Mexico border, of her own childhood and coming out as a lesbian, and ultimately her mother’s passing from Alzheimer’s. Moraga writes about her and her mother’s lives in an almost poetic way - weaving in commentary on borders and immigration, biracial identity and colorism, religion, feminism, queer issues and more.

I would highly recommend this work from Cherríe Moraga for anyone looking to hear a nuanced family story that will evoke many emotions and self-reflections. 5 stars!

[Laura Sackton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a bit too meandering for me. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what it was about it, as its very much the story of Moraga and her mother. It just felt like it jumped all over the place, like there wasn't a core narrative thread running through the whole thing, or even a thematic one. It was a collection of stories and memories that felt somewhat randomly glued together. Although I suspect that people who enjoy memoir more broadly than I do will find plenty to love in this one.

[Lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very touching, tears, smiles, thoughts and remembered feelings of my own Mother, stirs up many emotions, mostly Love. New insight into Alzheimer’s and what families suffer. I thank my son for the gift of this book, it truly was a gift.

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked this book, not so much for what it told but for what it made me think of: our relationship with our parents, how we deal with the fact that they are aging and won't stop doing so, the inevitability of death for everyone, and how all relationships we have in our lives affect ourselves in all possible ways. cherrie moraga should be read across the world; i just wish this book were translated into spanish so i could give it to my own mother, as she herself is battling against the impending aging of my grandparents.

[Octavio Solis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautiful memoir of Cherríe Moraga tracks her relationship with her mother Elvira, not only through the changes that she undergoes in her heart but through the history of our collective Native soul. Unflinchingly personal in its examination of the raw wounds that we measure family by, Cherríe
recounts the long troubled life of Elvira as she struggles to find her independence in a world of conflicting loyalties and allegiances. She's a stern parent, sometimes a violent parent, a warrior coping with the collective "amnesia" of our indigenous past. And still there's love. This book drips with so much love. Even when she depicts the agonizing and debilitating effects of Alzheimer's Disease as it wreaks its havoc on her beloved mother (and the collateral damage brought on all her family), Cherríe expresses the devout and conflicted love she has for her. This memoir was an education for me, teaching me how to view the choices of our Mexican Mother, our Matriarch, through the unblinkered eyes of our "Indio herencia", preparing me for the sad palliative days that loom ahead for us all.

[Cristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars! I listened to Moraga read this memoir (after T told me most of the big picture of the book on a drive from SF to LA, so I knew what to expect, but still wanted to hear it myself). Cherrie Moraga was a big name in the feminist and women of color literary scene I fell into in college in 1987-91 at UCSC, with This Bridge Called My Back. I hadn't heard of her since and was intrigued and pleased to learn she's made a living as a writer. Her mom's story of 1920s Tijuana and her own story of being a radical feminist were worth listening to, as well as how she dealt with losing her mom, relevant to me as my own mom ages. She's not a dynamic reader, but it's her voice and her accent with all the Spanish that fit perfectly. I lost the thread a few times because of out of order timelines, but it didn't matter much; the story was all there. I'm a fan of self discovery and introspection in light of our ancestry and history of our people in the world, and this book was fulfilling. I appreciated the queerness and frankness of her telling personal stories, too. Oh and she's a poet, so the language was at times mystical and lyrical and always lovely.

[Linda Doyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moraga’s heartbreaking memoir touched me deeply. My mother, who recently passed away, suffered dementia for several years, into her late nineties. I wish that I’d had Moraga’s memoir to read a few years back. I would have taken some comfort from it.

Moraga writes about her mother’s Alzheimer’s and her eventual death. The emotional upheaval that one suffers—anger, guilt, deep sorrow, hope, frustration—when a parent falls to this disease is clearly depicted. Moraga writes with poetic imagery. Of course, she is a poet. But she also writes in straightforward terms about her mother’s early life as well as the later days of illness. Moraga also goes into detail about her own coming to terms with her homosexuality, her long-term relationship, and her children. But her mother’s story is the heart of this book and by far the most intriguing part of it.

[Heidi Burkhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written book. I listened to the audiobook version which was read by Moraga.

Outstanding all of the way around.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure I liked this book, but I read it in 2 days and it spoke to many things for me that we don’t usually name.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lesbian Chicana icon. I don’t know who writes these Goodreads book descriptions but I find it ironic and disappointing that it describes Moraga as a queer Latina, when she writes explicitly here about the cultural context of mestizaje and Native Mexicanos, especially Chicanos like herself, born in the U.S.
She even writes out that “To disappear into Mexicanism is not enough. To disappear into Latinidad is even less of who we are. To disappear into Anglo-America, our colonization is complete.”

Moraga is a witness to the Spanish Mission system and its genocidal erasure and dislocation against Native Californians, among other things… this piece in particular frames all that against the titular native country of her heart, which is to say her own dying mother as heartland. The book is inseparable from her mother Elvira and the relationships that defined her life, unveiled through the course of sickness and Alzheimer’s that eventually claimed her.

I sometimes felt bad for my unimpressed review of Crying in H-Mart as it unexpectedly kept drawing a lot of strangers’ feedback and likes over the years, but I feel more validated in saying what I said because look, here is Cherríe Moraga, writing her own grief memoir and ode to mama with all the self-awareness I felt Ms. Zauner lacked, and how much more beautiful a journey it was for all of us, Chicana or not.

3.75

[Tanya b · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was first introduced to Cherrie Moraga as an undergraduate in 1991 (This Bridge Called My Back) - she was the first Chicana Lesbian I was ever knew existed and she was completely foreign to me.

In Native Country of the Heart, I am once again introduced to a woman I can so deeply relate to. With this memoir of her life via Elvira Moraga, her mother, I am immediately once again in similar foreign territory. My own mother is aging and shares many qualities that Elvira had in her twilight years. Is it also coincidence that my father is also a hardworking white man who exists under the blade of my mother's tongue as Cherrie's father had been?

I loved this book but it was also deeply painful. The search that Cherrie creates for her indigenous roots and examination of the assimilation of her family is remarkable and one that pokes at my long-time curiosity with my own Saavedra/Hildalgo familia. Perhaps I can be satisfied with quiet conversations with my mother in my future, precious days with her.

[Feisty Harriet · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This is a beautiful and heartbreaking memoir, Moraga draws from several generations of her family who are Californian, Mexican, and Native. She herself is queer and closeted, then queer and out, and how she balances family, career, health, relationships, history and future is just...beautiful. The last chunk is about the decline of Moraga's mother due to Alzheimers and dementia and how that impacted their family. This isn't an explosive book, it's more a casual walk down the path of Moraga's family and life, with stories and asides and mini essays along the way.

[Sandra Del Rio · Rating 4 out of 5]

”For the first time, we imagine the possibility of peace for her and awareness, a slow, gentle letting go of all attach-ment, including her children. For the first time, the illness holds the fragile promise of benevolence.”

Am sobbinggggg I just appreciate so much that Moraga would write and share this with us this means so much to me. I’m also a sucker for mother-daughter books; especially Mexican mother-daughter books in Tijuana!! <3

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The way Cherríe writes and envoks such beautiful visions of past and present, personal and collective history reminded me a lot of Solnit. A definite addition to a library if you love her. Hearing about Cherríe's mother story and deeply rooted Mexican tradition for family in relation to her own queerness and found family was really lovely.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moraga writes beautifully and movingly about her life and coming out. It is a vivid personal history of her immediate family, especially the long, unraveling loss of her mother who had alzheimers and dementia. I wish she'd gone into the NYC queer feminists of color movement in the 1970s more specifically, especially the organizing. A great audiobook too as it's read by the author.

[ame · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot describe how meaningful it was to receive this SIGNED book as a gift last year. I knew just how important it was, and how every word deserved to be savored, from the moment I got my grimy little hands on it. I can confidently say that this helped me feel the least alone I’ve felt in a while.

Where there is inherited trauma, there is also the joy embedded in storytelling, dance, and other communal activities. Sometimes I feel so alone by how scarred and disfigured my family tree feels, the branches heavy with addiction and violence. But there is always this feeling of strength carried by the women in my family, a feeling I have never felt adequately expressed anywhere else.

Cherríe Moraga, you are a gift to people like us everywhere, and I hope your words stick around forever.

[josie · Rating 5 out of 5]

i cried

[M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Native Country of the Heart is Cherríe Moraga's memoir about and relationship with her mother, Elvira. A friend and I went to go see Moraga speak at the book's release at the People's Forum in New York City, and we were both tearing up with deep feels in relation to the passages she read to us. Us raised in the United States with immigrant Mexican parents. It was powerful to hear someone from another generation (and a formative generation for many–Moraga co-edited This Bridge Called My Back with Gloria Anzaldúa) respond to audience questions on current political quandaries relating to xicanx identity and latindad, which is fitting given the book itself works through many thoughts about Mexicanism/Mexican'ness as it has/becomes generationally diluted and removed from indigenous origins (especially people whose family lines come from lands in and around what is now the US/Mexico border.

Cherríe Moraga talks about the world surrounding her mother and the circumstances it wrought on her over the years, invariably including her own withdrawn white father and his presence in their family's life. Not just him though–the effects of assimilation/aspiration into white American society come under scrutiny time and again. And not just that, but the ways patriarchy and the brutal surveillance of a colonizer Catholic society contains someone designated 'woman' in said society.

For me, Native Country of the Heart was one of those powerful/personal reads about someone's own life and own mother and the mysteries of her life that can only be pieced together from a lifetime of observation/reflection and stored memories imbued into that person's objects and dwelling spaces. The genocidal settling of what we now call Mexico and the United States by what we now call Europeans remains a haunting, and we're all caught up in it no matter who we are on this land. I think these sorts of memoirs that reflect upon one's own family, that ruminate over the circumstances of violence leading to your family's assimilation and forced forgetting–it's just one step, a baby beginning step to cycle breaking. Maybe.

[Jenny Yates · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book & wholeheartedly recommend it. It’s the story of Cherríe’s mother, Elvira, a strong, spirited, and complicated woman from the Mexican-American border. Elvira was always the one to take care of everyone, including her rather insubstantial gringo husband. And then she starts to lose her memory, eventually succumbing to Alzheimer’s.

This is about Cherríe’s ups and downs with her mother – adulation, rejection, and then slow understanding of the woman she is. At the same time, she goes deeper, looking into her family roots in Mexico and on the border. She embraces them, connecting them with her mother, and then has to let her mother (and all her mother’s memories) go.

The writing is beautiful and evocative.

Here Cherríe Moraga writes about her Elvira’s connection to the spirit world:

< Elvira, she who had la facultad, as Gloria Anzaldúa called it, to carry all those ghost stories inside of her. How was I to honor them and their carrier in a twenty-first-century AngloAmerica where to reside with the spirits is to reside in a foreign country? We were so far from home, it felt to me – my mother and me – living out her final years in this nation of true amnesiacs that could not contain her calling.

But that small white house, a house for which I believed I held no nostalgia, a house I had to leave in order to live, a house I marked as the site and source of my rebellion, had been country to my mother. It had allowed her permission to know what she knew and to reign madre over all of it, even as it occulted itself within the parameters of that narrow lot of crabgrass and rose garden in the smoggy basin of Los Angeles County. >

Here, she writes about Elvira’s dying:

< She is being called. I feel it, the pull on her from the other side, but I do not allow myself to recognize this, not in my body. It is too simple, too ordinary, too subtle: this shift from one world to the next. The room is animated with spirit; there is no mistaking it, but we are programmed in this culture not to believe what we feel. We deny and argue against this deeper knowing. >

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know what to expect with this book and what I got was truly a gift. Moraga's memoir of life with her mother is so heartfelt and touching that I cried more often than probably intended. There is true love within the pages of the books, along with struggles with reconciling what was and what is.

As someone who has followed Moraga's career, I can't help but feel honored that she continues to write and share from her perspective as an elder, able to put into context some of the aspects of her earlier work. While this book was focused on her relationship with her mother, with some peeks into other aspects of her life, this gives me hope that she has more stories to tell.

I highly recommend this, especially if you are someone who has lost an elder to Alzheimer's disease.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cherrie Moraga is a poet and Chicana lesbian activist. Here she traces the life story of her mother, Elvira, from a 1920s girlhood spent working to support her family in the gambling mecca of Tijuana, and the floating casinos of Caliente; through her marriage to a white American, and Cherrie's own childhood in the Pasadena of the 1950s and 60s, and her political and sexual awakening in the 70s; and finally, Elvira's long journey into dementia and death. While also touching upon Cherrie's later life, the fierce, unbending Elvira is the heart of this book, and it is through her mother's story that Cherrie attempts to reconnect with her Mexican and Indian roots. 'Native Country of the Heart' is beautifully written, and a reminder of the devastation wrought by colonisation and patriarchy.

[Briayna Cuffie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m unsure of how to describe this book. The intertwining of her and her mother’s lives is done well, even somewhat through multiple lenses of relationships.

It’s in the last third of the book where there seems to be more discussion of the Indígena of Chicano peoples. Cherríe doesn’t get too personal about her own life, but gives just enough for you to be able to do the work yourself of connecting her relationship with her mother/the way she was raised with her approach to life.

There’s a lot of connection to be made and discussion to be had about elder care, mental decline, and ethnic differences in approach to elder care.

[Janilyn Kocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir mostly pertaining to her mother, but Moraga interspersed some of her life in it as well. It was very interesting to read the span of her mother's life and snippets from her father's family. Most of the book is devoted to her mother's eventual decline and struggles with Alzheimer's and how it impacted the entire family. It's a touching telling of a woman whose life spanned many decades and who grapples with just the daily task of living. I love the cover picture. Thanks to NetGalley for the advance read.