American writer, cultural activist and Latina feminist Cherríe Moraga (1952) tells the life story of her mother Elvira Moraga (1913), from a young girl cotton picking in California, a cigarette girl in Mexico, her relationship with a white man to an old woman suffering Alzheimer's disease. Alongside her mother's story she traces her own discovery of her queer body and lesbian identity, and examines her mixed blood, her passion for activism and the history of her community. In the meantime she tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora: what it means to be Mexican in the United States, the nearly forgotten diaspora's Indigenous origins and America's cultural loss.