SOURCE: “The Cultural Politics of Dislocation and Relocation in the Novels of Ana Castillo,” in MELUS, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1998, pp. 81–97.

In the following essay, Walter analyzes how characters in Ana Castillo's novels are often subjected to struggles for identity and for freedom from oppression.

Now, I-woman am going to blow up the Law … in language.

(Cixous “The Laughing Medusa” 887)

By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness.

(Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera 80)

Ever since the initial success of vanguard Chicana writers such as Lorna Dee Cervantes, Estela Portillo-Trambley, Gina Valdés, Bernice Zamora, Lucha Corpi and Alma Villanueva in the late 1970s and early 1980s and throughout the boom of Chicana literary output from the mid 1980s until now, Chicana writers have used the written...