Product Description

f the Dreamers points out the omissions and challenges the misconceptions of a society that recognizes race relations as primarily a black-and-white issue. Castillo's essays analyze the 500-year-old history of Mexican and Amerindian women in this country and document the ongoing political and emotional struggles of their descendants.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26128 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Booklist
Castillo, who has earned respect for her novels--most recently, So Far from God --and poetry, here reflects on the place of Mexic Amerindian women and on the need for Xicanisma, a politically active and socially committed Chicana feminism, in national and global policy debates. In ten probing, passionate essays, Castillo explores the roles that women played in the Chicano/Latino Movimiento of the 1960s and 1970s; examines Mexicana activism in the 1986 Watsonville, California, canning strike; posits ancient Mediterranean roots for machismo; analyzes the consequences for women of the moral dualism, repression of sexuality, and fear of death that Catholicism and Communism share; assesses the "poetics of conscientizaci{¢}on"; and argues that eroticism, traditional healing and other forms of "lived spirituality," and "the mother-bond principle" represent essential elements in a Xicanisma that can speak to women and men of many cultures and need to be reintegrated into the lives of Mexic Amerindian women. The sometimes bristly, provocative essays in Massacre of the Dreamers will be a stimulating addition to ethnic and women's studies collections. Mary Carroll

Review
"immensely insightful in every sense of the word." -- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author

"is at times brilliant, at times angry, at times poignant, but at all times riveting." -- Maria Herrera-Sobek, University of California, Irvine

About the Author
Ana Castillo is the author of "So Far From God," "Sapogonia," and "The Mixquiahuala Letters."

Customer Reviews

A Powerful Revision of Amerindian/Xicana Women's History!
Massacre of the Dreamers is Ana Castillo's transdisciplinary book about the deconstruction of Mexic pallocentric "pyramids," as she herself puts it. By re(w)riting history, Castillo reconfigures the role of the Amerindian/Xicana/Mexican woman, allowing her to draw strength from Mesoamerican female goddesses. In this remarkable text, furthermore, Castillo employs her "own raw materials" (104) as an antidote to male-centered cosmic consciousness that operates in binary frames of dualisms, dichotomies, and schisms. In resurecting her spiritual mother goddesses, Castillo, like Anzaldua and Cisneros, reinserts "the forsaken feminine into our consciousness" (12). By exposing the manner in which the xicana has been "gagged" for hundreds of years, Castillo rejects colonization and mapps a xicana history with a difference that allows the Amerindian woman's various selves to coexist simultaneously, reinforcing her identity

Xicanisma (pronouned Chi-canisma)
It would be impossible to tell what this book did for me, especially during my days in law school. As a Chicana I felt isolated. I was often made to feel intellectually inferior. Castillo's brilliance soared like a flame to rescue my quickly freezing soul. If it weren't for this book I think I would have not survived that alienating environment bound to make me fail. She is not rhetorical but driven with reasoning. When women of color explain themselves we are dismissed as simply bitter. This book explained why I would have the right to be bitter and anger but why I must push forward. It saved my life.

This woman is a seer.
Castillo has obviously tapped into her power for this one. Her fiction is moving, thought-provoking, angering, sometimes even humorous... but this essay collection is even more impressive. I'm sure some will consider her xicanista views extreme, but Castillo calls it as she sees it.