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Watsonville : some place not here ; Circle in the dirt : el pueblo de East Palo Alto

This third volume of plays by Cherrie Moraga confronts the changing California landscape of the 1990s, as anti-immigrant, anti-youth, and English Only legislation sweeps across the farmworker towns and multi-racial urban communities of the state. Both plays were developed through interviews conducted with residents in the two towns of Watsonville and East Palo Alto. Both towns stand in the shadow of the first world culture of the University: East Palo Alto is a poor neighbour of Stanford University south of San Francisco, while Watsonville, further south, has seen the University of California at Santa Cruz devour the nearby Pacific coastline. These plays document the incursion of the white world of power and authority into poor, racially mixed communities. But they are more than reports of the times. In vividly realised drama, Moraga shows the communities mounting their own bold resistance to cultural domination and the threat of economic enslavement. The indigenous and feminist consciousness of the two communities brings them together to struggle against their oppressors, from within and without.

The hungry woman

Native country of the heart : a memoir

"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, 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."--Amazon.com.Native Country of the Heart: A Mexican American Geography is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherrie L. 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 remnants of the Mexican American diaspora 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.

Latin American Studies