Ana Castillo – författare

“Ana Castillo is an American treasure. Fearless, compassionate, and flat-out brilliant—she is the writer we need as we navigate the challenges of our ever-changing world.”—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

“Ana Castillo is de primera storyteller.”—award-winning author Julia Alvarez

Literary legend Ana Castillo explores the secrets that are kept within households and the women they impact the most in this breakout collection that cements her place as a leading voice in feminist fiction.

The first person in her traditional Mexican American family to graduate from high school, Katia is entering adulthood at a time of turbulent change. Across the nation young people are fighting for civil and women’s rights and protesting the Vietnam War and brutal dictatorships in South America. Like so many of her generation, Katia wants to make the world a better place, and is determined to follow her own path.

As she considers moving to California to join La Causa, Mexican American activist Cesar Chavez’s movement to improve the working conditions of migrant farmer workers, Katia receives an unexpected gift from her father: a plane ticket to Mexico City. Bring back your mother, he says, tell her, her children need her. And so Katia joins this cause, to get Tina back to Chicago. But it won''t be easy. Katia must learn to navigate a liberated version of her mother in a new country where she is now hawking supposedly superior cleaning products, called Donna Clean Well.

Katia is but one of the voices introduced in this dazzling collection of short fiction from revered writer Ana Castillo. Spanning from Chicago to Mexico to New Mexico, the stories in Doa Cleanwell Leaves Home illuminate a chorus of people whose stories will leave you breathless.

En Carmen la coja, el seductor y exuberante mundo flamenco sirve de telón de fondo para una historia clásica de independencia alcanzada, perdida y reclamada. Como la legendaria gitana de Bizet, Carmen “La Coja” Santos es apasionada, magnética y a menudo ocurrente. Carmen, una renombrada bailarina flamenca en Chicago a pesar de tener una pierna maltrecha a causa de un ataque de polio durante su niñez, ha mantenido un largo romance con Agustín, el director del grupo de baile, quien es casado—un romance que comienza a tornarse rancio. Pero cuando ella inicia una nueva y fogosa relación con Manolo, el ahijado de Agustín y un excelente bailarín, una rivalidad colérica estalla entre ellos. Al mismo tiempo, Carmen tiene una recaída y la agria relación con su madre da un penoso giro. De cómo Carmen finalmente logra alcanzar la felicidad en el amor y en su vocación es una historia divertida y fogosa—telenovela, tragicomedia y rapsodia—, una agridulce y exitosa novela acerca de vivir la vida con feroz intensidad.

Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human RightsThis new edition of an immensely influential book gives voice to Mexic Amerindian women silenced for hundreds of years by the dual censorship of being female and indigenous. Castillo replaced the term “Chicana feminism” with “Xicanisma” to include mestiza women on both sides of the border. In history, myth, interviews, and ethnography Castillo revisits her reflections on Chicana activism, spiritual practices, sexual attitudes, artistic ideology, labor struggles, and education-related battles. Her book remains a compelling document, enhanced here with a new afterword that reexamines the significance of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction

A lyrical memoir-in-essays by an award-winning Chicana writer: "the real power of Black Dove comes when it speaks to what mothers face raising black and brown children all across this nation." (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Growing up as the intellectually spirited daughter of a Mexican Indian immigrant family during the 1970s, Castillo defied convention as a writer and a feminist. A generation later, her mother''s crooning mariachi lyrics resonate once again. Castillo—now an established Chicana novelist, playwright, and scholar—witnesses her own son''s spiraling adulthood and eventual incarceration. Standing in the stifling courtroom, Castillo describes a scene that could be any mother''s worst nightmare. But in a country of glaring and stacked statistics, it is a nightmare especially reserved for mothers like her: the inner-city mothers, the single mothers, the mothers of brown sons.Black Dove: Mamá, Mi''jo, and Me looks at what it means to be a single, brown, feminist parent in a world of mass incarceration, racial profiling, and police brutality. Through startling humor and love, Castillo weaves intergenerational stories traveling from Mexico City to Chicago. And in doing so, she narrates some of America''s most heated political debates and urgent social injustices through the oft-neglected lens of motherhood and family.