An Evening with Cherríe Moraga with Cherríe Moraga
Date(s): Wednesday, April 10, 2019, 5:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Location: Cochise Room, Memorial Union, ASU Tempe, 301 E Orange St, Tempe, AZ 85281
Type(s): Reading, Reception, Talk
Genre and Form(s): Creative Nonfiction, Feminism, Latinx, Memoir, Women's Studies
Cost: Free
About this Event
Join us for an reading and reception with legendary Chicana writer, feminist, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright Cherríe Moraga as she launches her new memoir, Native Country of the Heart, on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in the Cochise Room of the Memorial Union on ASU Tempe (301 E Orange St, Tempe, AZ 85281).
Doors will open at 5:00 p.m. The reading will start at 5:30 p.m. Light refreshments will be served. A book signing will take place after the reading. This event is open to the public and free.
Moraga's visit is sponsored by the humanities division of The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU, with support from Department of English, the School of Social Transformation, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the School of International Letters and Cultures, and the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.
About the Book
From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother’s decline, and also tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora.
Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California’s Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation.
As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. As Moraga charts her mother’s journey—from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer’s—she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother’s memory fails, Moraga is driven to unearth forgotten remnants of a U.S. Mexican diaspora, its indigenous origins, and an American story of cultural loss.
Poetically wrought and filled with insight into intergenerational trauma, Native Country of the Heart is a reckoning with white American history and a piercing love letter from a fearless daughter to the mother she will never lose. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
