SELCUK UNIVERSITY
INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
UNDERSTANDING CHICANA FEMINISM:
TRADITION AND REBELLION IN ANA CASTILLO’S
SO FAR FROM GOD
Yasemin YILDIZ
MASTER OF ART THESIS
Supervisor
Assist. Prof. Dr. Sema Zafer SÜMER
TABLE OF CONTENTS ……….i
BİLİMSEL ETİK SAYFASI ………iii
TEZ KABUL FORMU ……….iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ……….v
ÖZET ………vi
ABSTRACT ……….vii
INTRODUCTION ……….1
CHAPTER ONE – THE WORLD OF ANA CASTILLO ………7
1.1. The Life of Ana Castillo ………..7
1.2. Ana Castillo as a Novelist and an Activist ………14
CHAPTER TWO – WHO IS THE CHICANA? ………23
2.1. Some Historical Background ………23
2.2. How the Mexican American Came into Being ……….29
2.3. The Chicanos within U.S. Society ………34
2.4. The Chicana: The Brown Woman ………38
CHAPTER THREE – ANALYSING THE DYNAMICS OF CHICANA OPPRESSION……….43
3.1. Familism, Machismo and Gender Roles ………..43
3.2. Rape, Abuse, Abortion and Health Care ………..49
3.3. Labor Force and Unequal Opportunity ………56
3.4. Perspectives for Education ………...61
CHAPTER FOUR – UNDERSTANDING THE CHICANA FEMINISM ………..66
4.1. Understanding the Chicana Movement ……….66
4.2. The Birth of Chicana Feminist Thought ………...71
4.3. The Development of Chicana Feminism ………..75
CHAPTER FIVE – THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY: SURVIVAL AND ENDURANCE IN SO FAR FROM GOD………...……….81
CONCLUSION ………..110 WORKS CITED ………115 ÖZGEÇMİŞ ………...119
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to express my great depth of gratitude to my thesis supervisor Assistant Professor Dr. SEMA ZAFER SÜMER who directed, supported, and encouraged me willingly during the process of preparing this thesis.. Without her support, I could not write my thesis.
I am initially thankful for Adalet YILDIZ, without whose guidance, encouragement, and belief that this is a worthwhile endeavor, this study might never have been finished.
Special thank goes to my husband Koray YILDIZ, who has always been a real lover and supporter of this entire journey and my life.
ÖZET
Ana Castillo, önemli bir Çikana Feminizm yazarı olarak bilinir. Erkek egemen toplum tarafından ezilmiş kahve tenli Çikana kadınlarının boyun eğiş hikayelerini konu edinir. Çikana Feminizminin eş anlamlısı olan Xicanisma teriminin yaratısı olan yazar Çikana feministlerinin mücadelesini anlatmayı amaç edinir. Edebi eserleri Çikana’ları baskın topluma meydan okumaya zorlar. Meksikalı Amerikalı kadınların yaşamlarında karşılaştıkları kimlik, cinsiyet ve ikilem durumlarını gözler önüne serer ve eserlerinde kullandığı kadın karakterleriyle bizlere Çikana kadınlarının sorunlarını yapıcı bir dille anlatır.
Çikana kadınları olarak da bilinen Latin kadınları geçmişten bu yana Amerika’nın özellikle de güneybatısına itilmiş, kültürel, sosyal, politik ve ekonomik olarak dışlanmıştır.. Tarihleri çok eskilere, güçlü kadın savaşçılara, baskın anne figürlerine ve insanüstü tanrıçalara dayansa da bu güç zamanla özellikle de Aztek halkının burjuvazi eylemleri, İspanyolların ise sürekli işgalleri ile zayıflatılmıştır.
Ana Castillo, Tanrıdan Çok Uzak adlı romanında kadın gücünü yeniden ortaya çıkarır. Romanında büyük üzüntüler ve kederler içinde bir kadının küllerinden yeriden doğmasını konu alır. Bu konu, yalnızca diğer kadınlar için bir model olmaktan öte efsanevi kadın karakterlerinin gücünün yeniden gün yüzüne çıkarılması için de bir ışık niteliğindedir.
Bu bastırılmış ırkın geçmişten günümüze tarihi verilerek, okuyucuya Çikana kadınlarının kendilerine karşı bir tehdit olan topluma nasıl başkaldırdıkları gösterilmek istenmiştir. Kadının, geleneksel değerleri nasıl yıktığını, kendisine hayatı zorlaştıran erkeklerden daha üstün olduğunu ve artık bir birey olarak nasıl davrandıklarını Castillo etkileyici bir dille gözler önüne serer.
Bu çalışma kadının gücünü yeniden kazanışını inceler. Castillo güçlü ve akıllı kadın karaketerler yaratarak ataerkil toplumun karşı çıktığı normları yıkar. Ataerkil egemen toplum düzenini anaerkil toplum düzeniyle yer değiştirir. Böyle bir çabayla kendisine miras kalmış olan kadın sorunsalına etkileyici bir bakış açısıyla değinir.
ABSTRACT
Ana Castillo has emerged as a prominent Chicana writer. She examines the history and subjugation of women of color, specifically brown- skinned women, Chicanas, by a patriarchal society. Coining the term Xicanisma, a synonym for Chicana feminism, Castillo aims to include more women into the struggle faced by Chicana feminists. Her literary works force Chicanas to challenge the dominant society. She examines the issues of identity, sexuality, and duality that Chicanas face in their lives and shows the female characters in her novels dealing with these issues in constructive ways.
Latina women also known Chicana women have traditionally been culturally, socially, politically, and economically marginalized in the United States, particularly in the Southwestern region. Despite the fact that their heritage, which extends back for centuries, consists of forceful women warriors, dominant mothers, and superhuman goddesses, the power base has been weakened by a combination of circumstances beginning with the burgeoning militarism of the Aztecs and the colonization by the Spaniards. “Monotheistic Catholicism and its pantheon of male saints replaced earlier matriarchal cultures which resulted in an abject subjugation of women” (Davis, 2004:x).
In So Far From God Ana Castillo sets out to reclaim the power feminine. She creates a novel in which an older female, despite having suffered tremendous losses and sorrows, rises from her own ashes to save her community from the same ills that infect many impoverished, indigenous communities in the late 20th and early 21st century. Castillo not only creates a viable and identifiable role model with whom women everywhere can identify, she layers in and infuses her fiction with European and early meso- American mythological, historical, and legendary figures as a means to recapture the diluted power once the main purview of females.
By giving the background of this oppressed nation from very beginning of the history to the present, it is tried to be understood by the reader how the Chicana women in the novel try to function in a society that neither understands nor respects
them, in fact, which works against them. They are much stronger than the men in their lives, who do not or cannot help them overcome the abuse of their society: companies that encourage employees' contact with residual radiation, the violent attack on a defenseless woman, discrimination, and the loss of Native American autonomy by European conquest. Castillo portrays subjects who resist traditional roles and the hardships of their society while exploring their individual paths or callings.
This study examines how Castillo attempts to reempower women. It discusses the ways in which Castillo creates strong and wise females who seem to have supernatural, paranormal, and/or somehow mystical powers. Further it traces how Castillo, as a writer, acts as an agent for change as she uses her characters' situations, behaviors, and experiences to critique unacceptable social conditions.
Finally, this study takes up Castillo's attempt to dismantle patriarchy and her replacement of it with matriarchy. In doing so, Castillo is addressing the problems inherent in marginalization.
INTRODUCTION
The feminist movement that surfaced in the late 1960s seemed to encompass all women who felt slighted by a male-dominated, patriarchal society. Refusing to accept that they were inferior to males, feminists expected equality. Unfortunately, this feminism was not all-encompassing. Anglo-American women were ignoring the plight of their Spanish-speaking sisters of Mexican and Indian descent. This increasingly growing portion of the population was given little voice during the early period of the feminist movement. The differences exist within the feminist movement and to deny these differences is to ignore the search for a solution. To each woman, feminism has its own definition. The Chicana feminist embraces this and, through discourse about these differences, searches for a solution.
Many feel that the terms Mexican-American and Chicano/a describe the same group of persons. The term Mexican-American was coined by an Anglo society and the use of the suffix American suggests that those of Mexican descent cannot be validated without it. One of Mexican heritage who allows himself or herself to be called Mexican-American wishes to be accepted by an Anglo-dominant society. The term Chicano/a describes one who is not fully Mexican nor fully American, and that the term has been in use much longer than popular culture recognizes. Common since the 1930s, this term delineates one who sees their culture and heritage being at least equal, if not superior, to Anglo culture. This pride in culture and heritage is what separates a Chicano/a from a Mexican-American. The Chicana feminist embraces this ideal and aims to give a voice to a group largely viewed as inferior by Anglo-American society.
That the plight of the Chicana was largely overlooked during the surge of the Anglo feminism movement means that Chicanas are behind in the struggle for recognition and equality. Chicanas are struggling with not only gender issues, but also racial-ethnic and class identification struggles at the same time. The existence of multiple groups to identify with causes conflict with how to satisfy each. This is the
crux of the Chicana feminist problem: how to identify with multiple groups and find a solution to satisfy each group.
Chicana writers have come to the defense of women dealing with this issue and are striving to give voice to the women. Writers such as Norma Alarcon, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, and Ana Castillo have risen to the challenge and become voices for the Chicana feminista.
Ana Castillo has devoted time and energy in her writings to bring light to the suffering and oppression felt by the women of her culture. The fruits of Castillo's doctoral dissertation come in the form of a collection of critical essays titled
Massacre of the Dreamers. In it, Castillo (Collins, 2002: 1) writes, "The woman in the United States who is politically self-described as Chicana, mestiza in terms of race, and Latina or Hispanic in regards to her Spanish-speaking heritage, and who numbers in the millions in the United States cannot be summarized nor neatly categorized" This suppression and ignorance are the catalyst for Castillo's work. Castillo (Collins, 2002: 5) sees that these women of mixed race exist "in the void," and through her introspective essays, she strives to validate the existence of these women. Negating the idea that everyone who is classified as a citizen or resident of the United States seeks to assimilate into that culture, Castillo (Collins, 2002: 6) explores the struggles faced by Mexic-Amerindian women who, due to their mixed heritage, wish to preserve their Mexican and/or Native American heritage. Merging her identity with that of all Chicana, mestiza, Latina, and Hispanic women, she challenges all to "find a clue as to who we are and from whom we descend".
When So Far From God was published in 1993, it was heralded as the newest masterpiece from one of the most elegant voices in the Chicana movement. The novel revolves around the life of Sofi, a wife, a mother, and a Chicana who discovers what it means to be a woman. Through the deterioration of her marriage, the deaths of her daughters, and the awakening of her social activism, Castillo produces an image of a Mexican-American woman who endures all and comes out stronger than ever before. Castillo mixes religion, supernatural occurrences, sex, laughter, and heartbreak in a novel unlike anything previously seen in American Literature. So Far
From God is a funny novel than does not have a happy ending; a novel dominated by
tragedy, yet full of the victory of the human spirit; a novel that is highly entertained while still thought provoking. Castillo wants to expose the joys and realities of contemporary Mexican-American life on the edge of American culture.
With all that in mind that, the thesis consists of five chapters apart from the introduction and conclusion. The first chapter is about the writer, Ana Castillo who is novelist, poet, editor, translator, painter, coiner of the term Xicanisma. She is the author of several works in multiple genres and one of the leading feminist activist of Chicanas, as well. Her life and career as a novelist and as an activist will be analyzed to explain the reader to form the basis of her novels and her Chicana identity.
Chapter Two, titled Who is the Chicana? sets off the term Chicana referring to women of Mexican descent who are born or raised in the United States. It will be also explained that although the term is widely used by Chicana activists and scholars today, many Chicana women debate the term’s origin and early connotations. According to this it will be shown some believe that the term originated with the native Mexica tribes of Mesoamerica while others claim that the word was originally used by colonizers as a racial mark. By giving historical background such as during the 1960s and 1970s Chicano Nationalist Movement, it will be displayed Mexican-American women reclaimed the term Chicana. The necessity stems from the need to look into the history for some historical evidence to understand the origin of the name of Chicana. With the three subsections of this chapter it will be pointed out the very beginning of the history of Mexicans and Mexican Americans to the present by giving the information about the Aztecs, The Spanish Conquest of Mexico, U.S. and Mexico War and migration of Mexicans to the United States. It will be also focused on the Chicano/as within the U.S. society as an ethnic group in this Chapter. By identifiying the situation of the Chicanas within the Chicano and U.S. community this chapter will be concluded.
The oppression of the Chicana is complicated and arises from a multitude of domineering means. She is an ethnic minority, she is woman who is universally oppressed by men, and her Chicano heritage exaggerates this male domination over
women. The first type of oppression mentioned is due to ethnicity of the Chicana. The Chicano culture is politically and economically exploited by Anglo society. Chicanos are considered subordinate, dependent and have been subjected to numerous accounts of genocide. Another type of oppression is due to gender. Women across the vast majority of cultures are considered subordinate and are universally oppressed by her male counterpart. In addition, there is also an internal oppression caused by the Chicana heritage. Some identify this as “machismo” and caused by the colonization of the Chicano. Whatever the origin, it has a declining effect on the Chicana and must be addressed.
Perhaps the unique characteristic of the Chicana is in the nature of her triple oppression. Chicanas suffer more than the double oppression of women who are members of a colonized group; they are also internally oppressed. As noted earlier, Chicanas are part of an economically and politically exploited colony. They are victims of attempted cultural genocide as the dominant group has sought dangerously to destroy the Chicano culture and render its institutions subordinate and dependant. Chicanos, however, have resisted assimilation and women have played a critical part in this resistance. The second form of oppression is results from their gender. As women, Chicanas experience the universal oppression that comes from being female. In most societies, past and present, they have been subordinate to men. Even in matrilineal society the woman is never anything more than the symbol of her family. Matrilineal descent is the authority of the women’s father or brother extended to the brother-in-law’s village. So, the authority runs through the male line. Finally Chicanas carry an additional burden of internal oppression by a cultural heritage that tends to be dominated by males and exaggerates male domination over women. The issue of machismo is a complex and sensitive for Chicanos. The problem of male dominance in Chicano culture is real and must be faced directly.
In her song Mujer, Mary Helen Virgil best goes over the main points of the dynamics of Chicana oppression:
Mujer, since I can remember you have suffered with eight muchachos You have cooked day in and day out. You know no peace.
Your older muchachos go out and leave you with the chiquitos.
You have lost weight. The shine in your hair is gone. You smile no more. You were cheated out of life since your hombre was taken to the cold war overseas.
Mujer you never complained: you never even once raised your voice in protests.
Why then, do you weep in silence? (Garcia, 1997:109)
In the light of these information, Chapter Three will be analysed by focusing on the familiar terms such as gender roles, rape, abuse, labor force and unequal conditions. In terms of four subsections of this chapter the issues mentioned before will be analysed in a more detailed way.
In the fourth chapter titled Understanding the Chicana Feminism, it will be commented on Chicana Feminism to make reader understand the term. Because feminism is a world-wide event. It has been a world-wide event since the beginning of oppression. You can find the roots of women’s struggle to end of oppression people and of themselves as far back as 200 years before the birth of Christ. Namely, through history, women have been devalued, often even abused, in many different societies. In Latin America in particular, many women were, for centuries, treated by their fathers, brothers and husbands with discrimination. Women in Latin America, Mexico included, were seen as child-bearers, homemakers and caregivers. These women had to watch their children, perform household chores and cook for their husbands. Many men did not consider women to be capable of working outside the home, which is part of the reason why the term weaker sex was coined.
At this point, Chicana Feminism, referred to as Xicanism, is an ideology based on the rejection of the traditional household role of a Mexican-American woman. It challenges the stereotypes of women across the lines of gender, ethnicity, class, race, and sexuality. The issue is summarized like:
Chicana Feminism is in various stages of development… It is recognition that women are oppressed as a group and exploited as a part of la Raza
people. It is a direction to be responsible to identify and act upon the issues and needs of Chicana women. Chicana Feminists are involved in understanding the nature of women’s oppression. (Garcia, 1997:5)
Although many issues contributed the development of Chicana Feminist thought, the ideological critique of sexism or machismo contributed significantly the formation of Chicana Feminism. Chicana Feminists, as active participants, in the Chicano Movement experienced the immediate constraints of male domination in their daily lives. To the extent that Chicanas found their contributions triviliazed, subordinated and often ignored. Thus Chicanas recognized the need to move against racism and sexism simultaneously. Chicanas’ recognition of their paradoxical situation within Chicano Movement formed the basis for the development of what we have come to know today as Chicana Feminism. With the help of this findings this chapter will achieve its purpose.
The last chapter will explain us the politics of Chicana identity in terms of survival and endurance within Chicano and Anglo society. Given the controversial history of the Chicana/o population in the U.S., it is not surprising that much of its literature is politically charged or deals with political, economic, social, and cultural resistance to oppression. It is not unusual for the literature of this heterogeneous community to struggle with conflicting claims and demands, for its characters to engage a discourse of identity in which issues of power and opposition to the dominant society are central. Consequently, it will be stated that Chicana/o literature has demonstrated a preoccupation with the multiplicity of subject positions that colonized and oppressed people must of necessity occupy in their experiences. In this respect, Castillo's novel is no exception, representing a virtual catalog of the subjectivities, often in opposition to one another, in Chicana communities. However,
So Far from God expands our definitions of what constitutes resistance, of what is political, and of who is capable of effecting social change, by focusing on the
defiance that characterizes the family of women at its center and the rebellion that explodes as they engage in ongoing battles.
CHAPTER ONE - THE WORLD OF ANA CASTILLO
1.1. The Life of Ana Castillo
Ana Castillo is one of a few Mexican American writers who have attracted the attention of the mainstream reading public. From her earliest writing she has tried to unite those segments of the American population often separated by class, economics, gender, and sexual orientation. Her success is a tribute to her self-discipline, her courage, and her considerable literary ability.
Castillo was born in Chicago on 15 June 1953 and her family is Raymond Castillo and Raquel Rocha Castillo, struggling working-class people. In an interview Castillo told that she attended a secretarial high school studying to become a file clerk, which her parents considered a good job (Saeta, 1997: 134). Castillo, however, had other ideas. She said “I couldn't have been a secretary because I'm a lousy typist and I've always had this aversion to authority, so I knew that I wouldn't get far in that atmosphere” (Saeta, 1997: 134) so she abandoned secretarial training. After attending Chicago City College for two years, she transferred to Northeastern Illinois University, where she majored in secondary education, planning to teach art. She received her B.A. in 1975.
Castillo's experience as a student at Northeastern Illinois was largely negative because the extent of the racism and the sexism of the university in a city like Chicago discouraged her from becoming an art teacher. In the interview, she went on: "by the time I was finishing my B.A., I was really convinced that I had no talent. I couldn't draw and I had no right to be painting" (Saeta, 1997: 134). As a result of these experiences, Castillo stopped painting. During her third year of college, however, she resumed writing poetry.
These first poems were a response to her grandmother's death and her family's working-class status set the stage for a developing writer who throughout her literary career has examined pervasive social and economic inequities that affect women and Chicanos in the United States.
Castillo's literary career began before she finished college. At twenty she gave her first poetry reading at Northeastern Illinois University, and in 1975 Revista
Chicano-Riqueña published two of her poems, The Vigil (and the Vow) and Untitled
That same year another poem, Mi Maestro was included in the anthology Zero
Makes Me Hungry. The following year the Revista Chicano-Riqueña published a
second group of her poems about racial injustice, particularly the fate of indigenous peoples in America. Mindful of her previous experience as a painter, Castillo told Saeta she promised herself never to take writing courses "with anybody or any university . . . because I was so afraid that I would be discouraged and told that I had no right to be writing poetry, that I didn't write English well enough, that I didn't write Spanish well enough" (Saeta, 1997: 134). Like many other Chicano poets of her generation, Castillo felt that she had no models that spoke to her experience in her languages and she admits she wanted to be a good poet, but a poet on her own terms, with a political conscience and fluency in the two languages that she used to navigate through a predominantly Anglo world.
Despite her uncertainty about the value of her poems, Castillo continued to write and develop her poetic voice. Caught up in the political enthusiasm of the 1970s and concerned by the plight of Chicanos in the United States, she told Saeta (1997: 139) that she thought of herself as "a political poet, or what is sometimes called a protest poet talking about the economic inequality of Chicano people in this country". One of her early poems, Invierno salvaje (Savage Winter), written in 1975 and published in the anthology Canto al Pueblo (1980), addresses the difficult lives of Chicanos during a hard winter.
In 1975 Castillo moved to Sonoma County, California, where she taught ethnic studies for a year at Santa Rosa Junior College. Returning to Chicago in 1976, she pursued a master's degree in Latin American and Caribbean studies in 1978 and 1979. In 1977 she published a chapbook, Otro Canto (Other Song), in which she collected her earlier political poems, including Napa, California, dedicated to migrant-labor activist César Chávez, and 1975 a poem about talking proletariat talks. From 1977 to 1979 she was writer in residence for the Illinois Arts Council. In 1979
she published her second chapbook, The Invitation, a collection that exhibits for the first time Castillo's interest in sexuality and the oppression of women, especially Latinas. She also received her M.A. degree in 1979 from the University of Chicago and between 1980 and 1981 was poet in residence of the Urban Gateways of Chicago. A son, Marcel Ramón Herrera, was born on 21 September 1983.
In 1984 Arte Público Press published Women Are Not Roses, a collection of poems that includes some poems from her chapbooks. In 1986 her first novel, The
Mixquiahuala Letters, which she had begun writing in 1979, was published by the
Bilingual Press; it received the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 1987. Written as a series of letters from Teresa, a Latina, to her Anglo-Spanish friend Alicia, the novel reveals Teresa's complicated feelings for Alicia during their ten-year friendship. Castillo provides three tables of contents or reading strategies, labeled For the Conformist, For the Cynic, and For the Quixotic.
Regardless of which reading strategy the reader chooses, The Mixquiahuala
Letters begins with Teresa's description of three trips to Mexico taken by Teresa and
Alicia, together or separately, and follows a narrative through which Teresa not only reminds her friend what happened during their time together but also admits her own feelings of love and hate. Anne Bower (1997: 134) claims that The Mixquiahuala
Letters "is very much a quest novel . . . with form and explanation taking us into the
women's emotional and artistic searches". Then in her essay she went on:
Castillo's heroine never expresses doubts about her sexuality, desires, pleasures, her mestizo background, or her career choice. Her letters demonstrate, however, that she does struggle with discovering the writing self's best modes of expression, questing for more suitable patterns (in writing and living) than the ones the past has cut. (Bower, 1997:134) By suppressing the nature and development of the experiences of people of color, The Mixquiahuala Letters reveals Ana Castillo's attempt to react, by striking out against the limitations created by canonical structures. Castillo's novel functions as an oppositional feminist discourse that challenges the limitations inherent in both
Anglo-American and Mexican culture.
By 1985 Castillo was once again in California teaching at San Francisco State University, becoming more and more involved as an editor for Third Woman Press and receiving early praise for The Mixquiahuala Letters. After the novel received the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 1987, Castillo was further honored by the Women's Foundation of San Francisco in 1988 with the Women of Words Award for pioneering excellence in literature. Still needing money and finding it difficult to raise her son alone, she taught Chicano humanities and literature at Sonoma State University in 1988, creative writing and fiction writing at California State University at Chico as a visiting professor in 1988-1989, and Chicana feminist literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara as a dissertation fellow/lecturer for the Chicano Studies Department during the same school year. In 1989 she received a California Arts Council Fellowship for Fiction and in 1990 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
Castillo's second novel, Sapogonia: An Anti-Romance in 3/8 Meter (1990), was written in Chicago in 1984 and 1985 while she was teaching English as a second language and taking care of her new baby. The novel springs from her passion for flamenco music, which had earlier led her to the Al-Andalus flamenco performance group, with which she performed in 1981 and 1982; Máximo Madrigal is the main male character in the novel and a second-generation flamenco artist. Although Castillo denies that the novel is autobiographical, several aspects of the female protagonist, Pastora Velásquez Aké, are reminiscent of the author's life. Pastora sings her own poems, becomes involved in liberation politics, and questions her Catholic faith just as the author herself.
Sapogonia is a complicated narrative about the love/hate relationship between
Pastora and Máximo. The novel explores male fantasy, its potential for violence against women and the female subject's struggle to interpret herself both within and outside of the discourse on femininity and it evolves through Pastora's web of connections with both men and women as well as through her commitment to Chicano politics.
By the early 1990s Castillo was a fellow at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she gave a seminar and researched her dissertation. She received her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Bremen in 1991 with a dissertation on Xicanisma, or Chicana feminism, subsequently published as
Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994) defined as a collection of
essays on the experience of the Mexic Amerindian (Castillo's term) women living in the United States and a meditation on the recent history of Mexic activism. In this book Castillo advocates their own mythmaking from which to establish role models to guide them out of historical convolution and de-evolution and she believes these myths should address their spiritual, political, and erotic needs as a people.
In August 1990, before completing her Ph.D., Castillo moved to New Mexico, where she began to write her third novel. Undoubtedly her best novel, So Far from
God (1993) distinguishes itself through Castillo's use of the New Mexicans' English
sprinkled with Spanish, a language whose rhythm often makes the characters' English sound like Spanish. The characters in this novel use double negatives and code switch (alternate) between Spanish and English as they communicate.
So Far from God, Castillo's best-known novel, focuses on the lives of a New
Mexican mother, Sofia, and her four daughters, who seem doomed to live chaotic lives from page one when la Loca climbs during her own funeral and ascends to the roof of the church. What follows is an elaborately developed story through which the four daughters--Fé (Faith), Esperanza (Hope), Caridad (Charity), and la Loca--live their lives and die young. Fé dies from exposure to chemicals at a job that promised to help her achieve the "American Dream" to which she aspired. Esperanza, the only one of the four sisters who leaves her hometown in Tome and, thereby, the safety offered by the family, disappears during Desert Storm as she covers the war for a news station. Caridad is first attacked and left disfigured by la malogra the evil that lurks out in the night, and then is miraculously healed during one of la Loca's seizures. Caridad not only becomes herself again but also becomes a healer; shortly after falling in love with a woman, she takes the woman's hand and plunges off a mountain to become, perhaps, a mythological character. La Loca, a character who
never leaves home, contracts AIDS from no apparent source and dies, leaving Sofia, alone and angry, to become a radical political organizer.
So Far from God is simultaneously funny and sad, as Castillo examines several
different issues at once. Fé's story illustrates what can happen to Latinas who turn their backs on their culture to pursue material possessions. Sofia's story is probably the most poignant; even before she loses all four daughters, she becomes a community activist, hoping to improve the lives of the people of Tome. Because spirituality also plays a significant role in this novel, many critics consider it Castillo's homegrown version of Mexican American magic realism, but So Far from
God is actually a work in which the lives of five women are realistically defined not
by their imaginations but by their connections to each other and the world around them. In 1993 the novel won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in Fiction and the National Association of Chicano Studies Certificate of Distinguished Recognition for "Outstanding Contributions to the Arts, Academia, and to Our Community." The following year, So Far From God won the Mountains and Plains Bookseller Award, and Castillo also received a second National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction.
In 1996 Castillo published Lover Boys, an uneven but interesting collection of short stories. Brian Evenson, writing for the Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1997:204), claims that "as intriguing as the book's cultural depictions is the complex way in which gender and desire are figured and refigured from story to story". Evenson recognizes in the stories a theme that runs through much of Castillo's work, "desire of all types, heterosexual and homosexual, from women who flirt with other women despite feeling themselves largely heterosexual, to the lesbian in the title story who finds herself drawn irresistibly to a young man" (Spring 1997:204). With the stories often showing passage from gay to straight relationships or vice versa, with the characters often torn between different desires, sexuality is envisioned as fluid. Sometimes this is echoed culturally when characters seem to experience similar fluidity in terms of possessing a social identity that makes multiple claims on the individual.
In Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), Castillo returns to one of her favorite themes: flamenco dancing and music. Castillo creates Carmen, La Coja (the cripple), whom she invests with an obsession to become a flamenco dancer although she is not a gypsy and one of her legs is afflicted by polio. The trip down, however, is filled with convoluted love stories about Carmen and Manolo and Carmen and Agustín, both dancers and gypsies as well. These two men dance in and out of Carmen's life without ever committing to much more than a good time. Máximo Madrigal, the main character from Sapogonia, makes an appearance as a flamenco musician who becomes Carmen La Coja's gallant, but temporary, lover. Peel My Love Like an
Onion is the first of Castillo's novels to be deeply concerned with the erotic lives of
its main characters.
Carmen is in many ways defined by her nonsupportive, selfish family. They recognize her passion for dancing only when she becomes a singer earning good money. That she could become a flamenco dancer in spite of her condition escapes them, and they are not capable of giving her more than occasional reassurance, a lack of support that might explain why Carmen expects nothing of the men in her life. Her one purpose and joy in life is to be onstage dancing to flamenco music.
Castillo also published a new volume of poetry in 2001, I Ask the Impossible, which collects her verse work of the past eleven years and presents poems alight with stubborn love, crackling wit, and towering anger. In this collection Castillo enjoys an enviable reputation as a novelist, essayist, and poet, the latter evident.
Castillo's is a voice that speaks from deeply held beliefs and deep identification with the Chicana movement, though her works cut across gender and political lines, speaking to the common thread of humanity in each reader. Castillo's novels, short stories, and poetry all emerge from a working-class, Latina sensibility; yet, her work has crossed social and ethnic lines to examine issues common to all people regardless of their cultural backgrounds or ethnicity. Her detailed descriptions of a specifically Chicano culture are the backdrop for a body of literature that speaks to people of all cultures.
1.2. Ana Castillo as a Novelist and an Activist
Ana Castillo has emerged as a prominent Chicana writer. Through Massacre of
Dreamers, the product of her doctoral dissertation, she examines the history and
subjugation of women of color, specifically brown skinned women, Chicanas by a patriarchal society. Coining the term Xicanisma, a synonym for Chicana Feminism, Castillo aims to include more women into the struggle, faced by Chicana feminists. Her literary works force Chicanas to challenge the dominant society. She examines the issues of identity, sexualty and duality that Chicanas face in their lives and shows the female characters in her novels dealing with these issues in constructive ways.
To survey Castillo's career is to chronicle the growing recognition of Chicana literature in the United States during the last three decades, when many of these writers have moved from small presses to more powerful publishing houses. Her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, published by the small Bilingual Press in 1986, won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and
Sapogonia (1994), her next novel, was published by the same press. Norton
published her third novel, So Far from God (1993), which won both a Carl Sandburg Award and a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. In 1995, Norton republished its edition of her 1988 book My Father Was a Toltec, a collection of poems, some written in English, some in Spanish, telling the story of her father as member of the Toltec street gang, and included in the volume a selection of her earlier poems. Along with the publication of Peel My Love like an Onion, Doubleday reissued her first two novels. Henceforth, Castillo has become a powerful presence not only in the literature of Chicanas--Mexican-American women--but in the literature of the Americas.
She specifically identifies herself with Chicana authors: the forerunner writers publishing in the early 1970s, such as Lorna Dee Cervantes and Lucha Corpi, and her contemporaries and friends like Sandra Cisneros, Cherrie Moraga, and Denise Chavez. The label Chicana is problematic, however, according to Castillo, because it is a matter of perception as well as bloodline. She points out that women of Mexican descent or background--Mexic Amerindians--or Latinas born in the U.S. but closely
linked to Mexican culture all might be called Chicana because they are all part of the Chicana/o diaspora in the U.S. In fact, she champions the working-class brown
women, who are joined by their economic position regardless of ethnicity, in a world
where the black/white dichotomy prevails.
These are the people who are the subject of her fiction and the people with whom she grew up. Born, raised, and still living in Chicago, Castillo is the daughter of Mexican-American parents and raised in the neighborhood for so many immigrants of that period--Jewish, Italian, black, and Mexican. Castillo attended public schools, became a political activist in the 1970s, and received a BA degree in liberal arts from Northeastern University and an MA in Latin and Caribbean Studies from the University of Chicago. For years she made her living as a teacher--early on in Chicago at Malcolm X Junior College, later at Sonoma State College, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of New Mexico--but never considered teaching as a primary career. A self-taught writer who is deliberate about her decision not to participate in traditional MFA programs or workshops, she began writing, because she had something to say. Her academic background was in the social sciences--philosophy, women's studies, sociology, literature so she figured that would all inform her writing. So she linked her impulse to write to idealism and went on:
Being of Mexican background, being Indian-looking, being a female, coming from a working-class background, and then becoming politicized in high school, that was my direction. I was going to be an artist, a poet. Never once did I think of it as a career…I could possibly earn a dime writing protest poetry. So all those years I went around like a lot of young poets…going anywhere I could find an audience, getting on a soapbox and reading. I was a Chicana protest poet, a complete renegade--and I continue to write that way. (Baker, 1996: 59)
Even as Castillo continues to write as a renegade, however, her work--in particular, her fiction--has found a home with the reading public. Her first novel, The
Castillo critical acclaim, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and steady sales. Without consulting Castillo, Bilingual Review sold the rights to that novel and to Castillo's subsequent effort, Sapogonia, to Doubleday/Anchor, which brought them out in paperback in 1992 and 1994, respectively. This annoyed Castillo, who would have liked to have had more involvement in the publication (she eventually was able to make some revisions to
Sapogonia). Her chief comment on the matter now is to urge young writers to have
their contracts vetted, no matter how small and friendly the press.
In the wake of the success of her first fiction efforts, Castillo signed up with agent Susan Bergholz, of whom she speaks warmly. Bergholz, Castillo says, played a key role in the genesis of what would become Castillo's debut publication with Norton, the novel So Far from God. In an emotionally bleak period during her stay in New Mexico, Castillo had happened upon an edition of The Lives of the Saints. Reading its spiritual biographies inspired her to write a story about a modern-day miracle that happens to a little girl known as La Loca. After dying, La Loca does not only rise from the dead: she ascends to the roof of the church that had been about to house her funeral and reproves the Padre for attributing her resurrection to the devil. Upon reading this story, Bergholz suggested that Castillo develop it into a novel. So she wrote two more chapters, then she sent it out and eventually Gerald Howard took it at Norton. The story grew to encompass the lives of four sisters, martyrs in different ways to the modern Southwest, and of their mother, Sofia, who turns her bereavements to positive account by organizing the community politically and by working to reconfigure the Catholic religion. Castillo speaks very highly of Howard's editing. When So Far from God came out, Castillo declares: "I started looking at writing as a career, because indeed, after 22 years, I began to earn my living from it" (Baker, 1996:60).
Castillo has made attacks into writing cultural criticism, collected in Massacre
of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1994), in which
she defines the Mestiza/Mexic Amerindian woman's identity through the concept of
a Ph.D. from the University of Bremen. Writing against an Anglocentric perspective and carefully distinguishing her concerns and position from those of white feminists, Castillo's essay collection is a manifesto on racism, machismo, sexuality, mothering, spirituality, and language. The title derives from the legend that the Aztec ruler Montezuma sought out the people who he had heard dreamed of the fall of his empire and had them massacred. No one, after that, dared tell of their dreams. Castillo includes herself in "we, the silenced dreamers" who must reclaim the vision of wholeness--a spiritually grounded self defined apart from the greed on which patriarchy is based and living in harmony with the natural world. In this work, she analyzes the forces that have instilled self-contempt in the mestiza and calls for recognition of the vast difference between the reality of the mestiza and that of the dominant cultures. Castillo intends for this collection, as she writes in her introduction, to be a contribution to "the ongoing polemic of our 500-year status as countryless residents on land that is now the United States"(Shea, 2000:35).
Castillo explains that since the 1970s, European academics have taken an interest in Native American and Chicano studies, and by the 1980s had become interested in women within these groups. Dieter Herms, former dean of the American Studies Program at the University of Bremen, had traveled to the U.S., where he met Castillo and invited her to give a keynote address for an annual conference of German Americanists. My Father Was a Toltec and The Mixquiahuala Letters were being used in Germany as Chicana feminist theory, and when Castillo told Herms that one day she was going to sit down and write her ideas out in essay form, he told her that when she did, she should submit it as a formal dissertation.
In the tradition of the academic world, the approval process was lengthy and often contentious, but Herms, who became very ill with cancer, remained Castillo's champion and shepherded the book through the necessary channels. Castillo traveled to Germany, where she successfully defended the work a few months before Herms's death. While Massacre of the Dreamers has the vital theoretical foundations expected of a dissertation in interdisciplinary studies, including references to critical work in social sciences, history, and literature, the bare difference is in approach.
This is a dissertation by, for, and about Chicanas. It seeks to raise consciousness of their history and to incite change in their self-awareness and, thus, their future. In the call for inclusion, its message is a revolutionary one calling for change throughout the culture.
Not surprisingly, one of those changes come about through a re-visioning of language. Not interested in becoming part of an existing discourse, Castillo looks toward creating a new, more inclusive one. She calls for a critical understanding of the consequences of being marginalized from the language of the dominant society and writes of the need to take on the re-visioning of Chicana’s own culture's metaphors--not only to understand but to act on the bone-and-blood link between language and identity. In the topic of an earlier poem, A Christmas Gift for the
President of the United States, Chicano Poets, and a Marxist or Two I've Known in My Time Castillo points out the issue : “My verses have no legitimacy. A white
woman inherits her father's library, her brother's friends, Privilege gives language that escapes me. Past my Nahua eyes and Spanish surname, English syntax makes its way to my mouth with the grace of a club foot” (Shea, 2000:37) .
Castillo writes and publishes some poetry in Spanish, but she writes mostly in English, a decision, she says, she made over 20 years ago--"not because I was trying to reach a gringo audience. But I was raised in Chicago without the privilege of bilingual education, so the people I thought would read my work would be the Chicanos who read English. I didn't learn to write in Spanish" (Ibid.). She has stated in interviews (Saeta, 1997:141) that the English she writes is not "white standard English" and that an essential element of her work is the distinctive language of the narrator, particularly in Sapogonia, where the narrator's pretentiousness is signaled by the second-language English he proudly uses.
When she sits down to write, language is not the only choice Castillo has to make, since she feels equally at home in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She claims that the choice is sometimes hers, sometimes not:
from God, then the short stories, then back to painting, then some
poetry--and that was all in one day! At some point, I say, "Enough is enough," go back to the easel, and spend the rest of the day painting…I felt confident enough in my writing at that time that it didn't matter what people thought of me as a painter… Usually, I paint myself in whatever is going on at the moment. Then, I don't necessarily put that in my writing. (Shea, 2000: 37-38)
Castillo is never alone in her creative process. One of the key chapters in
Massacre of the Dreamers is about spirituality. In the doctrine of Xicanisma,
spirituality involves acceptance of self in the context of forces that Western thought might consider supernatural and requires rejection of the hierarchical thinking characteristic of Western culture. In Chicana culture, spiritualism is embodied in
curanderas and brujas, the latter spiritual healers or psychics, by Castillo's
definition, the former specialized healers, learned in the knowledge of specifically healing the body. Castillo is the granddaughter of a curandera, and it is she, Castillo says, "who taught me how to love and care for other living things. We lived in the heart of Chicago in a flat in the back with a kitchen looking out into a nasty, rat-infested alley. Yet she grew her herbs there, in coffee cans" (Shea, 2000: 37-38). In the introduction to Toltec, Castillo tells a moving story of beginning to write at age nine when this grandmother, her abuelita, died. "My lines were short, roughly whittled saetas [flamenco-style songs] of sorrow spun out of the biting late winter of Chicago"(Shea, 2000: 37-38), she writes and so Ana the writer was born out of the death of the woman who was and is her spiritual guide.
Castillo is herself a curandera, but explains that she has been reluctant to take on that lifestyle. In 1997, she was crowned a curandera and hail-maker by the Nahua people of Central Mexico, the region of my ancestry. She believes this is work she is destined to do, but chooses not to elaborate on what that means: "I'm not trying to be mysterious, but as I learn and accept my responsibilities and duties, I must humbly keep them private" (Shea, 2000: 37-38).
square ring honoring this figure. Her poem La Wild Woman is dedicated Para Clarissa to Clarissa Pinkola Estés, kindred spirit and author of the best-seller Women
Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992).
In 1996, Castillo published Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of
Guadalupe, a series of pieces she commissioned from Chicano artists and writers,
including Estés, to explore the meaning of la Virgencita at the end of the millennium. Authors of these essays refuse to separate spirituality and sexuality, much as Castillo herself refused in Massacre of the Dreamers, seeing them as part of the same energy.
The erotic and spiritual coexist in Peel My Love like an Onion. At 40 years old, Carmen describes herself to look like a Picasso forgery but, as Castillo puts it she knows herself to be beautiful inside and out. This novel's about self-love. Unlike the Carmen of Bizet's opera, this one refuses to be a tragic heroine. Something about a grand final exit doesn't appeal to me as much as the idea of being asked for an encore. She's the one who brings clients in the beauty parlor, where she is the shampoo girl, to tears when she demonstrates the flamenco in her cross-trainers.
So Carmen didn't merely waltz into Castillo's imagination, she flamencoed into a novel about the Chicano and gypsy cultures of Chicago. An irresistible metaphor, flamenco is more a way of life than a dance, one that begins not with the feet but with the heart. Although Castillo is not a professional flamenco dancer, she does not deny that she can do some fancy footwork herself:
You don't have to be tall and svelte or have shiny hair or even all your teeth. The other night on the book tour, there was a flamenco dancer as part of the event--and she's about sixty years old, five feet tall, and sort of all-the-way round--and she gave a really great performance! Flamenco is a very passionate dance, like the tango; it comes from the streets, from poor people, and it's like the blues, an expression of loss, oppression, migrations. (Shea, 2000: 38-39)
Castillo does have a strong investment in pedagogy, however, a commitment currently finding its most direct expression in a children's book project, My
Daughter, My Son, the Eagle, the Dove. This manuscript consists of two long poems
based on Aztec and Nahuatal instructions to youths facing rites of passage that Castillo discovered during her research for Massacre of the Dreamers: "There are chronicles of talking. Imagine that you're coming of age, getting married, going off to war, and you're brought to the elders, who tell you the significance of the event. I took passages of those speeches, which the Spaniards documented from the Aztecs, and turned them into two chants--one for the son, one for the daughter” (Shea, 2000: 38-39). This lyrical advice is not so different, Castillo says, from what parents say -or should say-to children today when offering counsel about life: When you speak, speak not too loud and not soft but with honest words always.
Like Castillo's other work, there is an emphasis on ancestry and history as a source of pride:Understand, my daughter that you are of noble and generous blood; you are precious as an emerald, precious as sapphire. You were sculpted of relations cultivated like jade.
Castillo says she is particularly excited about the book, as well as its sequel--for the newborn--because of her own son, Marcel Ramon, who is 16 and the subject of a number of poems in her newest, unpublished collection, I Ask the Impossible. One of these, the whimsical El Chicle appears in the New York City subway as part of the Poetry in Motion series and recalls a younger Marcel in more innocent times. Castillo says her major concern today is how her son is perceived as a young, brown-skinned male on the streets of Chicago:
I grew up in a world that was racist, and young people were harassed by the police and by kids from other neighborhoods, but we're living now in a much more dangerous time. My biggest worry is not the choices he's going to make, but how the world has become so much more violent and aggressive. (Shea, 2000: 38-39)
Castillo shows great respect for the community that can be created and nurtured by those of Mexican heritage. Each of her characters respects those close to her, whether they be family or friends. Castillo supports the idea that close ties to the
community and certain individuals are both a part of Mexican culture and heritage, with characters who come to appreciate and family and the culture they embody. Her characters come to realize their part in something much larger than just their immediate world; they realize they must work toward the betterment of the community which they belong. Castillo empowers the Xicanista in Massacre by asserting that “we can endure any circumstances” (Collins, 2002: 39). She also suggests that this endurance is not enough by challenging that “daily we prove that we must be reckoned with by dominant culture, we must have faith in our vision” (Collins, 2002: 39). Castillo instills in her characters with this faith.
CHAPTER TWO - WHO IS THE CHICANA?
2.1. Some Historical Background
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Americans continue to deal with the impact and consequences of immigration from various countries to the United States. As with other immigrant groups, Mexican immigration to the United States created generations of New Americans. Mexican immigration differs from other immigrations in one major way: Mexico shares a 2,000 mile-long border with the United States. Mexican immigrants never had to cross an ocean to reach American shores. In fact, unlike all other immigrant groups, the American Southwest belonged to Mexico until the country's defeat by the United States in 1848. The history and culture of contemporary Mexican society have always influenced the lives of Mexican immigrants living in the United States.
An overview of Mexican history begins with Mexico's early civilizations and continues through the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The earliest groups to arrive in Mexico migrated from the north, near the Bering Strait, around 8000 B.C.E. These nomadic tribes roamed the countryside hunting buffalos, mammoths, and mastodons. When these herds died out, around 7000 B.C.E., some tribes living in what is now the state of Puebla discovered how to cultivate crops such as corn and beans. Agriculture transformed the nomadic tribes into village-dwellers, and by 2000 B.C.E., large villages existed in the Valley of Mexico, in what is now Mexico City, and in the southern highland region with its fertile soil, which was ideal for farming. An evolving and complex society emerged around 1000 B.C.E. The Olmec Indians led the first major developments in pre-Columbian Mexico. The Olmecs settled in the Southern Gulf of Mexico Coast and their empire thrived between 1200 B.C.E and 400 B.C.E. Archaeologists identify the Classic Period (300-900 C.E.) in ancient Mexico as the one during which the most significant cultural and artistic achievements developed. The rise of cities, particularly in the Valley of Mexico, led to the development of complex societies characterized by social classes, commerce, transportation systems, and religious centers. Cultural centers in the Classic Period included those of the Maya in Yucatán and Guatemala, the Mexican Highlands of Teotihuacán, the Zapotee cities of Monte Albán and Mitla in Oaxaca, and the
Totonac cities of Tajin on the Gulf Coast. These civilizations declined as a result of the frequent warfare that existed throughout the Classic Period.But still, from 900 to 1520, a variety of tribes continued to engage in warfare. Later pre-Columbian cultures thrived but never reached the cultural heights of the Classic Period's civilizations.
Beginning in 1300, the Aztecs, a highly warlike people, entered the Valley of Mexico and settled on Lake Texcoco, which is now Mexico City. They established their capital of Tenochtitlán on an island in Lake Texcoco. The Aztecs selected, this site because one of their legends said that they should build their capital on the site where they found a cactus with an eagle sitting on it, holding a serpent in its mouth. This symbol became the national symbol of Mexico. The population of this Aztec city reached the amazing number of 300,000. The Aztecs ruled over a loose confederation of surrounding states and spread their social, cultural, and, most important, their religious influence throughout the Valley of Mexico. In 1519 when the Spanish arrived in what is now the state of Veracruz, Hernán Cortés encountered an Aztec empire ruled by the emperor Moctezuma. The arrival of the Spanish signaled the defeat of the Aztecs and the creation of a Spanish colony that would eventually rebel against the Spanish Crown and establish its independence in the nineteenth century.
Cortés and his expedition entered the Aztec Empire in 1519. When Moc-tezuma first heard of the arrival of these strangers from the East, he believed that Cortés was the Aztec god Quetzalcoatle—the Feathered Serpent—who, according to legend, flew away from the world but promised to return from the East. Moctezuma also realized that the Spaniards represented a military threat to his Aztec Empire, and he tried to appease Cortés with gifts of gold and other precious metals. After a preliminary setback, the Spanish subdued the Aztecs in 1521 with the surrender of Cuauhtémoc, who was to become the last Aztec emperor. The Spanish Conquest incorporated a vast territory into the Spanish Empire. In the two centuries that followed, the Spanish maintained governmental control over its colony, and The Spanish accumulated great wealth from the silver mines and other raw materials
discovered throughout Mexico, facilitating its economic and political superiority over other European powers by means of the wealth accumulated in the New World.
Throughout the sixteenth century, Spanish America experienced the continued expansion of the Spanish monarchy. During these early years of discovery, Spain brought to the New World or New Spain its culture and language and supported the Christianization efforts of the Catholic Church. Furthermore Spain's contributions to the development of the cultural life in New Spain go hand in hand with its military conquest. Although pre-Columbian cultures such as the Aztec and the Mayan left a rich heritage of arts and sciences, Spain contributed its own cultural heritage. Many times Spanish culture, particularly language, integrated native elements, creating a uniquely New World culture. The ultimate result of the introduction of Spanish to the Americas, like the introduction of English to North America, was the expansion of the Spanish language to the twenty countries in the New World.
The Spanish Conquest of Mexico created a highly stratified society. At the top, Spaniards (born in Spain) and Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Mexico) dominated almost every aspect of life in the colony. They controlled the government, owned all the land, and maintained a strong coalition with the Catholic Church. Through intermarriage, many other racial/ethnic groups developed within New Spain. Intermarriages between Spaniards and indigenous people created a completely new group called Mestizos who eventually formed the majority of present-day Mexican people. Indigenous groups and enslaved Africans remained at the bottom of the social class ladder.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europe found itself in a state of political uprising. In Spain, King Charles IV's reign was built on corruption and repression. Eventually an opposition movement succeeded in forcing Charles IV to abandon, and his son became King Ferdinand VII. Almost immediately Napoleon gave refuge to Charles who began a campaign to regain the Spanish throne. Napoleon's attempt to place his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne in Spain led to the Peninsular War of Spain in 1808.
These political disorders were felt in New Spain where a growing anger against colonial rule continued to increase. Although there were many groups in Mexico, such as the Spaniards, various opposition groups joined together in a common cause to overthrow the Spanish. The Spaniards represented a small group of ruling elite whom the rest of Mexican society resented for their oligarchic rule. The Mexican War for Independence pitted the existing social classes against the ruling class of Spaniards. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a local priest, began organizing a combination of Mestizos and indigenous groups so a call to revolt issued on the night of September 15, 1810.
Soon after, Hidalgo led a band of his followers to the town of San Miguel where he again issued a cry that has become a central part of Mexico's historical and cultural past. Hidalgo's troops won important victories in the towns of Celaya and Guanajuato. Eventually Hidalgo and his followers fought their way to Mexico City, but, tragically, Hidalgo, with his limited military skills, made a poor strategic move when he turned his troops away from Mexico City to regroup. The Spanish troops began to win several critical battles that increased the disorganization of the opposition's forces. Eventually Hidalgo and his military co leader Ignacio de Allende were captured, court-martialed, and shot. Other leaders continued the struggle for independence. The Spanish government strike backed with a series of repressive measures against the insurgents, but their strategy backfired as more and more groups joined the independence movement. As a result of a coalition of anti-Spanish leaders, Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821. New Spain became the young nation of Mexico, and Hidalgo had succeeded in turning the course of Mexican history. He remains Mexico's greatest patriot.
The decades after 1821 proved to be some of the most turbulent in Mexican history. The political coalitions that had been formed to gain independence from Spain soon disintegrated, producing intense civil trouble. Some groups favored establishing a monarchy to rule Mexico whereas others dreamed of creating a form of government patterned after the United States. The former leader of the independence movement, Iturbide, gained control of the country and declared
himself emperor of Mexico until he was overthrown by the military. Finally, in 1824, the various factions agreed upon a republic headed by an elected president and a Congress. Guadalupe Victoria became Mexico's first president.
The new republic soon faced one of the most turbulent episodes in Mexican history to have a long-range impact on contemporary Mexican society: Mexican immigration to the United States and relations between Mexico and the United States.
Mexico’s dramatic upheavals went on through the first half of the nineteenth century. Although a democratic republic existed on paper, political chaos prevailed throughout the country. Some groups opposed the constitution; others favored military intervention. Shifting political coalitions produced one of the most confusing periods in the country's history. The disastrous political decisions of the leaders of Mexico led to one of the most critical turning points in Mexican history: the war between Mexico and the United States.
Prior to 1848, the most northern region of Mexico, the American Southwest and particularly Texas, was sparsely populated. After Mexican independence in 1821, the Mexican government encouraged greater numbers of Mexicans to move into this border region. The government recognized the potential threat of American settlers crossing the U.S.-Mexico border who had started to take up residence in Mexico's northern territory. Under the leadership of such well-known historical figures as Sam Houston, adventuresome Americans settled in Texas. By 1835, an estimated 65,000 Mexicans lived in Texas; about 50,000 were Americans, most of whom opposed the Mexican government that enforced restrictions on them. Santa Anna, Mexico leader set blockade on San Antonio, where serious uprisings had developed. The famous Battle of the Alamo witnessed the efforts of Americans and some Mexicans who joined in opposition to the Mexican government. Santa Anna's victory put a temporary halt to the Texas uprising. The noted historian Carey McWilliams analyzed the clash of cultures that developed inevitably as more and more Anglo-Americans established permanent residence in Mexican territory:
