Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

  Her spirit is so strong. I remember Celia’s words at my mother’s vigil, and I know. My broken state was not the result of an evil eye or the magic of malice. It was a mother spirit, before and after death, leading a daughter back to this place of return.

  This woman’s fireplace.

  The Native Country of the heart.

  FOR THE RECORD—AN EPILOGUE

  Nine months after my mother’s death, my sister, son, and I would pass by my parents’ home in San Gabriel just to look at it; just to see if there was something left to be found there. We had in fact left an old emptied trunk, its lock busted, and a rusty blue wheelbarrow, which I had hoped to bring home with me when I next had the chance. The chance came more than two years after our dismantling of the house, when I had finally found the resolve to return.

  As we make the U-turn across the four-lane Junipero Serra Drive to pull up in front of the house, we see an older, well-groomed gentleman, pressed khaki work pants and button-down shirt, rolling up a garden hose on the blacktop driveway of the house. The place looks the same, but nicer than during my parents’ last years there, when gardeners tended toward mediocre maintenance without my mother’s constant regañadas.

  The elder holds the end of the hose and watches us with a frown of suspicion as we park and step out of the car. “He must be the owner’s father,” JoAnn says. JoAnn had followed the sale of the house and was gratified to learn that it had been purchased by a Latino couple. We had feared the house would merely be razed for the construction of yet another apartment complex.

  We approach.

  At first, as we try to explain who we are, the conversation is reserved and awkward. And then relief passes over the elder’s face when, struggling with his English, JoAnn and I readily shift to Spanish.

  He apologizes that our things had been discarded after so long when no one came to get them. We apologize that we were so delinquent and assure him of this several times. “No se preocupe, señor.” But recovering the abandoned items turned out to be a mere pretext for the visit; for what this elder gentleman was to give us, guiding us through the grounds of what had once been our home, would matter so much more than any rusty wheelbarrow.

  The day before, we had gone to my mother’s grave site, a small plot of thick Bermuda grass, neighbored by thousands of other Spanish-surnamed gravestones. It was Mother’s Day at the Resurrection Cemetery en las lomas de San Gabriel and las familias had brought coolers and lounge chairs and umbrellas in anticipation of the high-noon sun. Folks hung out, eating, praying, and weeding the grass around the graves; washing them down with rags and buckets of water. We, too, with my father and my mom’s remaining brother and sister, prayed and sang and told stories about my mom, and it felt good for all of us. But something was missing. Elvira.

  For it wasn’t until the next day, when JoAnn, Rafael, and I were back in San Gabriel and stepped into that garden of seventy-five-year-old rosebush, blossoming camellia, bougainvillea, and poinsettia that my mother’s spirit presented itself.

  Standing beneath the canopy of century-old blossoming jacaranda, it came to me that we are as much of a place as we are of a people; that we return to places because our hands served as tender shovels in that earth; that those yellow-peach and cream-colored roses, that wild yerba buena, las verdolagas covering the earth like loosely woven cloth to catch the steady drop of rose petal and leaf, this was my mother’s constant site of comfort. And this jardinero guardian angel was custodian to it—that small lot of land and my mother’s memory.

  How egotistical we are to believe that when someone dies, they leave their spirit with people. Yes, I carry my mother’s DNA, but she left herself equally in that patch of earth, where she had always offered her best self. Without tombstone marking, without plaque, without store-bought flowers stuck into the mouths of cast-iron vases dug into the graveyard earth, this was her earthbound site of remembrance more than any cemetery.

  * * *

  It is a warm September afternoon and I am digging, digging through books on the “Gabrielinos,” books on the mission system, books of my own scribblings of remembrance and regret. I search websites, library databases, sift through photographs of “Californios” and the first Native “Angelinos,” the computer-screen facsimiles of Spanish land-grant maps, and some early baptismal records of the missions.

  I land on one, which distinguishes itself in that it is the first recorded baptism of “un indio” en la Misión de San Gabriel. I examine it, line by line. On that same manuscript of calligraphic letters, I spot the name Moraga. I can barely make out the fading script, which reads “Bautizé solemna otra adulta como 40(?) años, Viuda [y?] su consorte gentil y madre de los niños…” The two children are named Joseph Joaquín Moraga and María [de?] la Luz Moraga. With a bit more research, I learn that gentil in colonial Spanish is defined as a “heathen (unbaptized) indio.” The register notes the baptismal site as the nearby Tongva village of Juyuvit and is signed by Fray Junípero Serra in November 1778.

  This matters to me somehow: the proximity of Serra’s ethnocidal signature, my maternal family name, and the Indigenous words for places I once knew as home. It is my own personal record that testifies to a complex system of mixed-blood misnomered historical erasure.

  To disappear into Mexicanism is not enough; to disappear into Latinidad is even less of who we are; to disappear into AngloAmerica, our colonization is complete. We were not supposed to remember.

  There is no religious justification for the Spanish mission system, which effected a genocidal practice of slavery, dislocation, disease, and rape against Native Californians, and laid the groundwork for the two centuries of Native obscurity that followed. There is only greed.

  There is no justification for the betrayal of the promises of Mexican Independence against the Tongva, the Chumash, the Cahuilla … There is only greed.

  Since the arrival of the gringo in the mid-nineteenth century, it is first and last greed that has whitewashed the entire history of Native California, even as it walks still in the bodies of its “Mexican” descendants.

  There is no justification, but there is so much need for reckoning; for me and perhaps for Elvira, too. And in that reckoning, there is the need for return.

  My mother left her self planted there in those rosebushes in the once Tongva village of Sibangna. That’s it. It was she who brought our Moraga clan to San Gabriel and its surroundings in 1961.

  * * *

  I return through these pages.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Some books that mattered to me, along the way of this writing.

  Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

  Caspary, Anita. Witness to Integrity: The Crisis of the Immaculate Heart Community of California. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003.

  Cixous, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

  Cooney, Eleanor. Death in Slow Motion: My Mother’s Descent into Alzheimer’s. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

  De Hennezel, Marie. Intimate Death—How the Dying Teach Us How to Live. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

  Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005.

  Erdrich, Louise. Four Souls. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

  Frank, L., and Kim Hogeland. First Families: A Photographic History of California Indians. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2007.

  Guerrero, Vladimir. The Anza Trail and the Settling of California. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006.

  Gunn Allen, Paula. Pocahontas—Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2004.

  Gutiérrez Baldoquín, Hilda. Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism. Berkeley: Parallax, 2004.

  Hanh, Thich Nhat. No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.

  Hogan, Linda. The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton, 20
01.

  Kimball, Sandy. Moraga’s Pride: Rancho Laguna de los Palos Colorados. Moraga, CA: Moraga Historical Society, 1987.

  McCawley, William. The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles. Banning/Novato, CA: Maliki Museum/Ballena, 1996.

  Moraga, Cherrie. The Mathematics of Love. World premiere at Brava Theater Center, San Francisco, CA, August 12, 2017. Directed by the playwright.

  _____. Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1997.

  Narby, Jeremy. The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. New York: Putnam, 1998.

  Rimpoche, Gehlek. Good Life, Good Death. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001.

  Shenk, David. The Forgetting. Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

  Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New York: Little, Brown, 1996.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Agradecimientos.

  To my beloved of twenty-one years, Celia Herrera Rodríguez. She opened a road for me, gave me permission (as it were) to return to the old stories, to believe I had a right to return. She also, just plain and simple, loved me—when I was not easy, when there was never enough time to write, when reliving the moments in this memoir sometimes stole my heart. I thank our children—Camerina, Cetanzi, and Rafael—for the gift they gave me in parenting them, each at distinct junctures along our shared paths. I thank my son, Rafael, most for this—for the uninterrupted nature of that path and for his continued courage to speak his truth in the formidable face of my own limitations.

  Deep gratitude to Stuart Bernstein, my literary representative, for his patience and humor, his editorial eloquence, his strength of character and purpose. He not only encouraged me along the road of writing Native Country, he believed in and defended me. I marvel at this pure blessing—to become trusted friends in this way.

  Gracias to my elder primo, Carlos García, who still holds familial ground in Arizona, and who began his search for our raíces through the desert towns of Sonora long before the at-your-fingertips virtual searches of Ancestry.com. Gracias a David Gonzáles, who tracked me down via those same internet searches to uncover that his father and I have grandparents who were siblings. His research was enormously helpful.

  I have been gifted the generous professionalism of the editorial, publishing, and marketing team at FSG, especially Jackson Howard, Stephen Weil, Rebecca Caine, and Jeff Seroy, as well as the insightful legal counsel of Mark Fowler. Thank you. I am indebted to executive editor Ileene Smith, who was first drawn to the intimacy of this mother-daughter story, which also drew me to Ileene. I was so heartened by her open admission of what she did not know of my cultural world three thousand miles from hers in New York City; for in that aperture of not knowing and knowing, we found a cross-cultural conversation that helped shape this book into authentic existence. Mil gracias.

  Doy gracias to my literary comadres—Helena María Viramontes and María Herrera Sobek—upon whose sisterhood I’ve come to rely. I am beholden to my Yoruba practitioner homegirls in Oaktown—Arnita, Xochi, and Sauda—for their ceremonies and faithfulness to the ancestors that have sustained us all. Ashé. Gracias a mi amiga fiel and personal assistant, Elisa D. Huerta, for so many years of support, as I also thank mi querida Myrtha, por su confianza en mí. I bow to my ever-teacher, Alice Joanou, who taught me how to breathe again, and to Ryumon Sensei for our people of color sangha in the years surrounding my mother’s passing.

  I am also grateful to my creative writing students at Stanford and now at UC Santa Barbara whose collective desire to tell an honest truth continues to inspire my own. I thank the Hedgebrook writers community and Yaddo artists’ residency for the writing time and all the universities and communities that have provided me entrance for the opportunity to present and grow my work.

  Tlazocamati to La Red Xicana Indígena and Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought and Art Practice, whose political and philosophical existence as cultural activist organizations has helped me realize my aspiration to serve as a woman of my word.

  I thank all my family members, living and ancestral, who occupied the unspoken world of this memoir, especially mi querida prima hermana Cynthia Moraga García, who bore witness to many of the tales told here. Gracias to my queer hijo/hija, Cathy Arellano, for her loyalty and love, and for the growing familia that she and Gina have offered me through my nieto, Amado. I thank my father, now ninety-five, for our precious time together and for the remembered stories of his past. I thank my brother because he is my brother. And finally, I thank my sister because JoAnn is, in a certain way, the instigator and receiver of this work as I pass it on to Chicanas/Latinas who share her story.

  Y a mi mamá … bueno, todo el libro está escrito en agradecimiento a ella.

  ALSO BY CHERRÍE MORAGA

  NONFICTION

  A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000–2010

  Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios

  Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood

  The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (coeditor)

  This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (coeditor)

  DRAMA

  The Mathematics of Love

  New Fire—To Put Things Right Again

  Digging Up the Dirt

  Watsonville: Some Place Not Here and Circle in the Dirt: El Pueblo de East Palo Alto

  The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea and Heart of the Earth: A Popul Vuh Story

  Heroes and Saints & Other Plays

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Cherríe Moraga is a writer and cultural activist whose work disrupts the dominant narratives of gender, race, sexuality, feminism, indigeneity, and literature in the United States. A cofounder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Moraga coedited the influential volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981). In 2017, after twenty years as an Artist-in-Residence in Theater at Stanford University, Moraga was appointed a professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where, with her artistic partner Celia Herrera Rodríguez, she founded Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought and Art Practice. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Theatre Playwriting Fellowship Award and a Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature. You can sign up for email update here.

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  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE—UNA SALTA PA’TRAS

  PART I

  COYOTE’S DAUGHTER

  SOMETHING BETTER

  LITTLE RASCALS

  WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO NORMAN ROCKWELL?

  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS

  JUST EAT YOUR CHICKEN

  BODY MEMORY

  MARTIN

  MISSION GIRLS

  MIND-FIELD

  DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL

  PART II

  NOTHING MÉXICO COULDN’T CURE

  TRAINING GROUND

  OLD SCHOOL

  A ROLLING STONE

  LIKE THE HERON

  THE MOTHER OF THE BRIDE

  “A VERY NICE MAN”

  HALLOWEEN SHUFFLE 2003

  A MOTHER’S DICTUM

  PART III

  ELVIRA’S COUNTRY

  SWEET LOCURA

  SEND THEM FLYING HOME

  SIBANGNA

  REUNION

  POR COSTUMBRE

  EXPRESSIONS

  SOME PLACE NOT HOME />
  NOW AND ZEN

  WHEN THEY LOSE THEIR MARBLES

  PART IV

  THE WISDOM OF DOLPHINS

  SOFT SPOTS

  SOLA CON LOS DIOSES

  COYOTE CROSSING

  ROUNDHOUSE

  FOR THE RECORD—AN EPILOGUE

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY CHERRIE MORAGA

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  175 Varick Street, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2019 by Cherríe Moraga

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2019

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71854-1

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  * David Foster Wallace.