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Native Country of the Heart
Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir | Cherrķe Moraga
9 posts | 5 read | 12 to read
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherrķe 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, Cherrķe 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.
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MEGR
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ā€œHow egotistical we are to believe that when someone dies, they leave their spirit with people. Yes, I carry my mother‘s DNA, but she left herself equally with that patch of earth, where she had always offered her best self.ā€

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MEGR
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ā€œ...it came to me that we are as much of a place as we are of a people; that we return to places because our hands served as tender shovels in that earth. That those yellow-peach and cream colored roses, that wild yerba buena, las verdolagas covering the earth like loosely woven cloth to catch the steady drop of rose petal and leaf, this was my mother‘s constant site of comfort.ā€

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MEGR
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ā€œFor my mother, meals were the site of familia. Her capacity to feed us was her capacity to mother us. So when we were not present, she ate with the awareness of a place reserved for us at her table.ā€

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MEGR
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ā€œWe return as refugees to that forgotten landscape which we recognize as home.ā€

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MEGR
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šŸ“–Saturday evening simplicity ā¤ļø

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tholmz
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Pickpick

Incredible story and beautifully told.

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merelybookish
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Next up on audio, a memoir about a mother-daughter relationship and Mexican-American history.
Turns out, Moraga has been an important Chicano writer and queer feminist thinker for years. But this is the first I've heard of her. šŸ˜•

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suzisteffen
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I love this author so freaking much. Thank you, LatinoUSA, for having her on! Immediate TBR add. #memoir #latinx

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Well-ReadNeck
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Pickpick

Second great memoir this weekend!!!

Absolutely gorgeous memoir. Spanish phrases were beautifully woven into the narrative and i especially loved how the author sticks strictly to her POV in the moments of her life, allowing the narrative to unfold to the reader as it did for her without the benefit of hindsight or foreshadowing. #netgalley

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