SOURCE: “Queering Chicano/a Narratives: Lesbian as a Healer, Saint and Warrior in Ana Castillo's So Far from God,” in Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 30, Nos. 1–2, Spring, 1997, pp. 63–80.

In the following essay, Morrow examines the character Caridad in So Far from God, and how Caridad's lesbianism is a liberating factor in the male-dominant Mexican culture.

One of the most conspicuous features of Mexican-American liberatory and feminist discourses is their radicalization of traditional narratives for the purpose of social reform.¹ These discourses were constructed by Chicana/o rights activists in the 1960s and Chicana feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Both civil rights and feminist discourses contextualized historic Mexican-American models of communal and individual identities in late-twentieth-century terms. Such revisionist pre-Columbian, colonial and post-colonial narratives argued for programs of ethnic and gender empowerment. Much of their appeal to Mexican-American audiences derived from their cultural familiarity. Contemporary ideas were framed...