Ana Castillo

Author

• Born: June 15, 1953
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

AMERICAN WRITER AND FEMINIST

A prolific and well-regarded writer, Castillo has produced poems, short stories, novels, and critical essays that call attention to the multiple challenges faced by contemporary Latinas. She is committed to feminism and to revealing the oppression of Latinas in US society.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Literature; poetry; women’s rights

Early Life

Ana Hernandez del Castillo was born on June 15, 1953, to working-class parents, Ramon and Raquel Rocha Castillo. She grew up in a Mexican American inner-city neighborhood of Chicago. Castillo was nine years old when her paternal grandmother died, and she wrote her first poems about this event. Castillo shared these poems with her family and her classmates. At age twelve, she began to write longer stories that she illustrated herself.

Castillo’s parents selected for her a high school that trained its students for clerical careers. However, in the late 1960s, Castillo began to identify with the emerging Latino movement. She wrote her own small newspapers expressing her political beliefs and thought about a career in painting. After high school, Castillo attended Chicago City College for two years before transferring to Northeastern Illinois University, where she earned her bachelor of arts degree in art education in 1975.

Castillo found college stifling and felt that it quashed her aspirations as painter. Instead, she turned to writing poetry. In 1975, Castillo published her first poems. “The Vigil (and the Vow)” and “Untitled” appeared in the magazine Revista Chicano-Riqueña. “Mi maestro” was included in the anthology Zero Makes Me Hungry (1975).

Life’s Work

After a year of teaching ethnic studies at Santa Rosa Junior College in California, Castillo enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1977. That year, she published her first collection of poetry, Otro canto (Other Song, 1977), adding Spanish to her primarily English verses. In 1979, Castillo earned her master of arts degree in Latin American and Caribbean studies. To support herself while writing, she worked as instructor or writer in residence at various US colleges and universities. She gave birth to her son, Marcel Ramón Herrera, on September 21, 1983.

In 1984, Castillo published her second anthology of poetry, Women Are Not Roses, advocating a strong Latina identity. In 1986, she released her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters. Consisting of forty letters from Teresa, a Chicana, to her white friend Alicia, the letters explore female friendship and the pain inflicted by men. The novel won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation in 1986.

Castillo returned to California in 1986 and was invited on a reading tour of Europe by the German Association of Americanists. She was honored by the Women’s Foundation of California in 1987 and 1988. Her third collection of poetry, My Father Was a Toltec (1988), met with critical acclaim and contributed to Castillo winning a California Arts Council fellowship for fiction in 1989. In 1990, she published her second novel, Sapogonia. Dedicated to Castillo’s son, the novel chronicles the life and loves of the free-spirited Latina protagonist Pastora Velásquez Aké.

In 1991, Castillo earned her PhD in American studies from the University of Bremen in Germany. Two years later, she released the novel So Far from God. It combines the tale of a strong Latina mother and her four different daughters with the genre of magical realism, concern for the environment, and feminist issues. The novel won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in Fiction for 1993, and the 1994 Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. It also contributed to Castillo’s second National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

In 1994, Castillo published her PhD thesis, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. By 1996, she had edited four scholarly anthologies. Her first collection of short stories, Loverboys: Stories (1996), features homosexual and heterosexual couples. Her next novel, Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), depicts the world of a dancer struggling with the recurrence of childhood polio.

Castillo used Aztec and Nahuatl legends in her children’s book My Daughter, My Son, the Eagle, the Dove: An Aztec Chant (2000). While holding the La Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University from 2001 to 2006, and as visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2008, Castillo published four more books. Her fourth collection of poetry, I Ask the Impossible (2001), was followed by Psst—I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor: Two Plays (2005). Next was Watercolor Women/Opaque Men (2005), which won the Independent Publisher Outstanding Book of the Year Award in 2006. Castillo’s novel The Guardians (2007) concerns itself with the effects of drug-trafficking violence on Latinos in the Southwestern United States. In 2014 she published Give It to Me, a novel about the sexual adventures and family secrets of a divorced forty-something Chicana in Albuquerque who reunites with an ex-con cousin.

In 2023, Castillo published a short story collection entitled Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home. Reviewers have claimed the seven stories in the collection give the reader tantalizing glimpses into the lives of intriguing characters but leave them wondering about some of the outcomes. She followed this with the September 2024 release of a poetry collection, My Book of the Dead: New Poems.

Significance

Castillo’s rich body of diverse writing is unified by the author’s deep concern for the fate of Latina women in America. Her poetry, fiction, plays, and critical essays have won Castillo an impressive array of literary prizes and fellowships. Even readers and critics from different ethnic, political, and philosophical backgrounds have been impressed by the creative force of her texts.

Bibliography

Bost, Suzanne. Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature. New York: Fordham UP, 2010. Print.

Gonzalez, Liliana. "On Her Own Terms: Ana Castillo Discusses Sexuality, Identity, and Life—Then and Now." Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 27, no. 4 Oct. 2023, pp. 414-423, doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2023.2250670. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Moreno, Laura. "Literary Legend Ana Castillo: Celebrated Author Discusses Her Personal Life Lessons." Adelante, 30 Sept. 2024, adelantemagazine.com/literary-legend-ana-castillo-celebrated-author-discusses-her-most-personal-life-lessons/

Mujcinovic, Fatima. Postmodern Cross-Culturalism and Politicization in US Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alvarez. New York: Lang, 2004. Print.

Spurgeon, Sara. Ana Castillo. Boise: Boise State U Western Writers Series, 2004. Print.

Torres, Hector Avalos. Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2007. Print.

Vivancos Perez, Ricardo F. Radical Chicana Poetics. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Print.