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