Women Are Not Roses (1984) is Castillo's third book of poetry. In it she explores the idea of women who feel disenfranchised in male-dominated cultures.

The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Castillo's first novel, earned her an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. As the title indicates, the novel is composed of a series of letters, written in the 1970s and 1980s, between Teresa, a California poet, and Alicia, her college friend who has become an artist in New York City. The correspondence reveals how the roles these women have assumed differ from the traditional roles of Latina women and how the men in Teresa's and Alicia's lives—both Anglo and Chicano—resent this difference.

In 1993 Castillo published So Far from God, a novel that garnered more public interest than any of her previous works. Written in the genre of magical realism...