Customer Reviews

Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma

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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.

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

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.

Ana Castillo is an inspiration/orguyo to all Latin women. A role model for the latin women, who still fined them selves confined to their social imprisionment and traditional impairment. In this book, Ana Castillo through a collection of essays touches on a wide range of controversial issues, which many Latinas-surprisingly-will fined they relate.Castillo writes on topics; such as, Machismo, a women's sexuality and lesbianism. Castillo also writes about her experiences and struggles with society's exceptances in the oppression of the Latin women. Trough her struggles, she stays true to her values and never conforms to social pressures.Castillo a true woman in every senses of the word, resilient, bountiful, and amorous. There is no doubt in my mind the Castillo intended this book to give voice, strength, and hope through her words of inspiration and examples of triumph. To those women not yet free, because of their social and religious imprissonment to submission.I recommend this book to any women who wishes to be enlightened, inspired and empowered by Ana Castillo's ideology.