Narratives of Dissent in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia and Massacre of the Dreamers

• In Event: Political Prowess in Ana Castillo’s Chicanx Literature of Dissent

Abstract

In Writing outside the Nation (2001), Azade Seyhan writes: “In many Chicano/a works, the translation of the idea of nation into a linguistic and metaphysical idiom becomes an object of intense reflection, since as a quintessentially hybrid identity, the Chicano/a cannot return to a national origin.” For many Chicana/o writers, the space from which they engage in the “intense reflection” noted by Seyhan is liminal; it is a site physically and psychologically located in the interstices of national and transnational borders and boundaries, from the southwest to the west and Midwest, and beyond to Central and Latin America. Those whose identities are tied to this in-between space reveal the ways in which they are anchored by a genealogy of critical thought that seeks to reframe hegemonic systems of power that have traditionally excluded them from national and transnational, historical, social, and political narratives.

Chicana author and Chicago native Ana Castillo is one such individual who places at center stage important questions about nationalism, transnationalism, borders, and identity in her novels, short stories, and critical essays. In this paper, I address the ways in which dissent sits firmly at the heart of Castillo's work and describe how her novel, Sapogonia (1990), alongside her collection of critical essays, Massacre of the Dreamers (1995), can be used to demonstrate how the concept of “nation” carries with it an inherent conflict of identity and state of mind—one that is deeply rooted in colonial histories and their residual effects. This conversation is particularly salient considering our current political climate; thus, this paper seeks to bring attention to the ways in which Castillo’s cultural production reveals her commitment to confronting epistemologies of race, capitalism, and heteronormativity. In Sapogonia, for instance, Castillo articulates the relationship between conquest of land and body, and employs a postmodern method of blurring the lines between narrative voice and point of view to reveal the ways in which the novel's two protagonists, Máximo Madrigal and Pastora Velásquez Aké, straddle borders of belonging, sexuality, and power. In Massacre of the Dreamers, Castillo encourages a new social consciousness in which she invites her reader to consider the importance of constructing, reconstructing, and deconstructing sexual, gendered, patriarchal, and national identities in an effort to develop conscientización and "an erotic whole self." Studied together, these works not only reveal the “borders” through which the author crosses, but they also bring attention to the multiple sites through which pedagogies of dissent materialize and function within Chicana/o cultural production.

Author

• Karen Roybal, Colorado College