Native Country of the Heart Quotes

“The amazing efficacy of patriarchy is that it is a covert operation. It is entre nos, just between us - man and woman, sister and brother, father and daughter, queer and not so queer. It takes place behind closed doors, inside la hacienda and back there in the slave quarters. It is so seamlessly woven into the fiber of our lives that to pull at that dangling thread of inequity is to rip open an entire life.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

“And I know nothing about psychology or the "pedagogy of the opressed." I know nothing about the origins of guilt 'cept Adam and Eve, and my feminism is a good ten years down the road, and my buddhism another twenty, and unlocking the sad shame of Elvira will take another forty; but I do know that my sister and I were just plain guilty for being female, perhaps simply being females with hope; for feeling that we had a right to hope.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

“And I know nothing about psychology or the "pedagogy of the oppressed." I know nothing about the origins of guilt 'cept Adam and Eve, and my feminism is a good ten years down the road, and my buddhism another twenty, and unlocking the sad shame of Elvira will take another forty; but I do know that my sister and I were just plain guilty for being female, perhaps simply being females with hope; for feeling that we had a right to hope.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

“[Mi'ja, Mi'jita] The translation cannot possibly express the pure grounding provided by that word for a Mexican child of any age. In a gesture of familial confidence, parents and tios and abuelitas and even strangers tell it to us. So that, in a certain way, entre nosotros mexicanos here in an English-speaking world it denotes the extended Familia de la Raza.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

“There were times in which I did not know whether my mother was truly demented or just Mexican in a white world.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

“She is someone with such a steady lightness of being, such contained and complex beauty, it will take me several years to find the resolve to press my mouth to hers in a kiss I know will mean a marriage vow.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir