Political Prowess in Ana Castillo’s Chicanx Literature of Dissent

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This year's annual meeting invites us to Chicago—the largest Midwest city, and perhaps more importantly, a global city defined by the intersection of peoples, politics, and borders. From the Miami, Sauk, Fox and Potawatomi tribes who originally inhabited the area, to the first non-indigenous settler, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a mestizo of African and European ancestry, to the scores of European, African, and Mexican immigrants, Chicago has historically been a site of transgression and transformation. Inspired by this transformative location and its people, this panel focuses on the work of Chicago-native Chicanx author, Ana Castillo, whose novels, poems, and critical essays directly confront what happens in response to this city’s—and nation’s—historical cultural displacement, mixing, and border crossing. Through our engagement with her work, this panel exemplifies how Castillo compels us to employ pedagogies of dissent in our classrooms. Collectively we address the ways her novels and critical essays directly confront the various sites and historical moments, the past and present conditions, and the socio-cultural conditions that have proliferated a heteronormative and colonialist logic that continues to impact us in the present.

The papers in this panel address the myriad ways in which Castillo's work can be used by scholars, teachers, and students to better understand the meaning of "pedagogies of dissent." Combined, we hope to reveal how Castillo's critical recognition of the entanglements of political repression, sexual violence and gendered inequality, and normative "American" values and cultural practices can and have been challenged in Chicanx cultural production, and particularly, in literature. Monica Flores's paper, for instance, addresses how our understanding of origin narratives shifts from "mythic familial chronicles" to encourage questioning of “authenticity" when we focus on narratives of adoption and guardianship in The Guardians and Give It To Me; Bernadine Hernández's paper emphasizes the ways in which the excessive Chicana body politic employed by Castillo in Give It To Me (re)signifies the pathologized, overly sexual and excessive Chicana figure in narratives; Norma Valenzuela's paper interrogates the ways Castillo constructs an oppositional pedagogy in So Far From God that reassigns the roles of the bruja and curandera as healers of the Xican@ colonized body; and Karen Roybal's paper demonstrates the ways in which Castillo's novel, Sapogonia, and essays in Massacre of the Dreamers, impart 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. We argue that her work is significant to further understanding the ongoing resistance to the unequal social, political, gendered, and cultural injustices that continue to impact our communities, families, and overall lives.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Ana Castillo, Independent Scholar

Individual Presentations

• Chicana Narrative of Dissent: Corporeal Containment and Sexual Excess in Castillo's Give It To Me - Bernadine Hernández, University of New Mexico

• Dissident Lived Spirituality: Brujas and Curanderas in So Far From God - Norma A Valenzuela, New Mexico Highlands University

• Narratives of Dissent in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia and Massacre of the Dreamers - Karen Roybal, Colorado College