{"id":369459,"date":"2026-06-21T21:02:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T21:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/369459\/"},"modified":"2026-06-21T21:02:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T21:02:10","slug":"native-country-of-the-heart-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/369459\/","title":{"rendered":"Native Country of the Heart Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s easy to imagine Cherr\u00ede Moraga\u2019s Native Country of the Heart<\/a> as a culmination. Published in 2019, the book explores Moraga\u2019s story through that of her mother, beginning in 1920s Tijuana and encompassing the older woman\u2019s struggle with Alzheimer\u2019s. This means it is a choice, as memoir is always a choice: a choice of what to put in and what to leave out, of memory and its lapses, of how to shape the vagaries of a life (or lives) within the clarifying frame of art. In that regard, Native Country of the Heart is more continuation than conclusion, as the most rigorous memoirs are.<\/p>\n

And Moraga\u2019s book is nothing if not rigorous. \u201cThere came a time in my life,\u201d she explains in a brief author\u2019s note, \u201cwhen I began to look backward.\u201d This, of course, is where all memoir starts. Yet the generosity of Moraga\u2019s perspective becomes apparent in the first sentence of her prologue, where she channels her mother and establishes the stakes.<\/p>\n

This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cElvira Isabel Moraga was not the stuff of literature,\u201d Moraga confides. \u201cFew bemoan the memory loss of the unlettered. My mother\u2014and her generation of MexicanAmerican women\u2014was to disappear quietly, unmarked by the letter of memory, the memory of letter. But when our storytellers go, taking their unrecorded memory with them, we their descendants go too, I fear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Native Country of the Heart, then, aspires to function as a reclamation, a reconciliation. For a reader, this is thrilling. First, there\u2019s the flow of the language, which shifts fluidly from the personal to the collective and back again. I particularly admire its contrarian authority, Moraga\u2019s insistence that the lives of the unlettered matter, even as she encodes her mother into letters. In part, this insistence has to do with memory, which Elvira is losing; \u201cmemory loss,\u201d thus, takes on a double meaning and an intimate resonance. Then there is her decision not to hyphenate \u201cMexicanAmerican,\u201d to blur it as a single word. We are not here to qualify or to explain, Moraga means to tell us, but to treat identity as a state of being, even\u2014or especially\u2014when the culture doesn\u2019t recognize us as we are.<\/p>\n

Such an idea sits at the center of Moraga\u2019s project; as a queer feminist, writing from an intersectional perspective, she, too, might once have been dismissed as \u201cunlettered\u201d (as in unaccounted for in the world of letters), until she carved out her own territory. Her body of work, read via this filter, represents an ongoing act of will. It is the insistence on recording the unrecorded that creates the driving tension of this book. \u201cHow to explain the complexity of this?\u201d Moraga ponders. \u201cWhat it means to be\u2014not just me but us.\u201d The solution\u2014or, at least, the only one that matters\u2014is courage: \u201cto move forward in the face of doubt.\u201d\u2022<\/p>\n

NATIVE COUNTRY OF THE HEART, BY CHERR\u00cdE MORAGA\"<i>NATIVE<\/a>NATIVE COUNTRY OF THE HEART, BY CHERR\u00cdE MORAGACredit: Picador<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s easy to imagine Cherr\u00ede Moraga\u2019s Native Country of the Heart as a culmination. Published in 2019, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[149792,7,9,8,149789,149790,149791,149788,149793],"class_list":["post-369459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-alzheimers-and-memory","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-cherrie-moraga-memoir","tag-mexican-american-family-memoir","tag-native-country-of-the-heart-book-review","tag-native-country-of-the-heart-review","tag-queer-feminist-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}