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Feminists from across the greater Los Angeles area gathered at Ms. HQ Wednesday for the inaugural meeting of the Ms. Book Club, joining author and activist Cherríe Moraga for a night of cocktails and conversation about her memoir Native Country of the Heart.
During a reception featuring custom cocktails from Yola Mezcal—which is handcrafted, distilled on its namesake farm in Oaxaca and bottled by feminists dedicated to promoting the economic independence of Oaxacan women—the halls buzzed with reunions and new ones, but the crowd was silent with rapt attention as Moraga opened her own copy of Native Country and let the room hear the story in her voice.
“Growing up, my elders, well-meaning, told my generation: Go that way, hijos. Look north to your future. They asked us to betray them, to forget them. Walk that way, mi’ja. They didn’t know the cost,” Moraga read. “For all my feminism, this is why I left a white woman’s movement in the late 1970s. So I wouldn’t have to explain anymore, translate anymore. Because translating, I knew, would keep me from the harder work of going home.”
Going home is Moraga’s pedagogy—and in Native Country, she offers no translations as she invites us into her own.
Moraga opened up to me and the crowd about the justice of representation, the interconnected nature of women’s stories and the power and danger of speaking in our own voices at the first-ever book club convening.
Described by the author as a MexicanAmerican work, Moraga reinvents the landscape of memoir and subverts notions of literary form in the pages of Native Country. Her latest work chronicles the life of her mother, Elvira, alongside the story of her own coming-of-age. She writes in polished verse, but inserts her own poetry and journal entries into some sections; she alternates between English and Spanish without hesitation.
Such a wholly authentic reflection—of a queer Chicana’s life, or the life of the unlettered Mexican woman who raised her—is not often lauded by the literati or published by major houses like Farrar, Straus and Giroux. That was why Moraga wrote Native Country in the first place. She had one singular mission: “I wanted my family to be literature, too.”
In her review of Native Country for Ms., author Myriam Gurba asserted that the book inserts new voices into the Mexican canon. When I asked Moraga if perhaps she was actually creating an entirely new canon, she deferred. “I respectfully receive your question,” she reminded me, but MexicanAmerican literature and stories are not new. And as an entire generation comes to consciousness in the wake of her groundbreaking work as a co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and co-editor of the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, it is a collection of voices that is only growing.
Native Country, like so much of Moraga’s work, is a site where private and public discourse collide. The book, born over a decade, sprouted originally from Moraga’s journal entries—most of which begin with a question that has no answer. She also derived inspiration, as she often will, from the conversations sparked in rooms across the country at gigs where she is invited to speak and also has a chance to listen.
It is fitting, then, that the final draft is dedicated to only Moraga’s sister, JoAnne, and her ancestors. It also determined the Ms. offices to be an appropriate setting for a discussion around the book—which is not only a double memoir, but a historical revisitation, a call to action and a political manifesto.
“I’m so glad that I was present at Ms. magazine’s first book club gathering,” author Sehba Sarwar told the organizers. “By accepting the invitation to attend, I knew I was guaranteed the fusion of my passions— writing, feminism and social justice—and I found that I was gratified on all fronts.”
Moraga did not expect to write such a political book—but by the time she had completed it, the urgency of the moment demanded a destruction of the mythology of the American Dream. “I don’t remember a time,” she said, “where there was so much hatred against Mexicans.” When an audience member asked her if her book—in two or three decades—might help the children being separated from their families at the border today finally find their own way home, she confessed that she was confounded by the distance between theory and practice at this moment.
“In a country with a history of slavery, of genocide,” she declared, how can we see images of children in cages and not find ourselves compelled to take to the streets and “tear it all down?”
Native Country was an attempt to uncover not only Elvira’s story, and the truth about her life, but an opportunity for Moraga to correct the record on the histories of Mexico and the U.S., and the lives and stories trapped between the borderlands. Elvira’s later years involved a painful battle with Alzheimer’s, forcing Moraga to confront not just personal amnesia but the larger cultural amnesia around racism, sexism and violence that has shaped the lives of women like her, women like her mother and MexicanAmerican life at-large across centuries.
“We are not immigrants,” she reminded the room. “We are indigenous.” She urged a collective consciousness that stripped identity away from the arbitrary borderlines of nation-states and back to the lands that house the spirits of their ancestors and the histories of their lineages.
Moraga’s urge to make Mexican life visible on the printed page is also part of her own praxis: collective, creative liberation. She told me that she knows now that Elvira is requited—something she notes, in the text, was never offered to her in life—and together we reflected on the ways in which women are perhaps not only uniquely suited to be their mothers’ narrators, but are destined to live out their fantasies. But Moraga’s work here also makes clear that we still need a reckoning to requite the rest of us.
Although Native Country is an “act of love,” Moraga also admitted to hoping it had an impact outside of and within her own community—that it would tell untold stories of MexicanAmerican life while also urging the people who saw her story as their own to wake up to the hard and necessary work that lies ahead. “Going back to that mission was painful,” she said, reflecting on the destruction and erasure preserved in the physical structures of colonization that shaped the borderlands around Mexico and southern California. But going back was part of the process. It was something she knew she had to do to tell this story.
Moraga’s journey home also takes readers across a disparate freedom road—one she writes about searching for throughout her own life, one she walks further through having written this story, one her mother would never have had the luxury to walk along. “There’s nowhere to arrive,” she noted about the pursuit of liberation. “It’s just a daily way. I feel enormously blessed in my life. Does a book bring me closer to freedom? I hope so, you know?”
Freedom, Moraga clarified, “is a relationship to obstacle.” The daily practice she cultivates to find it involves taking risks, saying no and orienting herself around her own intuition. “This book feels dangerous to me, on many levels, and some of them are for very intimate reasons, and I’m willing to take it,” she declared. “That tells me that this is a gesture toward freedom.”
Stopping cultural amnesia begins not only with a reckoning, after all, but with our abilities to trust our own voices. “Growing up like I did, when all the writers were white men,” she said, “I always knew that the only original thing I had was myself.” It’s a message she passes on today to her students at the the University of California in Santa Barbara—where, with her artistic partner Celia Herrera Rodríguez, she instituted Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought and Art Practice.
“If you feel a thing going on here,” she tells us, gesturing to her heart, “write that.” Through her own instruction, she has generously passed a piece of her own heart—and a sliver of her own native country—into our own.
