Rosario Castellanos considered literature a means of understanding the world around her. Consequently her fiction sprang from a deep-felt need to respond to issues close to her own reality: mainly the problems of Indians and the oppression of women. Having been raised in Comitán, Mexico, a provincial town with a strong Mayan influx, she became acquainted at an early age with the Indian plight. Because of this familiarity, she considered Indians to be neither mysterious nor poetic, but rather a people who lived in atrocious misery. Moreover, she felt she had to write of how misery had atrophied their best qualities. Castellanos included women in significant roles in her indigenous and neoindigenous writings, so that class, race, and sex could be seen as constitutive parts of the economics of oppression. Her loyalty, then, was divided between the despair of the Indians and the alienation of women...