"The Bookends of My Life," a reading with commentary

Moraga’s most recent publications, Waiting in the Wings (to be re-issued in 2022) and Native Country of the Heart (2019)—written nearly twenty-five years apart—together form a deeply personal portrait of the writer’s intersubjective life as a queer mother and queer daughter.  These memoirs were catalyzed, respectively, by the 1993 imperiled birth of Moraga’s son, Rafael, and the 2005 “demented” passing of her mother, Elvira Moraga.  They serve as an extended meditation on death and dying, which integrates a decolonial non-western and indigenous feminist perspective, as they also mark the political hour of the last half of the twentieth century.