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Reviewed by:
  • Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir by Cherrie Moraga
  • Sandra K. Soto
Cherrie Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. 256 pp. Hardcover, $26; paper, $17; e-book, $10; audio CD, $25.

Cherríe Moraga’s latest book, Native Country of the Heart, is an exquisite borderlands love story. By turns joyful and heart-wrenching, this long-anticipated memoir about Moraga’s extraordinary love for, and deep curiosity about, her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga Lawrence (1914–2005), intricately weaves memory and storytelling, history, queer feminist poetics, and cultural geography. From Moraga’s pen any one of those projects would be a satisfying read. But Elvira’s life and Moraga’s painstaking efforts to understand and ease the “great llanto of discontent” (the sorrow) that haunts it (228) demands transnational detours, engagement with painful intergenerational and interpersonal conflict, and acute attention to place. Native Country of the Heart is Moraga at her best. She brings to every page the traits that have made her one of the most important Chicana feminist writers of our time: urgent determination to write against the cultural amnesia that she sees as everywhere stunting Mexican America, especially in its erasure of Indigeneity; unwavering feminist commitment to the personal as political; frank and bold self-critique; and, perhaps most importantly, fresh insight about the racialization of sexuality and desire.

“Elvira Isabel Moraga was not the stuff of literature,” Moraga tells us in the opening sentence of her prologue (3). Like most Mexican American women of her generation, Elvira’s childhood was filled with labor and domesticity rather than school and play. In the 1920s she was a cotton picker in the Imperial Valley, and in the 1930s a cigarette girl in Tijuana’s casino-based entertainment industry. The middle child of nine, she would become the young matriarch for the Moragas, a role that she maintained even after [End Page 89] marrying Joseph Lawrence in 1948 and raising her own three children, Moraga the youngest. Although not technically a single mother, the memoir makes a strong case for her as such, given Joseph’s apparent inability to share in the parenting, even when Elvira needed that support most. What makes Elvira’s story very much “the stuff of literature,” then, is what it reveals about the making of a life and family under oppressive conditions and limited choices. Native Country of the Heart instructs us on how much goes missing from the written record and unattended memory when we misapprehend as unimportant and uncomplicated what seem at first glance like the ordinary, the everyday, the settling for.

The project for the memoirist in this case, then, must have required extraordinary restraint and nuance. Moraga writes against the erasure of the Mexican memory of “the unlettered” without taking a didactic or self-righteous tone (3). She shares the multiple sources of Elvira’s sorrow without rendering her one-dimensionally sufrida. She sketches without demonizing the three generations of patriarchs (father, husband, son) who utterly depended on and wore out Elvira’s affective, material, and domestic labor while giving so little in return. She represents Elvira as grand, resilient, and indisputably fierce, while not ignoring that those very traits were largely brought forth by a difficult childhood of gendered labor. With finesse, she makes ample room to hold, without presuming to resolve, the central tension of the book: Elvira, on one hand, as a Mexican American woman of feminine aptitude and estilo whose solid presence and self-confidence drew others to her like a magnet and from whom Moraga “learned every value that is worth something to me to this day” (225); and, Elvira, on the other hand, as fully committed to heteronormative ideals, gendered double standards, and strict work ethic— all of which, of course, prove claustrophobic for her two daughters.

Moraga’s first crossover book, Native Country of the Heart will be of interest to a range of readers. People new to her work will find themselves oriented by the rich context Moraga provides, such as the residual centrality of the national romance of Mexico from which mestizos were born and continue to be haunted. Avid...

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