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Michael Sedano


University Conference on Latino Culture and Science Fiction April 30.

The University of California, Riverside hosts a trailblazing academic inquiry into science fiction and speculative fiction written by raza writers in a gathering of casí all the raza writers of science fiction and speculative literature.

The April 30 conference arrives at a time of literary ferment when writers and readers come to the book market with higher expectations than publishers can understand.

The conference explores how six writers get their books to market, the role of sci-fi and speclit genres in United States letters, the nature of literary exclusion, and stories about what each writer brings to readers.

The morning panel joins almost all raza published authors of the genres into the same room at the same time. Hosted by UCR’s Professor of Science Fiction Media Studies, Sherryl Vint, the discussions will be classics among literary conferences. Mario Acevedo’s and Jésus Treviño’s vampire fiction meets Rudy Ch. García’s and Treviño’s dimensional surrealism. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s lunar braceros meet el padrino of Chicano sci-fi Ernest Hogan’s mexicas in outerspace. Y más.

In the afternoon, Michael Sedano and UCR graduate students join the circle to include critical perspectives and readerly responses to these sci-fi and speclit genres, and to join the audience in speculation into what directions each sees raza speculative literature and science-fiction taking.

A grand event in the late afternoon, years in the making, puts a capstone on the conference.

See Rudy Ch. Garcia’s Saturday, April 26 column for building/meeting-room specifics.

The beautiful Riverside campus is freeway convenient off the 60/215, in Susan Straight country.


Conference on Rudolfo Anaya: Tradition, Modernity, and the Literatures of the U.S. Southwest May 2-3.



La Bloga friend Roberto Cantú brings the most arrestingly interesting academic conferences to Southern California and the east side of the LA basin. May 2-3, Cantú surpasses himself with a conference dedicated to La Bloga friend Rudolfo Anaya and literature of the US Southwest.

Scholars from New Mexico to old Germany will lecture, moderate, and sit panel presentations.

Four keystone fiction writers take the lectern during the conference, Ana Castillo, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Reyna Grande, and Mario Acevedo, fresh from his stunning appearance UCR's raza in spec lit and sci-fi conference.

The Anaya conference on the campus of California State University Los Angeles in El Sereno is free and open to public visitors for just the cost of parking or a short walk from the bus station. There is no light rail serving this campus directly.

A word of caution: parking rules are posted so you can read them and avoid a ticket. Be assured local regulations are strictly enforced.

The conference is sponsored by Cal State L.A.'s Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Conference Series, the College of Arts and Letters, the College of Natural and Social Sciences, the Department of Chicano Studies, the Department of English, the Barry Munitz Fund, and the Emeriti Association.

See the conference website for details.



Writing Workshop With Ana Castillo

© foto: workshop at NLWC in 2011

Working with a seasoned writer to develop ideas, polish writing, glean insights from conversation often comes with the payoff of better writing, an improved attitude. This happens for beginners as well as polished authors.

The opportunity to work with one of Chicana Chicano Literature's most accomplished talents, Ana Castillo, should quickly fill the handful of seats available on May 3 through auspices of La Bloga friend Iris de Anda and Mujeres de Maíz.

 Visit the workshop Facebook page for your invitation. There is a fee for the workshop.


Writing Workshop for Newer Writers in East Los

La Bloga friend Sam Quinones organizes a writing workshop series for those who've never published before, Tell Your True Tale.



Students from recent workshops appear Saturday April 26 at the  East L.A. Public Library at 2:30 pm. The East LA Public Library awaits your attendance at 4837 E 3rd St, LA, 323-264-0155.

Quinones' workshops revolve around insisting stories fit in limited space. Tell Your True Tale approach forces writers to hone their thoughts and imagination, eliminate unnecessary words, make the hard choices that are part of strong writing, no matter the genre.

The Saturday event showcases the students' work with, according to Quinones, stunning variety and quality of stories: A vet returning home from Vietnam; a janitor in Houston trying to find her children in Mexico; of braceros finding their way north and back home again; a man learning confidence as he woos a woman; a bus rider in Los Angeles; a mariachi singing for a heartbroken family on Christmas Eve.

Find details on the workshops here.


Free Poetry Column Follow-Up: Veterans Land.

I noted in La Bloga's coverage of the Grand Park Downtown Bookfest that one organization performs Shakespeare with kids on the grounds of the Veteran's Center and elsewhere. The observation draws a response from the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles Associate Director of Veteran Affairs Kellogg Brengel.

I receive Brengel's words with appreciation for his organization's role in the VA's efforts helping GIs. LA is the homeless GI capital of the world. It's a moral outrage that so many of these men and women are walking wounded soldiers not receiving the care we owe them. I am a Veteran of the US Army but no one needs to be a Veteran to be outraged by this crud.

For Veterans and supporters of Veterans, a critical issue simmers just at the surface of efforts like the Shakespeare Center and other companies. Many, if not all, private or non-Veteran users of the West LA Veterans home lost a federal case and will have to vacate VA land, absent some amicable resolution that benefits Veterans more than others. A commercial laundry, the UCLA baseball team, an exclusive Brentwood girls' school, a theatre, all don't want to leave low-cost Veteran land for market-rate facilities.


Mr. Brengel notes the program goes into its third year on the VA campus, he says, supported by a veteran workforce. Working with the VA's Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, SCLA has hired a total of 61 veterans over the past two summers and because of our free admission policy for  veterans, active military, their families, friends and caregivers/VA employees, SCLA has given away 5,665 tickets to our summer performances.  

The veterans we hire are recruited from the VA's Veterans Community Employment Development program which helps find supported employment opportunities for veterans enrolled in VA services who are chronically unemployed, homeless, and/or receiving psycho-social rehabilitative treatment. 

Veterans receive paid on-the-job training and work in all aspects of the production including: production and venue crews, audio engineer, wardrobe assistant, ushers, parking attendants, and site-specific marketing. The transitional work experience this program provides has been a great success and we are very much looking forward to being back in the Japanese Garden for the summer of 2014. 

A ver.


La Bloga Welcomes Guest Columnists

Thank you for reading La Bloga. When you have a comment, a need to enlarge, clarify, or correct La Bloga's coverage of literatura, cultura, arte, o más, don't hide that light of yours under a bushel basket, dale shine. Contact La Bloga here for particulars of your Guest Column, or email labloga@readraza punto com. Of the eleven daily blogueras blogueros, eight began writing for La Bloga as Guest Columnists.


Late-arriving News

Just as I was putting La Bloga to bed, this opportunity pulls into sight.

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Over the weekend, I was catching up on my Facebook posts and resting. I had to cancel Jacquie Harvey’s interview for another day because I was truly exhausted.  Anyway, while trolling, I saw a post from YA author Matt de la Peña…

How do you say no to Ana Castillo, Tucson? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/breaking-tucson-high-scho_b_1458984.html

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Ana Castillo is a celebrated poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She is considered to be one of the leading voices to emerge from the Chicana experience. Castillo is an incredibly prolific author and poet whose work has been critically acclaimed and widely anthologized in the United States and abroad. She has long been an activist and feminist as well as a strong voice for social change.

Castillo’s books include the novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters (Bilingual Review Press, 1986; Doubleday, 1992), Sapogonia (Bilingual Review Press, 1990), So Far From God (Norton, 1993), Massacre of the Dreamers: Reflections on Mexican-Indian Women in the United States 500 Years After the Conquest (University of New Mexico, 1992) and I Ask the Impossible (Anchor Books, 2001).

Castillo has coordinated an anthology on la Virgen de Guadalupe entitled La Diosa de las Americas/Goddess of the Americas (Riverside/Putnam, 1996), Peel My Love Like an Onion (Doubleday) in 1999 and a children’s book My Daughter, My Son, The Eagle, The Dove. In 2005 she published a dramatic work Psst…I have something to tell you, mi amor (Wings Press) and most recently published her latest book The Guardians (Random House).

Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo currently lives in New Mexico, although she is currently teaching at MIT in Boston. The Ana Castillo website contains a complete bio and list of publications and awards.

For me personally, Ana Castillo is my hero, a role model and one of my favorite authors and poets. I've always admired her activism and her writing. Ms. Castillo very kindly took time out from her busy schedule at MIT to speak with me about her poetry, her books and her activism. I found her to be gracious, warm and brilliant. We had a lovely conversation and I gained both knowledge and inspiration from it.

GR: I loved your children's coming of age book My Daughter, My Son, The Eagle, The Dove - do you ever think you will write another book for children?


AC: Well, it's not always a matter of wanting to write something; sometimes it's a matter of getting it published. That book didn't do very well and is going out of print soon. I did write a book for babies from the huehuetlatolli but couldn't find a publisher that was interested in taking it on.


GR: It's a shame that the coming of age book is going out of print. It's such a beautiful book.


AC: I know, I know. And like I said I had the baby book, the huehuetlatolli, for the newborns and we passed that around. I wanted to do that about a year or so with this one. So you know you kind of lose your energy on it and then you move on to what else you have to get done like you know, a novel and so all those things are on the back burner right now.

GR: I loved The Guardians.

AC: Thank you.

GR: I loved Regina. She was a lot more timid and vulnerable than like say, Carmen La Coja of Peel My Love Like an Onion but she was wonderful. She was such a great character and I liked her so much. She was very easy to relate to.

AC: Thank you.

GR: What was your inspiration for The Guardians?

AC: Well I have been making my home in Southern New Mexico for the last four years splitting my time there and teaching and it’s out in the desert. The Franklin Mountains are in view. There’s a picture of me standing there outside of my house and you can see the Franklins behind me and actually that was the initial take off point for me in the story imagining someone on the other side of those of those mountains waiting to cross over. It was a cold morning and it was very misty – you couldn’t even see them but you knew they were there. That’s how it started for me. The first question is how would it be like for someone who’s waiting this morning to cross over and the other question was who’s waiting. And so I went over to my laptop and started writing the story.

GR: It’s a beautiful story, especially for someone like me who grew up with people who came during the revolution. My grandfather came over when he was about 14 years old from Guanajuato.

AC: Well my grandmother brought her son who had chased after Pancho Villa. He was 14 at that time too. She grabbed him in Torreon and then they went into Chicago and didn’t stop till they got there.

GR: A lot of people ended up in Chicago. My grandfather used to call it Cheecago.

AC: Yeah (laughs), so did we, ah ha Cheecago. But that’s how we got there and it’s just funny how people don’t know the history. Back in the 70’s people would say, “oh you’re from Chicago and you speak Spanish?” Of course a lot of Mexican people went up there. There were factories and the stockyards and the steel mills. So there was work for people.

GR: Yeah it’s how people ended up where they ended up during that time. My grandmother was born on the way and her family ended up in Piru – Ventura County picking oranges. They were hiding from Pancho Villa. So many of these families have these interconnected Pancho Villa stories.

AC: Exactly. That’s what the book does with el abuelito who is claiming these connections and say okay well fine we don’t have these connections but we could have had them.

GR: That’s why I think The Guardians is so important. It touches on so many of our personal immigrant stories and our family stories. It’s very relatable to what’s going on with the borders. It’s an amazing book and probably one of my favorites next to I Ask the Impossible.

AC: Thank you.

GR: One of the questions I had for you was about activism and what more do you think needs to be done? What advice would you give to young Chicana women today? How to keep it going?

AC: Well I’ve had a couple of inquiries as a result of the subject of the book that I haven’t had recently from young people, like you know new college kids maybe. I decided sometime back personally for myself most of my activism goes into my writing and the commitment I have to the books that I do and speaking and so on. That came because as a very young person when you discover, when you have some consciousness and you discover where you fit and where your people fit in society and you decide that it’s not just. You know you have that zealousness of the young person that feels like you can go out and do it all. You know you save the world, save your gente, save women and before you know it if you try to do that you will burn out very quickly. My feeling is that I always think that and my advice to young people regardless of what times in these decades we’ve been living in there’s always work to be done. The point is what can you do personally that you can live with so that you can get up the next morning and have the strength to start it all over again. So whatever it is that people find that they want to work on they also have to remember that they are human beings and they need to save some time for themselves for personal growth, for mental health, for their families, their loved ones so that they will have the strength to continue doing that work. So if you decide well you know I don’t have much time, my kids are in school and you want to get online and do letter writing to your senators, your local congressman on the Internet that’s something to do. That can be done. It doesn’t have to be doing it all, going out into the streets rioting, getting arrested. There are other ways to show your presence.

GR: Yes and it can consume you if you’re not careful.

AC: It does consume you because once you realize that one thing is related to the other, you’re outraged by injustice in general. So that’s what I would recommend. I have found my blog one source for that because I have readers. I don’t know how many readers but I know I have readers. I know there’s people out there because they respond every now and then and they’re not only in this country but they are in other countries and I think that is such a tremendous tool that we have these days with the internet. To be able to reach out to people all over the world that 20 years ago or 30 years ago was just impossibility. So I would say that and I think that another way to do that if you’re more hands on is to start in your own immediate community. That community could be your town, it can be your ward, your district, your town, your school and to see what needs to be done there. That’s one step. I also feel that it’s very important for young people to have a sense of history and do research and don’t re-invent the wheel and don’t think that you’re the first martyr to discover social injustice but to take advantage of previous generations of activists and find out what they did and how they resolved things.

GR: Right, right. It’s interesting. My mom was an activist and I saw her burn out very fast. I’m a danzante Azteca and that’s how that and book reviews – trying to get the Latino community reading is my personal torch to carry.

AC: And we absolutely need that as we have a growing body of Latino literature. We absolutely need it and I found myself on a tirade recently if you read my blog because you know it’s been happening obviously since the 80’s. You have activists coming out of the 60’s and 70’s and then you start getting people that are taking the opportunities for their education and then becoming Republican and becoming to my mind retroactive activity. One of them are we are living still in the time in which it’s not as if every Latino writer has the same opportunity as every white writer to get published. We are still seeing many of us, except for a handful are still seen as ethic or minority writers and therefore we are not writing to the universal experience. This has been a truism as far as I’ve known since the 80’s. The first people to go out and slam another Latino or Latina or another minority are their own people.

GR: Right, the crabs in the bucket.

AC: Yes! I was just outraged, not because people don’t have an opinion to like or dislike my work but why are you going to go do that out in the public? We already have enough going against us than to have our own people doing the dirty job for the mainstream.

GR: That kind of thing drives me crazy which leads me to my next question. What steps forward do you think we’ve made as women and Chicana women and what steps backward have we made since the 70’s, 80’s?

AC: Well we aren’t isolated from the rest of the country and the rest of the world and so as we were opening up those opportunities just as other ethnic groups, newer generations are able to assume that perhaps that they can get into college, that they can go away to school, that they can take certain careers. I think those are some of the wonderful things that have happened. The downside is that in my opinion we lost, some of the work that we also did as Chicana feminists that still needs to be done and that is and this isn’t the case of course with everybody but we also see now they’re not feminists, their not necessarily self defined as Chicanas, are young women marketing their careers vis a vis their bodies and that’s okay for them. And those are things that started evolving in the last ten or 15 years that when I started to see that I couldn’t believe what I had fought for was to see that. So I think that we’ve gone backward and I think that there is going to be a backlash with that. Maybe not today or tomorrow but there will be one. There was a reason that Chicanas wanted to be taken seriously for their intellect. To be able to get into positions of power for their intellect and not because you know they had cleavage, just the opposite in fact.

GR: Yeah I see a lot of the teenage girls and the way they dress and I just want to stop them and say mija – stop aren’t you reading? What are you doing? It’s a struggle with the girls – the media and the Internet and being so caught up in their looks. I think you’re right; we’re going to be hit with a backlash. Not just Latina women but women in general. We’re overly concerned about beauty, weight, etc.

AC: Well you know on the one had you can say that, when I hear for example that JLO is such a role model for Latinas, on the one hand I respect her for her business sense and I respect her for her ambition. But again, she’s in the entertainment world. She’s done it on her looks and very specifically on her anatomy. Madonna is also considered a great businesswoman and so is Yoko Ono. In the entertainment world that is a whole different story. I feel if I had a young daughter right now, I would feel a little discouraged if that was my daughter’s primary role model for success and for young people, for Latinas and Latinos. You know they think, oh she’s such a businessperson and she does this and that. Well yes, after you’ve made your money in a certain way whatever that way maybe. But again to me it is about social change and using your mind to implement those changes.

GR: Right. You know I just read a children’s book that I’m going to be reviewing. I have a children’s book review site for Latino children’s literature called Cuentecitos and I just read Monica Brown’s book on Gabriela Mistral. Now that’s a role model.

AC: Right and someone that we need to know about, that our children need to know about. In France where they have no shortage of adulation for their writers, I remember about 20 something years ago meeting some little girl, she was about ten years old and she had something like playing cards but they were about French writers. So that’s what I’m talking about. Those are the kinds of things we need to put out there for our young people.

GR: It’s important. Literacy is a big issue and sometimes I get a little discouraged but I just pick myself up and keep on going.

AC: What else can you do?

GR: One of my of my favorite things you write is your protest poetry. My favorite is Women Don’t Riot. It hits you in the gut. It’s an older poem but it still packs a punch.

AC: Yes, I wrote it right after the OJ Simpson case, after the decision was made. I think I wrote it right after that. It’s funny you mention that, I was just thinking that my son that is in his twenties now recorded me reading that and I think we posted it on the website. The way he sent it to me was Save My Mom and I saw that on my computer and I thought Save My Mom what is this and it was me reading that poem. It reminded me of what you were saying about your own mother. So that’s how he sees it.

GR: It’s a great voice and a beautiful poem that says so much. Are you going to be doing any more books of poetry?

AC: I never dismiss that possibility. I sure do hope so. It takes a very long time to get a collection that you want. You have to be selective and there’s also a theme and as I’ve gone more into prose there’s been less poetry. But you know Water Color Women was a 300-page poem that I did in 2005 so it’s not on my immediate agenda but I do hope that I am able to do another book in my lifetime. They take about ten years usually. Not Watercolor Women though.

GR: Well you have such a beautiful poetic voice it would be wonderful to see another book, another collection.

AC: Thank you.

GR: I read a Washington Post article recently about how you are haunted by your ancestors. Do you care to expand on that a bit?

AC: Well I think that’s one way, speaking of poetic voice I think that’s one way to put how writers come to their material. Especially postcolonial writers we come to our material haunted by our families, our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents migrations, haunted by history in a way that dominant society doesn’t have to do. You know things just have been going on as they’ve been going on, you know victory after victory. And we are reliving or working on a wound that we inherited and that’s the way it came to me to describe why I do write about Chicanos and Latinos, Mexicans I don’t even know how to describe us when we are American citizens who are always looked on as immigrants.

GR: Sometimes I think we do it to ourselves too. I mean I think of myself as a Mexican woman versus an American woman even though I am third generation, I was born here. My culture is so saturated in me that I consider myself a Mexicana.

AC: Well but that’s the debate that is given by people on the anti-immigrant side. They say that as long as you don’t assimilate like the good Europeans did who came to Ellis Island, you yourself are contributing to your own alienation. But I don’t really agree with that. I think that part of that comes because we have this unique relationship with being the Southwest of the United States became part of the U.S, in 1848 that no other country outside of the Native Americans really experiences that on this territory. At that time we are really made to feel alienated in this country forever. You know I live in New Mexico and there are people there in the village that I live in that their great, great, great grandfather established a town there and they definitely – I mean they may call themselves Hispanic (that’s the preferred term if your not a Mexican citizen) but they speak Spanish, they are you know look at Mestizo, proud of their Apache background but they definitely see themselves as marginalized or not white. And we’re not white. So I mean part of that has to do with we can’t assimilate because we have a very long history of being marginalized as people of color on these lands. You go where you feel most comfortable.

GR: I don’t think we want to assimilate because for me personally, I fight it kicking and screaming because I feel they are trying to take the color out of my life and kind of white wash me. Que no, que no! I am a danzante Azteca. I put on feathers and go out into the street and dance around in Native regalia. It’s very hard for me to assimilate.

AC: Well you know, this past weekend I was at the Brooklyn Book Festival and I was on a panel with two gentlemen writers and one was from Jamaica and one was from India and the point for me is that I am not from another country. Now I guess I live on the border but I do live on this side of the border.

GR: But we are treated as foreigners.

AC: Yes. So it’s a constant and you are treated as a foreigner and when they find out you’re not they lose interest in you. [Laughs]. Oh okay, one of those. You know what I’m saying? It’s like you lose credibility. When I’m asked if I write in English or in Spanish, I say I write in English why would I be writing in Spanish? I’m not Laura Esquivel. I’m from Chicago. So then they lose interest in you.

GR: Bueno, it’s a hard battle and it’s uphill but we gotta keep going.

AC: But I guess we signed up for it so it’s too late to turn back now!

GR: Right.

AC: Okay. Well thanks so much for the wonderful review that we received. You know you put a lot of hard work in your books and it’s easy for someone to say you know I didn’t like it.

GR: Well I loved it.

AC: Thanks for the work that you do too.

GR: Thanks so much.

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It's been a tremendously busy week for me and an exciting one. I've interviewed Ana Castillo (what an amazing lady she is), I've been researching illustrators, preparing for the Cybils, talking my nice boss into giving Dana-Farber free banner advertising and picking out safe new car seats for my grandkids along with my everyday work madness. I almost clean forgot Poetry Friday which would have been terrible since (gulp) I'm hosting and rounding up.

In honor of Ana Castillo and Poetry Friday - here is the link to her speaking her seminal poem - Women Don't Riot from her book I Ask the Impossible.

Women Don't Riot

I hope I figured out Mr. Linky. I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with for my first hosting Poetry Friday.

Please leave a comment after dropping your poem off with Mr. Linky. Happy Poetry Friday everyone!

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The Guardians. A Novel.
NY: Random House, 2007.
978-1-4000-6500-4

Michael Sedano

Now that Ana Castillo has left Chicago for southern New Mexico's lonely ranchitos, she's also left behind her normally strong older woman character. Carmen la Coja, the one-legged flamenco dancer of Peel My Love Like an Onion, captivates her younger lover until he's no longer amusing and she locks him out of her high-rise apartment. In The Guardians, Regina's low self-esteem keeps her clumsily in the path of an ardent younger swain. They kiss, but that's the limit of their physical intimacy.

Regina's incompetency comes as quite a surprise, since so often a Castillo woman stands as a model of independence and growth, like la coja. But then, rural New Mexico presents its own set of challenges for Regina and the writer: Hardscrabble farming, limited job horizons, complications of la frontera for the characters. Sadly, Castillo allows herself to be trapped by the lurking conventionality of evil coyotes and gang members, turning the story into a mere thriller.

Not that The Guardians is a disappointment, far from it. The early chapters express affectionate involvement with a middle-aged woman eking a living on sandy plots, supplementing one's income with wild-haired schemes and a big heart. The plot wends its way into the Juarez murders of thousands of women, mixing it with immigrant smuggling, narcotraficantes, and evil coyotes. Borrowing from another Juarez murders novel, Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood, one of the key characters is kidnaped by the sex torturers, but unlike Gaspar de Alba, Castillo shies away from the gruesome details.

A four-voice novel, Castillo supplements Regina's narrative with nephew Gabo, would-be lover Michael, and Michael's WWII veteran cantinero grandfather. Regina is the stunning redhead teacher's aide, Michael the chongoed middle school historian who's dated every woman on the faculty with no results. Gabo's torment at his father's disappearance complicates his deterioration into madness. The blind abuelo if not quite a blind Tiresias is often the voice of common sense who keeps as even a keel as their circumstance permits.

They make an unlikely team of detectives. Worse, the camaraderie among them is never fully developed. And, as with any detective story, a lot of what happens is completely predictable, but Castillo serves up a couple of good surprises. The fun comes from letting the characters do their thing and see what happens when the dust settles.


Notes of a Distracted Driver

Traffic clogs to a stop just across the intersection. I stop at the yellow light, tensing that the driver too close behind me may be thinking to synchronize both of us running the light. Across the street, thronged pedestrians lean urgently against the traffic, expecting to dash out to catch the connecting bus pulling up just now.

A pig hauler has halted in the snarl. A sixteen wheel trailer, forty feet of meat hauled by a big rig diesel. The aluminum box heads to Farmer John, a mile down the street. Everything but the squeal.

The aluminum sides of the trailer reflect the dull morning light in a swath of grey. Perforations checker the sides, bulging here and there with pinkish-brown bristled flesh. The light changes. My lane advances faster than the pigs'. I catch up just as traffic slows again and I begin to stop. Up on the second level a pig snout prods the air up there. I hope it is sweeter than the exhausted contamination that keeps my windows tightly up. Still, I hit the window switch. One-handedly, I switch on my camera, point in the right direction, and shoot.

Both lanes come to a dead halt. The pig pulls back its snout, looks up at the brightness of the western sky, and smiles at the glory of the coming day.

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Ana Castillo is a renowned poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Castillo’s books include the novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters (Bilingual Review Press, 1986; Doubleday, 1992), for which she received the Before Columbia Foundation’s American Book Award in 1987. She is also the author of Sapogonia (Bilingual Review Press, 1990), So Far From God (Norton, 1993), and a work of non-fiction, Massacre of the Dreamers: Reflections on Mexican-Indian Women in the United States 500 Years After the Conquest (University of New Mexico, 1992).

As a poet, Castillo is the author of several works including the chapbooks, Otro Canto (1977), and The Invitation (1979); these were followed by several volumes of poetry which include Women Are Not Roses (Arte Público, 1984), My Father Was a Toltec (West End Press, 1988), and I Ask the Impossible (Anchor Books, 2001). She recently published Water Color Women, Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse (Curbstone Press, 2005).

In addition to the above books, Castillo’s other works include Peel My Love Like an Onion (Doubleday, 1999), and a children’s book, My Daughter, My Son, The Eagle, The Dove (Dutton Juvenile, 2000). In 2005 she published a dramatic work Psst…I have something to tell you, mi amor (Wings Press).

In her new novel, The Guardians (Random House), Castillo ventures into controversial terrain as she explores the issue of undocumented immigration through the hardships of one family. She tells her story through the voices of several distinct and unforgettable characters as we follow Regina, a middle-aged widow living in southern New Mexico, who cares for her teenage nephew, Gabo, an undocumented immigrant. Gabo’s mother died seven years earlier attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico. Now Gabo’s father, Rafa, might have met a similar fate. As Regina and Gabo embark on their search for Rafa, they confront the underground and dangerous world of coyotes who are willing to smuggle immigrants into the United States for a steep price.

Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo currently lives in New Mexico. For a complete listing of her publications, awards and scheduled appearances, visit her website.

Castillo kindly agreed to take time out of her busy book tour to answer a few questions for La Bloga.

DANIEL OLIVAS: Undocumented immigration is such a hot-button issue which, sadly, brings out some of the worst xenophobic feelings in some people. Writers such as Luis Alberto Urrea and Reyna Grande have stepped into the fray in non-fiction and fiction, respectively. Why did you decide to put this issue at the center of your novel’s narrative?

ANA CASTILLO: Living in the desert in Southern New Mexico, near the border since the end of 2003, brought this reality front and center for my imagination to run with. I’ve taken on subjects of concerns in a variety of genres, and I have to make a decision each time as to which genre I will choose. I have found that storytelling is the way to reach out to audiences who might not come to an article or a poem.

OLIVAS: The Guardians is not a traditional novel in the sense that you use many different voices to tell your story. Did you try other structures first or did you decide on this structure from the start? What are the benefits to you, as a writer, to the multi-voice structure?

CASTILLO: The quartet of narrators happened as the story evolved. I don’t work with an outline. As the story develops the structure takes shape. In this case I felt it was important to give Gabo, the young man, his own voice. And Miguel/Mike, the Chicano, naturally had to speak for himself. And as they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, so Miguel’s grandfather also spoke for himself.

The benefit it gave me was the challenge of trying something I hadn't done in a previous book. For me personally as a writer, structural challenges are very important. They keep things interesting. I call myself a “genre jumper.” For example, a few years ago I started to re-work a long poem while I was supposed to be writing a novel. Six weeks later,I had written a novel in verse, Watercolor Women, Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse (Curbstone Press, 2005).

OLIVAS: One of my favorite characters in your novel is El Abuelo Milton. Is he based on anyone in particular? How did you create a character who is so different from you?

CASTILLO: I believe for every novelist it’s the same. All our characters have some of our selves in them just as they do in our dreams. We dream about our dead grandfathers, have arguments with old lovers, but in fact, all of those dream characters are ourselves. We’re working it out. In the novel, we writers do that and to make it accessible to the reader, we further develop a character that is a composite of many people.

OLIVAS: Do you have a favorite character in your novel?

CASTILLO: I put the same amount of love in each of them and each returned it.

OLIVAS: As you were writing The Guardians, did you have any friends or family members read drafts?

CASTILLO: I credited the friends who read a late draft in the acknowledgements. Sometimes I read passages out loud to people close to me as I'm writing. Basically, it’s to anyone who will listen! It started with my poetry -- to hear cadences. It helps me to hear it out loud.

OLIVAS: If there’s one thing you’d like readers to take away from The Guardians, what would it be?


CASTILLO: Extraordinary reading pleasure.
First and foremost, and I teach this about fiction: it’s for pleasure. No one reads a novel or short
story for the news of the day. “Pleasure” doesn’t necessarily mean that the subject has to be “pleasant” or comfortable for the reader.

OLIVAS: What are you reading these days?
Any recommendations?

CASTILLO: I'm reading Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life, by New Mexican Governor Bill Richardson. Let’s not rely on CNN and NPR to give us all the information we need to make responsible decisions for our communities. When I’m writing, I don’t read fiction. My other recommendation is: Vote in the primaries.

OLIVAS: Any advice for beginning writers?

CASTILLO: Short and sweet: Read, read read. Write, write, write. Re-write, re-write, re-write.

OLIVAS: Thank you for spending time with La Bloga.

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Goddess of the Americas
Castillo, Ana (ed.)
Riverhead Books, 1997
ISBN-10: 1573226300
ISBN-13: 978-1573226301

This a brilliant collection celebrating the love of and devotion to the enduring influence of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Castillo includes male and female writers, agnostics, traditional Catholics, feminists, and Santeras in this eclectic homage. This anthology contains essays, memoir, poetry, and rhetoric celebrating a complicated relationship with our diosa, one that is much less European and traditionally Catholic, something much more than that. This is a deity that is full-bodied, sensual, actively involved in the thrum and unraveling and reclamation of the world.

In the preface, Castillo writes that this brown-skinned Mary appeared in 1531; but in reality, existed as Tonatzin, a thousand years before the conquest. The thread that weaves these essays together, is the fascination with the ways in which Tonatzin, the moon goddess, morphed into this particular image of Mary. She is essentially Latina, essentially an emblem of indestructible indigena roots, which survived through a syncretic practice. (Much like the ways Mejicanos/Chicanos themselves survived the conquest.)

Authors such as Elena Poniatowska, Luis J. Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, and Gloria Anzaldua write with clarity, precision and grace, depicting a 'Virgin' that has survived the conquest and embodies a multiplicity of identities, based on the multitude of goddesses that are her antecedents. Shaped in their image, this goddess is rooted in the cyclic and eternal, sprung from our roots, from the religion that held us before there was religion. This goddess is one with qualities the colonizers could not imagine, let alone control. This Virgin is an amalgam of lover, consort, liberator, guardian of the living and the dead, wellspring of the revolutionary.

Of particular interest to me was Sandra Ciseneros' essay entitled, 'Guadalupe the Sex Goddess'. It in, she traces the Virgin's pre-Columbian roots as icon of fertility and sexuality, central to a cosmology in which female sexuality was valued, not denigrated. In that cosmology, Guadalupe's antecedents included Tonatzin, the moon Goddess who embodies the feminine principle of cyclical re-creation. She (Guadalupe) is also linked to Tlazolteotl, patron of sexual pleasure and Tzinteotl, goddess of the rump. Lastly, there is a connection Tlaelcuani, the filth-eater, she who transforms the ugly, the corrupted, into the sanctified and renewed.

Cisnero on her significance:

When I look at the Virgin of Guadalupe now, she is not the Lupe of my childhood, no longer the one in my grandparent's house in Tepeyac, nor is she the one of the Roman Catholic Church.

...Like every woman who matters to me, I have had to search for her in the rubble of history. And I have found her. She is Guadalupe the sex goddess, one that makes me feel good about my sexual power, my sexual energy, who reminds me I must...speak the most basic, honest truth...write from my panocha.' (p.49)

This is the vivid imagery, the hidden history I need in order to shape a reconstruction of identity, one woven woven with both Catholic and more ancient threads. This is the Goddess that saves everywoman, blesses everyman, and transforms physical violence and abuse, celebrating the sacred, sexual body.

A formidable read. This book has helped me think about what in means to be a Latina, in a personal and epic sense.

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