SOURCE: “‘i too was of that small corner of the world’: The Cross-Cultural Experience in Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986),” in Americas Review, Vol. 21, Nos. 3–4, Fall–Winter, 1993, pp. 128–38.

In the following essay, Bus explores the cultural attitudes and the journey of self-discovery that Teresa and Alicia undertake in The Mixquiahuala Letters, and how these issues affect their constantly changing relationship.

Ana Castillo's first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters¹ consists of 40 letters the Chicana Teresa writes to her friend Alicia. The letters take an inventory of “the cesspool twirl of our 20s” (17) immediately preceding the time of their composition. Teresa tries to set this decade into perspective,” to gather the pieces of the woman who was my self.” (108), in particular. The emphasis is on “was.”

Applying the terminology of Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), the critic Alvina E. Quintana said that in The Mixquiahuala Letters the “protagonist's existential well-being...