Short Synopsis
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.

Full Synopsis
Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherríe Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It 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. While Moraga reflects on 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 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.

"A sympathetic portrait of Mexican-American feminism (both in mother and daughter) . . . Poignant [and] beautifully written." -Kirkus Starred Review

"In crisp prose and poetic diction, Cherrie Moraga enlivens her irrepressible mother with shape and story, sadness and charm . . . Riveting and necessary." -Lius J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running

"A beautiful, painful, funny, heartening and heartfelt immersion in the life of one of the leading voices of Latino/a literature." -Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of Butterflies

"Cherrie Moraga's gravelly voice and impeccable pronunciation aptly convey the harsh lives of her family of origin." -AudioFile

Kirkus Review