Native Country of the Heart

Starred review from April 22, 2019
Activist Moraga (coeditor, This Bridge Called My Back) tells the story of her mother, Elvira, in this compassionate memoir that explores family and cultural legacies. Moraga weaves her coming-of-age as a queer Mexican-American woman with the story of her mother, who spends her final years battling Alzheimer’s. At the center of the narrative is Moraga’s attempt to resurrect her family’s Mexican and indigenous cultural legacies, both of which she and her mother came to distance themselves from in order to assimilate. Elvira came of age as a young woman in 1930s Tijuana, where she worked as a cigarette girl in casinos; in 1952, she gave birth to Moraga and followed the “dream of Suburban America” by moving the family to San Gabriel, Calif. In 1977, Moraga, who had become involved in women’s and gay rights activism, moved to San Francisco. Two decades later, however, Moraga embraced her ancestry by falling in love with a Chicana woman named Celia, “allowing my return to the love of a Mexican woman in my life.” During this time, Elvira reached the late stages of Alzheimer’s, and Moraga prepared for her mother’s death hoping she would finally embrace her own ethnicity. Moraga’s captivating and perceptive memoir successfully conveys her belief that “we are as much of a place as we are of a people.”

March 1, 2019
Moraga remembers her difficult mother in a memoir that transcends chronology and the personal. An unlikely matriarch who picked cotton in the Imperial Valley as a child, Elvira supported her family by working in a casino in Tijuana during the Depression. After the family moved back to Southern California, Elvira married Moraga's father, a white man. Coeditor of the classic women of color feminist essay collection This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and a poet, playwright, academic, and queer activist, Moraga expands her narrative to explore her ethnic legacy, which extends to the lost Native legacy of the state of California. The strand threading throughout the tela (fabric) of this narrative is Elvira's Alzheimer's. With short chapters, a little poetry, and a little Spanish, Moraga weaves her and her mother's lives and spirits together in four sections devoted to the broad themes of becoming; family and carnal love; spirits and ghosts; and dementia, dreams, and dying. Moraga's determination to honor her mother while encouraging Mexican Americans to uncover and rescue their own forgotten legacies is a tour de force recommended for every collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2019

Influential queer Latina feminist Moraga, who cofounded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and edited the important anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, here tells not just her own story but that of her mother, Elvira. Hired out as a child by her own father to pick cotton in California, Elvira worked as a cigarette girl in late-1920s Tijuana, learned about sex and power from a wealthy white man, and eventually became a strong-willed matriarch who slowly succumbed to Alzheimer's. Moraga charts their relationship and her own discovery of her sexual identity while using these stories to clarify the Mexican American experience and sense of loss.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2019
A queer Latina feminist focuses on her ferocious, survivor mother from Tijuana.In her moving portrait, Moraga (English/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010, 2011, etc.), the founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, examines her close but tortured relationship with her now-deceased mother. Elvira Isabel Moraga, who came of age in Tijuana's golden era in the 1920s, "was not the stuff of literature." The daughter of an "illusive trickster who shuttle[d] between worlds" and "rode the counterfeit borders of the Southwest with a vaquero flare of Mexican independence and macho bravado," Elvira and her numerous siblings, born on the American side of the border, were hired out by their father for menial labor, essentially limiting her education ("her inability to read and write well remained an open wound"). As a teenager, Elvira secured work until the mid-1930s as a hat-check-and-cigarette girl at a high-stakes gambling room in Tijuana, eluding the advances of the casino's predatory owner. Ultimately, she met and married a man named Joseph, a "functionary" who operated the South Pasadena Santa Fe Railroad station. Together, they and their children moved east of Los Angeles, embracing the suburban dream that characterized much of post-World War II America. Born in 1952, author Moraga offers mesmerizing details of growing up there and in San Gabriel, a mixed-race community, near her grandmother, who served as the locus of myriad visits by relatives. Coming to terms with her sexuality during a progressive social era almost derailed the author's relationship with her strict, volatile mother, but in the end, her mother assured her, "how could you think that there is anything in this life you could do that you wouldn't be my daughter?" The author's determination to learn Spanish and visit Mexico helped the two bond in her mother's later years, which were marked by Alzheimer's.A sympathetic portrait of Mexican-American feminism (both in mother and daughter) delivered in a poignant, beautifully written way.

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