Ana Castillo
Chicana Novelist and Poet
1953-
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Ana Castillo is a Chicana poet, essayist, editor, and novelist who explores the tribulations of womanhood and offers pungent socio-political comment. Castillo's work is based on established oral and literary traditions, yet at the same time it is highly innovative. Calling her "the most daring and experimental of Latino novelists," Commonweal contributor Ilan Stavans noted that Castillo's "desire to find creative alternatives and to take risks is admirable." In the early 1990s, with the publication of her third novel, Castillo's success as a novelist allowed her to turn to writing full time. Previously she had served as writer-in-residence at a number of colleges.
Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo credits the rich storytelling tradition of her Mexican heritage as the foundation for her writing. When she was nine years old, she wrote her first poems following the death of her grandmother. In high school and college Castillo was active in the Chicano movement, using her poetry to express her political sentiments. Her first published volumes of verse--Otro canto,The Invitation, and Women Are Not Roses--"examine the themes of sadness and loneliness in the female experience," according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Patricia De la Fuente. These works speak "for all women who have at one time or another felt the unfairness of female existence in a world designed by men primarily for men," De la Fuente continued. Castillo expresses her feminist concerns in another form in Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. This book, based on Castillo's doctoral work at Germany's Bremen University, explores the Chicana experience and the historical and social implications of Chicana feminism. It is a "provocative" collection, according to Marjorie Agosin in the Multicultural Review, and the work of a writer both "lyrical and passionate," and "one of the country's most provocative and original."
Castillo's first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, was described by De la Fuente as "a far-ranging social and cultural expose." Through the device of letters exchanged over a ten-year period between Teresa, a California poet, and her college friend Alicia, a New York artist, The Mixquiahuala Letters explores the changing role of Hispanic women in the United States and Mexico during the 1970s and 1980s and the negative reaction many conservative Hispanic and Anglo men felt toward their liberation. Castillo creates three possible versions of Teresa and Alicia's story--"Conformist," "Cynic," and "Quixotic"--by numbering the letters and supplying varying orders in which to read them, each with a different tone and resolution. Her novel Sapogonia: An Anti-Romance in 3/8 Meter tells the tale of Maximo Madrigal, the male narrator, and his obsession with Pastora Ake, the only woman he is unable to conquer. De la Fuente declared: "Castillo hits her full-fledged and sophisticated stride in an intricately woven tale of the destructive powers of male-female relationships."
So Far from God was Castillo's first novel to be widely read and reviewed. The lengthy narrative follows the life of a strong Latina woman, Sofi, and her four daughters. Esperanza, the eldest, graduates from college and becomes a television newscaster, but finds her life empty and unhappy despite her apparent success. Caridad, the beauty of the family, squanders her life in a series of one-night stands. Fe, seemingly the most "normal" sister, goes into a year-long trance when her fiancée leaves her. The youngest, known as la Loca ("The Crazy One"), dies on her third birthday, only to be magically resurrected and regarded thereafter as a saint. Castillo's customary social comment is supplied through the voice of the narrator, who describes herself as "highly opinionated."
Reviews for Castillo's first collection of stories, Loverboys, were consistently positive. The twenty-two stories are about all kinds of relationships, including straight and gay sexual relationships as well as familial love. Taking place in mostly urban settings, the stories are dominated by strong Latina characters. Racial and cultural issues are explored as well as the sexual and personal dynamics of each situation.
In a review of Loverboys for Booklist, Donna Seaman connected it to Castillo's other work: "Whether [she] is writing poetry, essays, or fiction, her work sizzles with equal measures of passion and intelligence." In Loverboys Seaman found the author "defiant, satirically hilarious, sexy, and wise." Catherine Bush wrote in the New York Times that the collection of stories is "seductive, loquacious, full of infectious vigor, sometimes defiant, often confessional and (like all lovers, I suppose) at times annoying, rambling into the seemingly inconsequential." A Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked, "The vitality of Castillo's voice . . . endow her first collection of short stories with earthy eroticism and zesty humor. . . . [Her] literary art resembles the cinematic Bohemia depicted by [Spanish filmmaker] Pedro Almodovar, and her inventive vignettes convey a volatile magic."
The success of Castillo's fiction has not undermined her intent as a self-styled protest poet, according to Samuel Baker in Publishers Weekly: "If Loverboys bids to occupy the mainstream of contemporary fiction, it nonetheless retains strong connections to Castillo's tremendously varied, and often quite radical, previous body of work." Indeed, the author's radical thinking was given full rein in an editing project published by Castillo in the same year as Loverboys. A collection of writings about the patron saint of Mexico, Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe was undertaken by Castillo because "what we could call the feminine principle is too absent from--is too denigrated by--Western society," as she noted in a Publishers Weekly interview. Castillo, not a practicing Catholic, asserted that she would love to see the book banned by the Catholic church.
Of Castillo's poetry collection I Ask the Impossible, John Stoehr observed in CityBeat online that the author "breaks the mono-linguistic rule by writing a Chicana-brand of poetry in both Spanish and English, effortlessly intermingling the Latinate and Germanic languages, often breeding them into an intriguing hybrid. But it's not 'Spanglish'--it's something more lyrical and thus more poetic." Geeta Sharma Jensen, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, dubbed it "a work that celebrates a woman's strength and reminds people of social justice." Noting that Castillo "wrote these poems between 1989 and 2000," Jensen quoted the book's introduction: "They are meditations, odes, stiletto stammers. . . . They are the musings of a big-city gal and the prayers of a solitary woman who can feel equally at home in the desert or rancho." Stoehr characterized the verses as "irreverent, witty, passionate and intensely political," and added that "much of I Ask the Impossible is like hearing the voice of Carl Sandburg if he'd had a Mexican accent. Though Castillo would chafe at the comparison, she can hardly deny the similarities, especially in her homage to her hometown, 'Chi-Town Born and Bred, Twentieth-Century Girl Propelled with Flare into the Third Millen-nium.'" He continued: "Beyond the Sandburgian free flow, Castillo brings to the fore her own unique voice, rife with the pain of ethnic life in the United States, the joys of a rich and diverse Mexican-American past and the struggles of her Chicana present. . . . [She is a] writer . . . who's likely to continue to fight the good fight and to break the rules for years to come."
For more information visit her page at Contemporary Authors online...
Prepared by Matthew Horowitz '10
