ANNA CASTILLO

Ana Castillo, a self described Chicana feminist writer, was born June 15, 1953 and raised in Chicago . Spanish was her first language. Her education centered around Chicago . She graduated from high school there, and then attended Chicago City College and Northeastern Illinois University , where she received a B.A. in 1975, majoring in Art with a minor in Secondary Education. In 1979 she received her M.A. degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Chicago . She extols the benefits of growing up in a metropolitan city: "I give it a lot of credit because of the range of cultures, you grow up knowing there are other beliefs and customs."

Castillo admits to writing her first few lines of poetry about the death of one of her grandparents as a child on the playground. She began her writing career in the mid-seventies in the Chicano movement as a poet and was first published nationally in 1975. She lists Toni Morrison as one of her earliest idols. She also read Anais Nin. She expressed her Chicana feminist voice as early as the 1970's during the time she spent in the Chicano movement. During the early years of the movement her first audience was the Latino activists around her. She admitted in a "Platica" at New Mexico State University in March 1998, that she was "devastated by the antagonism of my male counterparts in the movement." She withdrew and wrote The Invitation (1979). Castillo said she wrote the "naughty" book as her way of shocking her male antagonists and to expose their Latin machismo.

During the the late 80's and early 90's she taught feminist journal writing and women's studies in various colleges and universities in California . During this time she wrote The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), My Father Was a Toltec (1988) and Sapagonia (1990). The 1991 edition of Hispanic Writers said these works, "ushered the Chicana voice into the feminist discourse with a bang." Michael Sinayerson writes in Vanity Fair that her essays "make the case for a new, aggressive brand of feminism she calls Xicanisma, to win brown women a place in a black-and-white country."

Castillo has been interested in the role of women in Hispanic society and the lack of recognition of women in Chicano and American culture throughout her life and her work. She described in the 1998 "Platica" how "being a Chicana or a mestiza was a total non-event in American society. It's as if we didn't exist." She has studied the role of the Chicana archetypes such as La Malinche, La Llorona and La Virgen de Guadulupe. In 1996 she coordinated an anthology on la Virgen de Guadulupe titled La Diosa de las Americas/Goddess of the Americas . She has even trained as a curandera, a powerful woman's role in Mexican folk culture, under her grandmother's guidance. Having been raised as a Catholic she acknowledges that Catholicism and its traditions are a huge part of Mexican culture. But she asks the question, "which Catholic traditions benefit women and which ones do not?" She said she became aware at age 18 of the problems with the traditional role of women in Chicano culture and it's traditional Catholic values. She has gone against the grain of traditional women's roles within the Catholic church and Chicano culture and stated, in her 1998 "Platica," "One of my goals is to have the Pope ban all of my works."

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