SOURCE: “Chicana/o Fiction from Resistance to Contestation: The Role of Creation in Ana Castillo's So Far from God,” in MELUS, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer, 2000, pp. 63–82.

In the following essay, Rodriguez explores Castillo's contesting of political, social, sexual, and religious standards and beliefs in So Far from God.

The past two decades have given us a wealth of Chicana and Chicano literature, both because of the exemplary work of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project in discovering and recovering older texts and because of the sheer boom in Chicana/o publications over the last fifteen years. Even the nonspecialist now recognizes the names of Chicana/o authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Ana Castillo, Rolando Hinojosa, and Denise Chavez, to name only a few. Their work, as well as that of their contemporaries, complements the publications of the heralded Chicana/o movement, which included...