SOURCE: Sirias, Silvio, and Richard McGarry. “Rebellion and Tradition in Ana Castillo's So Far from God and Sylvia López-Medina's Cantora.” MELUS 25, no. 2 (summer 2000): 83-100.

In the following essay, Sirias and McGarry examine two novels—Ana Castillo's So Far from God and Sylvia López-Medina's Cantora—that offer contrasting views of the cultural situation of Chicanas.

The Chicana “voice” in literature, according to Ramón Saldívar, comprises a discourse that creates “an instructive alternative to the exclusively phallocentric subject of contemporary Chicano narrative” (175). As Cordelia Chávez Candelaria reports, Chicana/Latina and other women writers have struggled for centuries to attain the right “to express and assert the validity of woman-space and the textured zone of women's experience” (26). Over the last two decades, the body of work that Chicana novelists have contributed to the totality of Chicano artistic discourse has managed to expand the formally predominant socio-political...