CASTILLO, ANA

born June 15, 1953, Chicago, Ill., U.S. in full Ana Hernandez del Castillo Latina poet and author whose work explores themes of race, sexuality, and gender, especially as they relate to issues of power. Castillo studied art education at Northeastern Illinois University (B.A., 1975), where she became involved in Hispanic-American artistic, activist, and intellectual circles. Castillo's first collection of poems, Otro Canto (1977), was published as a chapbook. In 1979, shortly after receiving an M.A. in social sciences from the University of Chicago, she published a second chapbook, The Invitation, in which female speakers describe the experience of the erotic. Castillo's work draws on the sometimes contradictory political influences of militant ethnic and economic struggles and feminist and lesbian perspectives. Women Are Not Roses (1984), for example, explores the difficulties of poor and working-class women who must choose between devoting their energies to erotic relationships or to class struggle. Castillo characterized these arenas as feminine and masculine, respectively, and looked at how women claim their own sexuality as they negotiate between these conflicting desires. In The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Castillo continues her exploration of Latina women and their sexuality and examines the reactions of men in the Anglo and Latino communities. Written in an experimental form, the novel consists of letters sent over 10 years between two Latina women, arranged to be read in three different versions for three different types of reader: The Conformist, The Cynic, and The Quixotic. Castillo's other works include two collections of poetry, Zero Makes Me Hungry (1975) and My Father Was a Toltec (1988); the novel So Far from God (1993); and Loverboys (1996), a collection of short stories. She also coedited, with Cherre Moraga, Esta puente, mi espalda: voces de mujeres tercermundstas en los Estados Unidos, the 1988 Spanish-language edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), and edited the anthology Goddess of the Americas (1996; in Spanish, La diosa de las Amricas), about the Virgin of Guadalupe.