Ana Castillo
Ana Castillo
Ana Castillois a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar. Considered one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, Castillo is known for her experimental style as a Latina novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 June 1953
CountryUnited States of America
We live in a polarized world of contrived dualisms, dichotomies and paradoxes: light vs. dark and good vs. evil. We as Mexic Amerindians/mestizas are the dark. We are the evilor at least, the questionable.
I was just, like, not at all the office type; I was the artist type.
Between the sun and poverty there was us for a little while.
something about giving himself over to a woman was worse than having lunch with the devil...
Paris, true to its promise, had been a place of civilized indecencies, or uncivil decencies ...
There’s something insupportable about being pissed with the one person on this planet that sends your adrenaline flowing to remind you that you’re alive. It’s almost like we’re mad because we’ve been shocked out of our usual comatose state of being by feeling something for someone, for ourselves, for just a moment.
In nature, creatures never ended the lives of others except to survive. To women, abortion was self-defense and preservation of the species. Abortion was not a fancy borne out of the female mind. Abortion was instinct beyond ideas. Abortion was fear (the cat that devours its litter when a predator nears).
Mexico. Melancholy, profoundly right and wrong, it embraces as it strangulates.
my Mamá Grande, a tiny Mayan woman, took me aside when I was an adolescent and told me several things that didn't make a bit of sense to my young and inattentive ears, and as young people tend to waste all attempts of our elders to relay to us wisdom accumulated over the decades, I thought my Mamá Grande had a few mice in the attic.
Catch me, as if I have surely been out committing a violation against you, my sin of insisting on existing without you.
I'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.
Once innocence--an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists--encounters experience, it is transformed. If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.
Poverty has its advantages. When you're that poor what would you have that anyone would want? Except your peace of mind. Your dignity. Your heart. The important things.
It is an absolute impossibility in this society to reversely sexually objectify heterosexual men, just as it is impossible for a poor person of color to be a racist. Such extreme prejudice must be accompanied by the power of society's approval and legislation. While women and poor people of color may become intolerant, personally abusive, even hateful, they do not have enough power to be racist or sexist.