Excerpt: ‘Native Country of the Heart’

My mother, in her little black sweater with the faux fur collar and fake string of pearls, is celebrating her ninetieth birthday. Seeing her made-up like this, even amid the obligatory pleasantly pastel decor of twenty-first-century eldercare suburbia, I catch a momentary glimpse of Elvira’s past, she who appeared in the sepia-toned photographs of a late-1920s “Golden Age” Tijuana: Elvirita, linking arms with her girlfriends in front of the Foreign Club; sprawled beneath the bare arm of a fledgling city tree; hip to hip with her cuate, Esperanza, on the bumper of a Model A Ford. Elvira: in the calf-length shapely skirt, the matching white heels, and the low-slung blouse with its draping bow. The bright red lips that do not smile, but invite, as is appropriate for the era. Elvira had a grand life before her children ever came into it.

There were no fathers in the Moraga clan, not in those first Aztlán turn-into-the-twenty-first-century generations. There were men, yes; men who came and left the household with a single man’s prerogative and secrets; men who answered to no one, and never to a female.

It is 1925. Elvirita is eleven years old. She is picking cotton in the Imperial Valley, just north of the California-Mexico border. Her father is the freelance contractor for the job. He has hired out his school-aged unmarried children (what remain of the nine) to work the fields. Elvira wears one sack draped over the square bone of her thin shoulder. As she stuffs it full of cotton balls, she drags another sack, laden with the three-year-old weight of her littlest brother, Eduardito.

My mother cried the first time she told me this story. I was a little girl and I cried, too, at the picture of it. A picture of hardship, yes; but more than that—injustice. For most of her childhood in California, my mother’s father regularly pulled his children out of school and bartered them out to labor in the fields. She never said the word profit—that the fewer laborers he contracted outside of la familia, the more money would end up in his personal pocket. As I left the kitchen of my mother’s stories, I came to understand that her sense of injustice was not so much that she and her young siblings had to work in the fields. Many of my Chicano and Chicana counterparts knew farmwork as a regular occurrence growing up, their school schedules shaved off at both ends to accommodate the seasons. And although, of course, child labor in a just world would be outlawed, within a U.S.-Mexican context where poverty is law, child labor was common practice. It was the intimacy of the injustice that seemed to wound my mother the most; that although the near-dozen Moragas struggled economically, she believed my grandfather had a choice in the matter.

Born on the U.S. side of the border, they had also always lived on the other side of the (Mexican) tracks (or so my mother made a point of saying). She also insisted that when she was a girl her family never sat in the Mexican section of the movie house. “We were a difernt claz of peepo,” referring to herself and her eight Spanish-speaking siblings. Years of migrant farm labor did not, in my mother’s mind, bind them economically (or culturally) to the rest of the Mexican immigrant population. Or so she protested against an immutable and unspoken identification with them.

For most of my childhood, my mother hid the truth of her father’s drunkenness and outlaw scams: Moraga the bootlegger, Moraga the labor contractor, Moraga the human smuggler. Like el coyote, that illusive trickster who shuttles between worlds, Esteban Moraga rode the counterfeit borders of the Southwest with a vaquero flair of Mexican independence and macho bravado. Yeah, it was a Wild West life, but at its heart Elvira remained a naïve and tender teenaged girl relinquishing her wages and tips to buy the carne for the caldo, the harina for the tortillas, la manteca para los frijoles. This was the political economy my mother had known since childhood and that would continue as the Depression hit and Esteban Moraga moved the familia south to Tijuana’s “Golden Age of Vice.”

My mother would never return to school after that. It had already become too embarrassing: a girl of eleven stuck into classrooms with third graders. “The last time I was in school, I was so big, the teacher would step out and leave me in charge half the time.” My mother’s bitterness (or better said, shame) about her lack of formal education was tacitly evident in every palsied signature she applied to grocery store checks, every job application my sister and I helped her complete, every school notice we brought home to sit abandoned and unread on the kitchen table.•

Join us on September 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Cherríe Moraga will sit down with host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Native Country of the Heart. Register for the Zoom conversation here.