Native Country of the Heart -- Cherrie Moraga

A queer Chicana poet and activist treasures the life of her ailing mother and Moraga clan matriarch, Elvira. As Moraga writes so eloquently in her prologue, “Few bemoan the memory loss of the unlettered. My mother- and her generation of MexicanAmerican women- was to disappear quietly... But when storytellers go, taking their unrecorded memory with them, we their descendants go too, I fear.” Here is the story of a woman seen and unseen, a mother who accepted her lesbian daughter, and left a legacy for the rest of us to keep alive by reading it.