Grażyna Zygadło
“In Search of Their Mothers”: The Ancestor in Cherrie Moraga’s Memoir Native Country of the Heart
Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 18 (2024), pp. 83-90.

Abstract: Mother-daughter relations have been an ongoing discussion within gender studies since the second wave of feminism, yet the character of this debate is very much dependent on the generation and the ethnicity of the people involved. This paper is part of a larger project devoted to the research of the female ancestor’s role, specifically grandmothers and mothers, in ethnic women’s writing – mostly Latinx and African American authors. Cherrie Moraga, along with Ruth Behar and Sandra Cisneros among Latina writers, or Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Toni Morrison as African American representatives, all belong to the same generation of authors, who in their early years tended to be in the opposition to their mothers and grandmothers as the “gatekeepers for patriarchy,” but who at the later stages of their creation (re)discovered the cultural significance of this intergenerational bond. The article analyzes the recent publication by Cherrie Moraga, her memoir Native Country of the Heart (2019), in which she decided to record her mother’s life within Mexican American history in the US and more broadly within “an impossible patriarchy” (20) to “hold one thickly braided cord as a story – my queer self and my writer self, and each would bring me home to my Mexicanism” (3). In that sense intergenerational storytelling plays a representative role of not only an individual’s biography but becomes the “conscious historical connection” between generations in a diaspora and a path to identity formation. The mothers’ stories serve as a beginning of a journey towards ethnic writers’ self-discovery and personal growth.

Keywords: ancestor, women’s writing, storytelling, identity formation, cultural awareness, memory

DOI: 10.7311/PJAS.18/2024.06

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