SOURCE: “The Multiple Subject in the Writing of Ana Castillo,” in Americas Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 65–72.

In the following essay, Yarbro-Bejarano comments on the three perspectives often used in Castillo's works. Castillo writes alternately in first-, second-, and third-person perspective, but because of her experiences in a multi-ethnic world, her first-person writing style has a myriad of voices.

In her book Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa speaks of the political reality of the U.S./Mexican border and also of the psychological, sexual and spiritual borderlands that form “wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”¹ These borderlands are not only external but internal, marking out the rifts and splits of our “shifting and multiple identity.” My...