Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

"This memoir's beauty is in its fierce intimacy." --Roy Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 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.

Biographies & Memoirs

Moraga, Cherríe

Community & Culture

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness features essays and poems by Cherríe L. Moraga, one of the most influential figures in Chicana/o, feminist, queer, and indigenous activism and scholarship. Combining moving personal stories with trenchant political and cultural critique, the writer, activist, teacher, dramatist, mother, daughter, comadre, and lesbian lover looks back on the first ten years of the twenty-first century. She considers decade-defining public events such as 9/11 and the campaign and election of Barack Obama, and she explores socioeconomic, cultural, and political phenomena closer to home, sharing her fears about raising her son amid increasing urban violence and the many forms of dehumanization faced by young men of color. Moraga describes her deepening grief as she loses her mother to Alzheimer’s; pays poignant tribute to friends who passed away, including the sculptor Marsha Gómez and the poets Alfred Arteaga, Pat Parker, and Audre Lorde; and offers a heartfelt essay about her personal and political relationship with Gloria Anzaldúa.Thirty years after the publication of Anzaldúa and Moraga’s collection This Bridge Called My Back, a landmark of women-of-color feminism, Moraga’s literary and political praxis remains motivated by and intertwined with indigenous spirituality and her identity as Chicana lesbian. Yet aspects of her thinking have changed over time. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness reveals key transformations in Moraga’s thought; the breadth, rigor, and philosophical depth of her work; her views on contemporary debates about citizenship, immigration, and gay marriage; and her deepening involvement in transnational feminist and indigenous activism. It is a major statement from one of our most important public intellectuals.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Duke University Press

Last Generation: Prose And Poetry

United States

Canadian Scholars Pr

Poems, stories, and essays describe the political and personal implications of being a gay chicana in modern America

Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pas por sus labios

South End Press

The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry

A classic work by award-winning author Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation is an electric mix of prose and poetry that continues conversations started in the beloved books This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. Highly politicized and intensely personal, Moraga's work dares to imagine the mythic nation Queer Atzlán: a brave vision for gender, sexuality, race, art, nationalism, and the politics of liberation. Moraga crosses literary genres to ruminate on the paradox of being at once inside and outside the myriad struggles and communities—interlocking and often at odds—that spur her art and activism. Speaking from her experience as a queer Chicana activist/artist, Moraga is committed to building a broad politic of solidarity and justice for all dispossessed people. With fierce honesty and incisive political analysis, Moraga offers more than an inspiring portrait of the struggle of an activist artist—she helps us see the world as it is and dream it up anew.

A classic work by award-winning author Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation is an electric mix of prose and poetry that continues conversations started in the beloved books This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. Highly politicized and intensely personal, Moraga's work dares to imagine the mythic nation Queer Atzlán: a brave vision for gender, sexuality, race, art, nationalism, and the politics of liberation. Moraga crosses literary genres to ruminate on the paradox of being at once inside and outside the myriad struggles and communities?interlocking and often at odds?that spur her art and activism. Speaking from her experience as a queer Chicana activist/artist, Moraga is committed to building a broad politic of solidarity and justice for all dispossessed people. With fierce honesty and incisive political analysis, Moraga offers more than an inspiring portrait of the struggle of an activist artist?she helps us see the world as it is and dream it up anew.

A new edition of Moraga's seminal work on identity, sexuality, history, and the politics of Chicana feminism.

Loving in the War Years

Moraga, Cherr'e

Antología de ensayos, narraciones personales y poemas escritos por mujeres de ascendencia chicana, latina, indígena, asiática y africana --en suma, mujeres de color-- que viven en los Estados Unidos. Esta puente, mi espalda es la traducción y adaptación al español de la antología This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color que redactaron y recopilaron Cherríe Moraga y Gloria Anzaldúa, chicanas geniales e innovadoras de familias humildes. Las múltiples autoras de Esta puente, mi espalda manifiestan una amplia variedad de perspectivas culturales y planteamientos de feminismo que van mucho más allá de las preocupaciones de feministas de las clases profesionales y adineradas. 
 Las redactoras chicanas de Esta puente, mi espalda han reavivado la forma femenina de puente que se vio en la poesía del castellano antiguo. 
********************************************************* 
 Esta puente, mi espalda is the Spanish translation of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga with translations by Ana Castillo and Norma Alarcón. Adapted for a Chicana and Latina readership, Esta puente, mi espalda contains personal narratives, essays, and poems by radical women of color in the U.S. -- including Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldúa, Chrystos, Nellie Wong, Aurora Levins Morales, and many more. 
 The Chicana editors of Esta puente, mi espalda have rekindled the feminine form of puente (bridge) that existed poetically in old Spanish.

Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundistas En Los Estados Unidos

Castillo, Ana

Morago, Cherrie

Ism Pr

Antología de ensayos, narraciones personales y poemas escritos por mujeres de ascendencia chicana, latina, indígena, asiática y africana --en suma, mujeres de color-- que viven en los Estados Unidos. Esta puente, mi espalda es la traducción y adaptación al español de la antología This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color que redactaron y recopilaron Cherríe Moraga y Gloria Anzaldúa, chicanas geniales e innovadoras de familias humildes. Las múltiples autoras de Esta puente, mi espalda manifiestan una amplia variedad de perspectivas culturales y planteamientos de feminismo que van mucho más allá de las preocupaciones de feministas de las clases profesionales y adineradas. 
 Las redactoras chicanas de Esta puente, mi espalda han reavivado la forma femenina de puente que se vio en la poesía del castellano antiguo. ************************************************************ 
 Esta puente, mi espalda is the Spanish translation of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga with translations by Ana Castillo and Norma Alarcón. Adapted for a Chicana and Latina readership, Esta puente, mi espalda contains personal narratives, essays, and poems by radical women of color in the U.S. -- including Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldúa, Chrystos, Nellie Wong, Aurora Levins Morales, and many more. 
 The Chicana editors of Esta puente, mi espalda have rekindled the feminine form of puente (bridge) that existed poetically in old Spanish.

Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundisats En Los Estados Unidos (Spanish and English Edition)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moraga, Cherríe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Moraga, Cherríe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moraga, Cherríe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010

Last Generation: Prose And Poetry

Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pas por sus labios

The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry

The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry

Loving in the War Years

Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundistas En Los Estados Unidos

Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundisats En Los Estados Unidos (Spanish and English Edition)