[In the following excerpt, compiled from interviews and conversations between Saeta and Castillo between 1993 and 1994, Castillo explains how her Chicana background, feminist beliefs, and other Latin American writers influence her writing.]

Over the last three decades, Chicano literature has experienced its own renaissance. Many of the voices in that literary renacimiento belong to women—by the 1990s, nearly two-thirds of the contemporary literature was being written by women. Firmly committed to challenging and redefining the gender, race, culture, and class distinctions which have historically defined Chicanos/as in the United States, Chicana writers have become “conscious transmitters of literary expression … excavators of our common culture, mining legends, folklore, and myths for our own metaphors” (Ana Castillo Massacre of the Dreamers). Writing can dream and invent new possibilities. It is the utopian space where the long-silenced Other begins to speak heretofore unheard things—where authority is questioned, tradition subverted, privilege challenged. One of the most articulate, powerful voices in contemporary Chicana literature belongs to author Ana Castillo whose work has long questioned, subverted, and challenged the status quo.

An internationally recognized poet, novelist, essayist, and editor, Castillo first published her poetry in the chapbooks, Otro Canto (1977) and The Invitation (1979). Frequently anthologized, her early poetry ensured her reputation as a social protest poet. Her first collection, Women Are Not Roses (1984), was followed by the critically acclaimed My Father Was a Toltec (1988). An expanded edition of that collection—My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, 1973–1988 was published in 1995. The recipient of numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, Castillo has published three novels—the classic The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986, 1992), Sapogonia (1990, 1994) and the acclaimed So Far from God (1993). Her collection of critical essays, Massacres of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994), has been described as an unorthodox blend of cultural criticism, social sciences, and creative literature. In this collection, Castillo reissues her invitation to engage in a much needed dialogue on racism, sexism, and classicism, on sexuality and spirituality, on mothering and motherhood.

In this extended excerpt from interviews and conversations between March 1993 and October 1994, Castillo focuses on her prose discussing her development as a writer, the background of her fictional works, and the development as a writer, the background of her fictional works, and the philosophical backdrop of her critical works.

[Saeta:] Ana, when did you decide to be a writer?

[Castillo:] It was not something I ever intended to do. And it's very difficult for me even now to regard it as a profession or career. I started out very much wanting to be a visual artist in an environment in Chicago in which that would not have been considered a real profession for me. I was sent to business school—rather a secretarial girls high school—when I was a teenager. That was what I was supposed to be according to my family and my background—be a file clerk. I suppose 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.

But I loved to draw—I always loved to draw and I always liked to write. I've written since I was very little. I wrote poetry and wrote stories and drew on whatever I could, painted on whatever I could—anything, any piece of paper that was around. So when I got to college age, I started to send myself to school: first to junior college, and then to a regular college. During the mid 70s, the extent of the racism and the sexism of the university in a city like Chicago discouraged me to such a degree that by the time I was finishing my B.A.—and it took a lot of work to get scholarships and grants to get through the university system—I was really convinced that I had no talent. I couldn't draw and I had no right to be painting. And, I couldn't draw anymore—I literally did not draw or paint anymore. What I started to do about my third year of school was to write poetry. I worked very hard in the community in terms of organizing other artists. I had a lot of political consciousness. When I started to write, I got a lot of feedback and encouragement from those friends. When I was twenty and I was still in college, I did my first public reading of my poetry. By the time I was twenty-one and just finishing college I was being published. So with that kind of encouragement I thought “Well, that's the way to go.” I decided that I would never take courses with anybody or any university—we didn't have the kinds of programs and alternatives or models in universities that we have now—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. After twenty years on my own, I've learned to have an eye for what I want to do in my work.

For myself, as an artist, I had conviction, I had desire and perseverance. I was going to do this; despite the fact that I had to work twenty different types of jobs to make a living. I continued writing my poetry and stories. I studied other things so that I could earn a living doing something else. It's just been, as a I said, with the popularity and the success of my work that people consider it a career, a profession.

You've said that you did not participate in writing workshops, you read. What writers would you say have influenced you the most?

I think the writers that have influenced many of us of my generation are among the ones that taught me to write. When I was a teenager, I did begin to read Latin American writers because we didn't have many U.S. Latino writers. Very few people were being published at that time. This was during the early 70s, not that long ago in the history of our literature in this country. So what I did was I looked for writers that somehow spoke to my experience. For me, that had to do with the Latin American experience, the Latino, Mexican, Spanish. I also read a lot of African American writers, of course, especially the women, Toni Morrison for example. I did not read white women because white women derive from a different literary tradition which is Anglo or English. Instead I read women, for example, like Anais Nin, who is still white but had Spanish ancestry and Latin influence with French and Spanish in her language. And she was Catholic. Those things were very important to me. I stopped following the Catholic Church when I was eighteen, but Catholicism is embedded in our culture, in our psyche … so she was a great teacher for me. Fifty years before I was writing, she was writing in the 1930s about issues that were very similar to the issues that I was writing about in the context of being Mexican.

Among the other influences were Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, later Jorge Amado. I studied Portuguese in graduate school and was a big fan of a lot of the Brazilian culture as well as the literature. As a young woman, I read anything that somehow spoke to the experience here and that was who I was learning to write from. The book that I always cite as the most inspiring for me is The Three Marias by the great Portuguese writers that I read when I was around 19, 20, 21. You see that influence in The Mixquiahuala Letters—the communication, the challenging of the church, the sexuality—all of those things come from The Three Marias. They were punished, castigated in Portugal for doing those things. When that book came out they were jailed and these were successful middle class journalists. I could identify with that as a Catholic, as a person from a Catholic culture. I used to think it was very strange that I loved to read fiction, but I didn't like to read poetry very much and yet I was a poet for eight to ten years. In 1980, I made a commitment to the fiction writing—to start practicing fiction writing, and now you see where all those early influences have come in. That early training was there; it was just in dormancy while I was training myself by writing free form verse.

I've always wanted to ask you about your dedication of The Mixquiahuala Letters to Julio Cortazar … was he an influence in terms of your experimentation with form?

When I decided to write The Mixquiahuala Letters I was twenty-three. I had all of these stories that I wanted to tell and I started to write them down. I didn't know how to, but I had very grandiose ideas about how I wanted to do it. So I decided I was going to play with time, I was going to do time shift, tense shift, all this kind of stuff. In the meantime, I continued to write poetry. One day I was talking with a friend about what I was going to do with this project and he said, “That's already been done.” He took me to the library and pulled Rayuela off the shelf and I thought “Oh my God, I've already been plagiarized! Twenty years before, when I was five years old, my idea was already taken.”

As the years went on—it took me seven years to get to the point where I finished The Mixquiahuala Letters—I continued writing poetry and I started to write other short stories practicing that genre. The year that I finished it, in 1984 just as I finished it, he died. It was not because I saw the book, or read the book, or was influenced directly by Julio Cortazar that I dedicated that book to him, but because he was another person that I felt was the master in the particular form of writing that I was aspiring to. He had done it and had been brilliant. I have heard once or twice that some critics make note of the fact that I give credit in what they call a feminist novel to Julio Cortazar. Unfortunately, all of the classics and much of the literature done by men is up for scrutiny in that sense—whether if s valid or not—because of the sexism that's there in that perspective. Again, that had nothing to do with the story, what it had to do for me was the ability to play with language and structure. In fact, I was enroute—I was on a plane from Chicago to Houston for the reception of Women Are Not Roses when I read in a magazine like Time or Newsweek that he had died. I had the completed manuscript in my possession since I was submitting it to Bilingual Press and I saw that and thought “This means something to me.” So I gave him the dedication. Obviously people would at some point see the association and wonder about it. So I think it's better to be up front and acknowledge the credit. That's why I acknowledged it.

Sandra Cisneros has spoken about the influence of contemporary Chicana writers on one another—“things that Cherrie says, things that Ana says, make me feel like going to my typewriter and responding.” Do you feel a similar reaction? To whose work?

Cherrie Moraga and I co-edited two publications within a period of three years. We traveled extensively in our readings promoting our books and we had the great privilege at that time to be in constant dialogue. I think that was a very exciting and important time for me as a writer. There was also the time in which I was talking with Norma Alarcon—we all lived on the same street—Lucha Corpi, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Cherrie Moraga, and myself. Within those three years we were always in dialogue about feminism, Chicana politics, Chicanos. In terms of theory and thought, that was very important. When I was working on Massacre of the Dreamers—the book on Xicanisma [Chicano feminism] recently published by the University of New Mexico Press, I did a great deal of reading of what other Chicanas are writing to try to find some common ground: to find how we come to conclusions, how we live our lives, what decisions we make, why, what alternatives we have if we have any. So in that sense, I think in the comment that Sandra's making is interesting. She mentions Cherrie and myself because she has always acknowledged that both of us and Gloria Anzaldua are among the writers who do a lot of “theorizing.”

As far as style is concerned, style to me is a combination of influences and I am always inspired or charged up when I read something that speaks to me, is exciting to me. I think there are many fine and talented Chicanas and because we are speaking about the same subjects we can't help but influence each other. Mary Helen Ponce recently published her autobiography—now she's about 15 years older than we are—but when I was reading her manuscript it was very parallel to my own childhood. I'm telling those stories in very different ways in So Far from God and Massacre of the Dreamers. We do, of course, sometimes elicit memories and that's another way of influencing each other—saying “Yeah, I remember when my mother used to say that to me when I was a child” or “I had an aunt that was like that.” So I think in that sense that the fantastic thing for us as Chicanas in print is that we have this wealth of background that we can explore and manifest in so many ways in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, theory. Now what I try to do and what Gloria and Cherrie have also done is ask “Can we make theory out of this?” That's the next step. It can be a truism in poetry, but can you state it in a critical essay? Can we say that all Chicanas come to the same conclusion or have the same experience? So that's another challenge … another way in which we inform each other.

We've been talking about Chicana literature, Chicana criticism, the Chicana community, yet the term “Chicana” can apply to such a broad range of experiences—New Mexico is not Texas is not Michigan is not California … Are there dangers in attempting to generalize those varied experiences?

I think the advantages are much greater than any danger you can place on it. The term Chicana or Chicano as such is already a political term. It was an attempt in the last twenty years to label or categorize a politically conscious person of Mexican descent and sometimes of Latino descent in the U.S. So already it's a political term. Even back in the 70s or late 60s, it was always used only by people with that kind of conscientizacion. The advantage of it is that it attempts to bring together what might be loosely described as the Chicano or Chicana Diaspora on this land. And so, if you're looking at the dilemma of Chicano existence you have to bring together all of these populations in the U.S. So I think the advantage is much greater than the danger. The danger is only one that comes when you start to do a much more intense investigation and you start to make assumptions about Chicanas from Chicago or Chicanas from New Mexico or Chicanas from California.

How do you define your term?

To begin with, the term Chicana or Chicano that came out of the late 60s to mid 70s had political connotations. Today in 1993, when we have what is called Chicana literature, the term has become much broader. Chicana literature is something that we as Chicanas take and define as part of U.S. North American literature. That literature has to do with our reality, our perceptions of reality, and our perceptions of society in the United States as women of Mexican descent or Mexican background or Latina background. I don't object to a U.S.-born Latina who has been in close association within Mexican culture calling herself Chicana. I wouldn't think that she'd necessarily have to be called Chicana, but if she were, she would have to have a very acute understanding of what that experience is. She doesn't have to be a feminist necessarily, she doesn't have to be very gung-ho politically or really on the left, but she probably will not ever be on the right and call herself Chicana. I think we have had the unfortunate experience in our history during the 1980s in which we have whole lot of people, mostly under the age of thirty, who, having bought the Republican administration's ideals of assimilation into American society, reject the term Chicana and call themselves Hispanic.

And that labeling allows you to maintain a safe connection to your culture …

You use your roots only in as much as they are not politically threatening to the status quo. Yes, it's okay to be bilingual, it's okay to be proud of your Mexican heritage, it's okay to go out and celebrate the Mexican Independence Day parade, it's okay to love eating Mexican food—the whole premise of diversity, but that doesn't threaten changing society. And inadvertently, that's what makes you a consciously political individual. But by not wanting to threaten society, you are still doing something very political and I think the person who calls herself Hispanic is, of course, a political individual by virtue of her acts and by virtue of the fact that she refuses to make any kind of conscious challenges of society.

Given the diversity of the Chicano community, how do you see your role as a writer in relationship to that community?

I started out writing when I was in college and that was in the early to mid 70s—this was perhaps the height of the Chicano/Latino movement—so I started out very consciously as a Latina poet, a political poet, or what is sometimes called a protest poet talking about the economic inequality of Latino people in this country. And I don't think I've changed that much. I still have that commitment. How do I think I play a part in the Latino community? One, by my existence—by being a Chicana writer, or by being a Latina writer—and two, by the things that I say and do. And that means again that I'm not a Hispanic writer; I'm not just proud of my heritage. I acknowledge that racism is a dynamic of our society, that sexism is a dynamic of our society that in fact the particular society that we live in depends on racism, and on sexism, and on classism. And those things come out in my work too. Some people are very proud when they see me make appearances: “Oh, we're so proud to see this Mejicana, this Mexican American, this Hispanic writer” and they feel that I've made it like Richard Rodriguez has made it. They don't stop to think about how we have “made it” in very, very different ways and we're being acknowledged by very different sectors. So I play a part by my person and by my name and my presence, and also in terms of what I say in my work about our reality.

Some of those people who are proud of your achievements as a writer, do you get the feeling that they sometimes don't listen to what you're saying?

Oh yeah, of course, they may even be a little disturbed by what I'm saying and they wince a little when I say “Chicana” or if I talk about lesbian or gay issues. They'd rather I not move out of the realm of cultural identification. That is exactly the reason why a person like Richard Rodriguez—I don't want to sound like I'm using him as my target—but that is why he gets that kind of attention that he gets and I've gotten the kind of attention that I've gotten from two entirely different audiences for the most part.

Yes, his audience is much more mainstream, whereas your audience tends to be more political. But I believe that you've deliberately addressing different audiences.

I think that the question as to who your audience is or who the audience is that a writer has in mind when she sits down to write is a very difficult one for everybody. Most people usually say “Well, I wasn't really thinking about anybody when I was writing this.” And what I usually say is that “When I'm writing, I'm thinking about a woman who is very much like me reading it.” Because that is the void that we have had in literature: a void in the representation in the literature of women who look and think and feel like me and who have had similar experiences in society. I wanted to fill that void. Why should I want to write about characters that are all too familiar to American literature? They're there already: somebody else has done it and somebody else has done a much better job of it than I can because I haven't experienced that. All I can do, in the most convincing and powerful way that I know how, is to write from what is true to me. When I think about who I would like to read what I write I think about another Chicana very similar to me.

You've probably characterized your ideal audience as “another woman of color” or more specifically as a “friend who was a budding feminist … had some consciousness … and needed to work things out.” Is that still your ideal audience?

I still think so. If I focus on my perspective and what I feel I've needed to explore as a social being, as an entity in this society, that guides me on what I write. For example, in Massacre of the Dreamers, a book about Chicano and Mexican women, I have that focus. I said in the introduction that when I spoke of men and women, I was specifically talking about Mexican men and Mexican women unless otherwise specified. My editor, my agent, and my publisher—all said, “You know, Ana, although you are directing yourself to this woman, there are a lot of people who are interested and will be using that work.” I would like to think that anybody in my time right now will pick up my work and say “there's something in there for me.” People have been asking me for the past 5 years, white students at universities for example, “I really identify with your poetry or with The Mixquiahuala Letters, does that bother you?” and I always respond “No that doesn't bother me. I'm very delighted that you enjoyed it and that it speaks to you.” So, now I'm much clearer on the importance of acknowledging that there is a wider audience in the country and abroad. In fact, I welcome it because by welcoming it—it's not that I personally get accepted, but that we are communicating as a culture to other people. That's making it acceptable to other people instead of historically being foreign and strange and therefore something they could reject.

Although you're not always overtly political, there is a great deal which is subversive or revolutionary in your work.

It's implicit in the work. Obviously, one does not only undermine the status quo by stating it, but you undermine it by virtue of the language that you're chosen to write in, and by your acts. I started out self-publishing my poetry, and I have always had Spanish in my works—so I think that I've been an insurgent structurally, but also in terms of the language that I use. My language is not white standard English. It doesn't matter if you claim to be Chinese American or Mexican American or African American and put in all the familiar cultural motifs if you're still using the language that is acceptable by the status quo. And I've not done that. In So Far from God, one of the important aspects of the narrative, of the story that is being told, is the narrator. The same thing happens in Sapogonia; you have a Sapogon, he's pretentious, English is his second language, and you can see that in the narrative of Sapogonia. You have a very different narrator in The Mixquiahuala Letters; she is a Chicana, who is a radical poet and she uses the small “i” and she uses verse whenever she feels like it. So inherent in the content is also the language. I was just thinking of Luce Irigaray … she's an example of someone causing a revolution in her profession and in writing just by virtue of the language that she used. I was thinking of her book, Speculum of the Other Woman, try to read that! She was attacking white, male writing—she broke all the rules in the French language to do that.

In an essay in Massacre of the Dreamers, you say that the language is a living language and we have to use it, to make it suitable to our moment in history. It was in the passage where you were talking about not using the flourishes of the culture like Oaxacan paper cuts.

Yes, that it's not a cultural motif like the Oaxacan paper cuts that you string from beam to beam and the audience responds “Oh how beautiful, how wonderful, how lovely, she's a Latina … our new Hispanic writer.” But what's important is that you have to see everything that we are—everything that we are which to this date people have not wanted to see. And that means if s not just the pretty or the clever or what is embellished by romance and poetry. I believe that you cannot not be political. Even stating that you're not political is a political act. Refusing to participate is a political act. What you're doing is not that you're not participating, it's that you're joining in with the mainstream or you're joining in with the status quo. And that is a political act. So, we are political by virtue of the decisions we make in participating in society. The kind of political person that I am, of course, is one who does challenge racism in society, who does challenge sexism and economic inequality for the majority of the people. I do that in my work and I do that by the way that I live my life, too. As we were saying before the interview started, with fame does not necessarily come money. That comes from the kind of writing that I've chosen to devote myself to and that will probably be, for the most part, the way that it will be for me as a writer.

So that you've made a conscious decision about your work. From your experience does the literature—especially that written by Chicanas—reexamine, question, subvert, or reinforce the values of the dominant society?

When I was reading the question and thinking about the prominent Chicana writers of our generation and what their goals are and what their writings is like, I thought about what the word “values” means and what we got shoved down our throats during the 80s by the Republican administration. Somehow people's values supposedly changed. In contemporary society, whether you are African American and work in a gas station and that's how you support your family, or whether you're a Chicana who calls herself Hispanic and helps support her family by working in an office downtown in a city, or whether you're a white person who works in a university setting—hopefully the value is to lead a life in which you're not suffering physically, where you can eat well, where your children get a “decent” education, where you can live in a clean environment. So I think all of us in the United States share the same values. I think that as a mother, for example, I share the same values that a white woman in Tennessee who is a mother of an eleven-year old child has: she wants her child to grow up in a safe and clean world and to have a decent education and then hopefully to have a fulfilling life. That's the kind of life we can all have.

I think we all have many of the same values, so the way that a Chicana writer—a self-defined Chicana writer—challenges society is by introducing the particular dilemmas of what it is to be Chicana, a brown person. Let me just use specific examples: Cherrie Moraga, who has been instrumental in creating Chicana literature and whose work I have been familiar with, and Sandra Cisneros, who is also a prominent Chicana writer. These are two self-defined Chicanas—one from Chicago and one from southern California—who have similar, but not exactly the same goals in what they do when they write. And that's because one was also identified as a lesbian and as a feminist from very early on and wanted to challenge, truly wanted to challenge, to subvert American literature and white feminism. So those were her goals in the 80s. And then we have Sandra Cisneros who wanted to reflect—in my opinion—rather than to overtly challenge. The fact that she writes does challenge the white mainstream literature but what she was wanting to do for example in The House On Mango Street was to reflect the reality of a young Latina growing up in Chicago. I'm using their differences as an example, but I could say the same thing for example about Helena Viramontes, whom I also respect and admire, and her talent and her goal as a writer and as a woman who calls herself a Chicana of our generation. We're going to see Chicanas who are under the age of thirty putting out novels in the next few years and they're going to be reflecting the realities of the 80s and the 90s in a very different way than we can ever do because they'll have different goals. They will start their writing careers with a recognition of Chicana literature in the publishing world already in existence and hopefully, move on from there.

I do know that as Chicanas we are reexamining, we are questioning, we are subverting, we are reinforcing the values of the American ideal—democracy. But what we're doing is we are also giving first voice witness to our particular dilemmas and our particular perspective. And they're not the same: Cherrie Moraga is not the same as Sandra Cisneros; Sandra Cisneros is not the same as Helena Viramontes; Helena Viramontes is not the same as Mary Helen Ponce; and Mary Helen Ponce is not the same as the next woman. … We can't say at any point that any white woman—or to be more politically correct—any Euro-American woman writer between the ages of 35 and 45 who is writing today is going to be reflecting and examining American society the way the next one will. They come from their own perspectives and so do we. But what we have shared—the common thread for us—is that we're all coming from the Chicana reality.

Although we recognize the individual perspectives of many writers, we tend to see each Chicana writer as being a spokesperson for the whole perspective.

That tendency is very real. When Cherrie Moraga or Gloria Anzaldua would address a predominantly white audience in 1985, or when Sandra Cisneros would address an almost all white audience in 1991—the reason why these Chicanas would be looked upon and be weighted down by that pressure is because we are so under-represented. But once we start to see the range of our voices we begin to understand that of course there isn't one exclusive, politically correct Chicana literature.

Going back to your work specifically, both the novels Sapogonia and So Far from God originated in short story form—Sapogonia in “Antihero” and So Far from God in “Loca Santa.” Is that a typical pattern for your novels?

When you have three novels, I guess you can start to establish a pattern. As I've always said, being a self-taught writer I do things rather pragmatically. I didn't have a mentor or someone to say “This is how you start to work. …” But fortunately I think I did have some sense about it. How did I start learning to write prose was by doing small things, sketches, trying to construct a short story. It would have been very defeating for me between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-five to say “I'm going to write a novel” and never have studied with anybody, never have conferred with anybody about how you do this. In fact, I do remember Sandra Cisneros, who did go to the Iowa Writers Workshop, saying in reference to her own training that you have to start with constructing a short story and then you start to work toward a bigger project. So that's part of it. Another part of it is getting to know your characters. I did a lot of little sketches—there were little poems of Maximo Madrigal and there were sketches that never got to the public—besides the “Antihero” story. It took me about two to three years before I could know that character well enough in my head. Could I do him? Did I know him well enough? So I think the other part of doing the short stories is you start to get a feeling for your characters. It's about alchemy. It's about acting, projecting yourself into another reality.

You've created a number of unique characters. Do you have one that particularly stands out in your mind?

Last year, I started doing sketches on a new character. Her name is Miss Rose and I like her a lot. My editor at Norton saw my short stories and asked my agent if in fact Miss Rose was going to be a novel. You can tell. You may have three pages and then three more pages of another little story with Miss Rose and you can already tell that this character wants to be big—a big project. She is a kind of mysterious character in the Southwest desert; she's black—I don't know if she's African American—she's a hoodoo woman and she's lesbian. She says and does all kinds of things that are very egocentric. Two other characters that are related to her are two Chicanas from Mexicali—so far they're from Mexicali, I'm still not sure—and they're also very different. Miss Rose just does all kinds of things; she's very much into her own world. I enjoy her a lot. So for right now, I'd really like to be able to get my grasp on her and explore that character and grow with that. It's a trilogy because it's this woman plus these two other women and all of them are very much in tune with their psyches. I think that has a great deal to do with my own interests right now—my personal interests. These characters are able to manifest that. That's what all characters are really—it's just like a dream—everyone in your dreams is you and everyone in your novel is you. That character is calling something in you that you want to explore. So she's someone—Miss Rose—she's someone that I'm really fascinated by. In So Far from God, I have a tenderness for La Loca, but again I believe it was like the splitting of an atom of all my different sides that came out in these different women. And then, you have to remember that the novels are written over a number of years and so you live with those people and while you're with them that's when they seem to be most special to you. So I think my newest characters are like the newest baby in the family wanting all the attention. And the other ones, they're here, they've manifested themselves, they may get stubborn and make appearances and not want to go away—they're part of the whole body of work, but it's the baby that wants the attention. That's why I can say it's Miss Rose. We'll see what happens to her.

That's a perfect lead in to our next question. Your novels are often linked by the cameo appearances of characters—Tere and Alicia in Sapogonia and Pastora in So Far from God. Which of the characters from So Far from God is going to show up in the next novel?

In the next novel? I don't know. But I do know that somebody has to go through that desert obviously … someone has to work in there and appear in there. Since I don't have the next novel planned, I can't tell you. But I do have it in mind that that is my way of still being faithful to my children—I want them to know that in that strange world of literature, they will always have a place in my writing. They can come there and make a little appearance.

Critics have often commented on your ironic sense of humor. The subject matter of some of your work is potentially very tragic. How do you use the humor in your work?

I have a very sardonic sense of humor and if I let myself go I can see everything like that. I would like to examine that more and more. That's something you don't see in poetry. Some people can do funny poetry, not everyone. So when I do the fiction, you see immediately that I have this sense of humor. And, I also would like to be able to think that in cultures like the Hispanic culture of New Mexico, the Mexican culture—my own background—that we love to play with language. If we can't laugh or find joy, which is one of our greatest strengths, it would be a tragedy. Because we do have to live, in addition to living with the environmental issues, the economic destitution we have children to raise, we have celebrations, we have our rituals, and if we didn't find joy and humor we would have long been gone. We're not drones. We may be perceived as being drones in society, but we are not drones. It seems weird to see somebody trying to be funny about it, but that is the way that we move on from generation to generation by seeing the irony. It's not a laughing, vacant joke humor; it's humor that is pointing out the contradictions—always. That's being done more than anything in So Far from God.

Aren't you having a little fun in the poem “Not Just Because My Husband Said”?

There you see the irony again. It's the very careless reader that will see something and say “Well, she really means that.” And of course, I'm always saying things with tongue in cheek. I believe that if we see the irony and the contradictions in the institutions that we are given that is part of our ability not only to survive them but to contribute to a change. If you don't see it, if you don't point it out—“Yes, we have to accept this now, but look what it's doing to us” then you can't laugh and say “So, now what do I do about it so that we can move on? What I did in So Far from God was that I did give the ending a hopeful note because otherwise it would have been quite tragic with all of the characters dying off because of environmental issues and so forth. I projected it into the future where there will always be problems, but people are always trying to work them out.

You're right, if that last chapter had not been there it would have been a Greek tragedy …

In the mythology, the early Christian medieval mythology, they've taken Sofia who is the Greek goddess, and her daughters and turned them into martyrs. At the very ending of that story, Sofia is on the grave crying for her three martyred daughters. So that's how I originally ended my story. But my agent who was reading the manuscript commented that “Well, this is very depressing. You know, you promised Norton a happy ending.” So I thought, “what would she [Sofia] do to change that, particularly as a religious figure. What would she do?” She takes over. She doesn't submit to that point in history when patriarchy took over her authority.

To follow up, in an essay in Massacre of the Dreamers you say that the Mexican-Indian women writers have become “excavators of our culture mining our own metaphors, legends, folklore, myths …”

That quote is from my essay on the poetics of conscientizacion. It follows the line of thinking of an American writer studying in an English department, reading Chaucer, reading Homer as his informants or her informants for writing today going into the 21st century in the United States—a country that didn't exist the way it does now but has derived from the Greek tradition philosophically and the English tradition linguistically. It is the same thing that we did—that we were doing—we were looking for our link because definitely we didn't have a direct link to Europe in that sense. Since we're from the Americas, we looked for our parallels. Once we got into college and we were dealing with this great opposition to our presence, then we went and started digging up “Who does speak to me? If this model doesn't speak to me, where is one that does?”

The poem “Zoila Lopez” is a powerful poem about a heroic woman who normally would simply be overlooked or ostracized by society. Not letting those women be forgotten seems an important concern in your work.

I think that the poetry provides glimpses into things that I expand later in prose. In Massacre of the Dreamers that's exactly what I talk about. Think about a person like that—and that's one of the biggest messages that I keep repeating when people talk to me about that project. Think about a person like Zoila Lopez—who gets up in the morning, who puts her lipstick on, who washes her hair—she's dark, short, squat—everything esthetically that this society says is no good—she's wearing a used polyester dress, and yet she kisses her husband, and they make love, and she has a baby. Think about it. In all that, she'll walk down the street with her head up high and she'll look straight at people. Think of that kind of character. That's a formidably courageous, strong, and knowledgeable … a very wise woman. Sometimes they don't think about it because they say “Well, I'm just trying to survive.” But survival just means you exist and we're not just survivors. We are women who go way beyond survival. We don't just exist. We have great faith and optimism in the future. She's the perfect example of what I talk about. If you think about how we look in the media, they say “Well, you don't have a great job, you don't have an education, you're not 5'7” and blonde, you don't weigh 120 pounds, you don't have a house with a two car garage.” All the things that are put to us in this society as measures of success and beauty. And, then you've got somebody who doesn't have any of that and still gets up and thinks of herself as a heck of a person—that is someone that we can learn from. And that's my biggest message in Massacre of the Dreamers.

When people wonder “Well, with so much, Ana, don't you feel defeated or don't women feel defeated?” My response is “No, we don't feel defeated. Look at us.” just look at us. There's a lot of secrets that we're holding to ourselves. My projection of our future is that it's not so much for us to assimilate and be accepted by society, but for us to bring society to the fold, bring the dominant society, bring men of all backgrounds, to our way of thinking because we have in our psyches, and in our bodies, and in our memories, and in our histories … everything possible to make a different world. That's why I believe it's about bringing society to us not for us to be accepted and become part of a civilization and a society that is marching very quickly on its way to destruction.

I'd like to explain where the title, Massacre of the Dreamers, came from. When I was doing my research for the book and doing a lot of reading on pre-conquest Mexico, I read that Montezuma had some idea about the coming of the Spaniards and the doom of the empire. He had been told and it was written in the Codices. As part of his fear, he sent out emissaries throughout Tenochtitlan, the empire, to find people who had dreamed about the fall of the empire. As it turns out, the emissaries found thousands of people who had dreamt about it. He had them brought to the palace. They all foretold doom. He was filled with so much despair and felt so hopeless that he had them all massacred. Thousands of dreamers were killed and it was known in the Codices as the “massacre of the dreamers.” What is important about that incident is that afterward no one in the empire would tell their dreams. No one would talk about their dreams for fear, of course, of what would happen. But “what would happen” did happen anyway.

And so Massacre of the Dreamers for me is us if we're afraid to dream … if we're afraid to have a vision … if we're afraid to speak up. In other words, if we submit ourselves to apathy, it is not going to stop the inevitable doom of our society, of our civilization, of our globe. So we have to do something. We have to have a vision. We have to believe in our intuitions. We have to speak up locally and nationally. That's the message of Massacre of the Dreamers: to have a vision and not be afraid to speak that vision.