BiblioVault - Books about Castillo, Ana

Best of the West 2011

New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri

Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton

University of Texas Press, 2011

Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, an annual anthology of exceptional short fiction rooted in the western United States, debuted in 1988 and continued publication until 1992. Recognizing that the West remains rewarding territory for literary explorations, James Thomas and D. Seth Horton revived the series in 2009.

Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri is the latest volume in what has become one of the nation's most important anthologies. Editors Horton and Thomas have chosen twenty stories by writers including Rick Bass, T. C. Boyle, Ron Carlson, Philipp Meyer, Dagoberto Gilb, Yiyun Li, Antonya Nelson, and Sam Shepard. Subjects vary from an Idaho family that breeds lions and tigers with disastrous results, to a Mormon veteran whose mind is taken over by a nineteenth-century consciousness, to a Texas boy who spends an afternoon with Bonnie and Clyde shortly before their deaths. Taken together, these stories suggest that the West has become one of the most exciting and diverse literary regions in the twenty-first century.

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Chicago Latina Trailblazers

Testimonios of Political Activism

Edited by Rita D. Hernández, Leticia Villarreal Sosa, Elena R. Gutiérrez

University of Illinois Press, 2024

Mexican American and Puerto Rican women have long taken up the challenge to improve the lives of Chicagoans in the city’s Latino/a/x communities. Rita D. Hernández, Leticia Villarreal Sosa, and Elena R. Gutiérrez present testimonies by Latina leaders who blazed new trails and shaped Latina Chicago history from the 1960s through today.

Taking a do-it-all attitude, these women advanced agendas, built institutions, forged alliances, and created essential resources that Latino/a/x communities lacked. Time and again, they found themselves the first Latina to hold their post or part of the first Latino/a/x institution of its kind. Just as often, early grassroots efforts to address issues affecting themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods grew into larger endeavors. Their experiences ranged from public schools to healthcare to politics to broadcast media, and each woman’s story shows how her work changed countless lives and still reverberates across the entire city.

An eyewitness view of an unknown history, Chicago Latina Trailblazers reveals the vision and passion that fueled a group of women in the vanguard of reform.

Contributors: Ana Castillo, Maria B. Cerda, Carmen Chico, Aracelis Flecha Figueroa, Aida Luz Maisonet Giachello, Mary Gonzales, Ada Nivia López, Emma Lozano, Virginia Martinez, Carmen Mendoza, Elena Mulcahy, Guadalupe Reyes, Luz Maria B. Solis, and Carmen Velasquez

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The Chicana Motherwork Anthology

Edited by Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martínez-Vu, Judith Pérez-Torres, Michelle Téllez, Christine Vega; Foreword by Ana Castillo

University of Arizona Press, 2019

The Chicana M(other)work Anthology weaves together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who center mothering as transformative labor through an intersectional lens. Contributors provide narratives that make feminized labor visible and that prioritize collective action and holistic healing for mother-scholars of color, their children, and their communities within and outside academia.

The volume is organized in four parts: (1) separation, migration, state violence, and detention; (2) Chicana/Latina/WOC mother-activists; (3) intergenerational mothering; and (4) loss, reproductive justice, and holistic pregnancy. Contributors offer a just framework for Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies to thrive within and outside of the academy. They describe a new interpretation of motherwork that addresses the layers of care work needed for collective resistance to structural oppression and inequality.

This anthology is a call to action for justice. Contributions are both theoretical and epistemological, and they offer an understanding of motherwork through Chicana and Women of Color experiences.

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Growing Up Chicago

Edited by David Schaafsma, Roxanne Pilat, and Lauren DeJulio Bell, Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea

Northwestern University Press, 2021

Growing Up Chicago is a collection of coming-of-age stories that reflects the diversity of the city and its metropolitan area. Primarily memoir, the book collects work by writers who spent their formative years in the region to ask: What characterizes a Chicago author? Is it a certain feel to the writer’s language? A narrative sensibility? The mention of certain neighborhoods or locales? Contributors to the volume include renowned writers Ana Castillo, Stuart Dybek, Emil Ferris, Charles Johnson, Rebecca Makkai, Erika L. Sánchez, and George Saunders, as well as emerging talents. While the authors represented here write from distinct local experiences, some universals emerge, including the abiding influence of family and friends and the self-realizations earned against the background of a place sparkling with promise and riven by inequality, a place in constant flux.

The stories evoke childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, nighttime games of ringolevio, and the giant neon Magikist lips that once perched over the expressway, sharing perspectives that range from a young man who dreams of becoming an artist to a single mother revisiting her Mexican roots, from a woman’s experience with sexual assault to a child’s foray into white supremacy. This book memorably explores culture, social identity, and personal growth through the eyes of Chicagoans, affirming that we each hold the ability to shape the places in which we live and write and read as much as those places shape us.

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Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo

Bernadine Hernández and Karen Roybal

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

For more than forty years, Chicana author Ana Castillo has produced novels, poems, and critical essays that forge connections between generations; challenge borders around race, gender, and sexuality; and critically engage transnational issues of space, identity, and belonging. Her contributions to Latinx cultural production and to Chicana feminist thought have transcended and contributed to feminist praxis, ethnic literature, and border studies throughout the Americas. Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo is the first edited collection that focuses on Castillo’s oeuvre, which directly confronts what happens in response to cultural displacement, mixing, and border crossing. Divided into five sections, this collection thinks about Castillo’s poetics, language, and form, as well as thematic issues such as borders, immigration, gender, sexuality, and transnational feminism. From her first political poetry, Otro Canto, published in 1977, to her mainstream novels such as The Mixquiahuala Letters, So Far From God, and The Guardians, this collection aims to unravel how Castillo’s writing impacts people of color around the globe and works in solidarity with other third world feminisms.

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Watercolor Women Opaque Men

A Novel in Verse

Ana Castillo, introduction by Carmen Tafolla

Northwestern University Press, 2017

2006 Independent Publisher Book Award for Story Teller of the Year

In this updated edition of Ana Castillo’s celebrated novel in verse, featuring a new introduction by Poet Laureate of Texas Carmen Tafolla, we revisit the story’s spirited heroine, known only as “Ella” or “She,” as she takes us through her own epic journey of self-actualization as an artist and a woman. With a remarkable combination of tenderness, lyricism, wicked humor, and biting satire, Castillo dramatizes Ella’s struggle through poverty as a Chicano single mother at the threshold of the twenty-first century, fighting for upward mobility while trying to raise her son to be independent and self-sufficient. Urged on by the gods of the ancients, Ella’s life interweaves with those of others whose existences are often neglected, even denied, by society’s status quo. Castillo’s strong rhythmic voice and exploration of such issues as love, sexual orientation, and cultural identity will resonate with readers today as much as they did upon the book’s original publication more than ten years ago. This expanded edition also includes a short preface by the author, as well as a glossary, a reader’s guide, and a list of additional suggested readings.

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