"This a great book. In telling her mother's life-story Cherríe Moraga ruthlessly examines her own heart and the deep complications of growing up mixed race and lesbian in a racist culture. But she also lays bare the spiritual core that strengthens and sustains her. The heart, the soul, familia and tribe, the native country is as narrow as the space between clenched fingers and as wide as the sightlines to the horizon."
Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
"In crisp prose and poetic diction, Cherríe Moraga enlivens her irrepressible mother with shape and story, sadness and charm, abriendo puertas to memory and forgetting, how interlocked they are, to how ghosts and people occupy the same space. It is a journey of deep personal discovery that is riveting and necessary."
Luis J. Rodríguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.
"A beautiful, painful, funny, heartening and heartfelt immersion in the life of one of the leading voices of Latino/a literature, our very own Cherríe Moraga. Part elegy, part history and part testimonio rife with storytelling, Native Country of the Heart, like all of Moraga’s work, charts the unmapped and unspoken territories of body, mind, heart and soul and refuses to be confined by any border or genre. Her memoir is a defiant, deep and soulful book about all our mothers, mother cultures, motherlands and languages. Telling her own mother Elvira’s story is both a political and ceremonial act. “We were not supposed to remember,” Moraga writes. She does remember, and in this moving and brave book she gives us all a reckoning our country needs now.
Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies
“Cherríe Moraga, a foundational contributor to modern Feminism, grapples with her fierce but withholding Mexican mother who―despite their struggles―remains her strongest touchstone of identification. A raw and vulnerable story of acceptance hard won.”
Sarah Schulman, author of The Cosmopolitans and Conflict is Not Abuse
"I love A Native Country of the Heart's forthright blending of a bio of Moraga's intriguing powerhouse mom, Elivira, with Moraga's own queer evolution. And that the intimate facts of Cherríe Moraga’s family history get embedded alongside such valuable public secrets as the mass deportation of Mexican workers during the depression so that dust bowl farmers could have their jobs. This book is a coup."
Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow