SOURCE: “A MELUS Interview: Ana Castillo,” in MELUS, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall, 1997, pp. 133–49.

In the following excerpt, compiled from interviews and conversations between Saeta and Castillo between 1993 and 1994, Castillo explains how her Chicana background, feminist beliefs, and other Latin American writers influence her writing.

Over the last three decades, Chicano literature has experienced its own renaissance. Many of the voices in that literary renacimiento belong to women—by the 1990s, nearly two-thirds of the contemporary literature was being written by women. Firmly committed to challenging and redefining the gender, race, culture, and class distinctions which have historically defined Chicanos/as in the United States, Chicana writers have become “conscious transmitters of literary expression … excavators of our common culture, mining legends, folklore, and myths for our own metaphors” (Ana Castillo Massacre of the Dreamers). Writing can dream and invent new possibilities. It is the utopian space where the long-silenced Other...