Massacre of the Dreamers by Ana Castillo

Author:Ana Castillo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2014-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

In the first edition of this book I started this chapter with the following:

In 1980 at a writers’ conference, a noted Latino poet who was having trouble with his hotel accommodations asked to use the shower in my room. I waited for him in the room since we were both expected soon at a dinner in our honor. When he came out of the bathroom, dripping, he dropped his towel and dressed in front of me. Afterward, he asked for a cigarette and proceeded to smoke it stretched languidly in an odalisque pose on one of the beds. “Talk to me about erotica,” he said. “And what would you have me say?” I asked, disinterested, and not at all pleased by the wet towel left on the carpet. (He had used up all the towels; moreover, the woman poet with whom I was sharing the room had not yet arrived.) “And what gives you the impression that I know anything about erotica?” I added. “Anyone who has written ten pieces on any subject must be an expert on it,” he responded.5

I had recently self-published a chapbook, The Invitation.6 I wrote the poetry and prose in that chapbook during my midtwenties and had relentlessly pursued its publication. The chapbook was created out of my sobering experiences of the Movimiento Latino. Sobering because I felt my physiology was objectified and excluded by the politic of those men with whom I had aligned myself on the basis of our mutual subjugation as Latinos in the United States.7 With a poet’s trust in her intuition, I addressed this anguish with the compassion I had for myself as a woman. Even as I moved toward this untracked terrain, however, as a Latina and lapsed Catholic I anticipated that the men within el Movimiento Latino, as “liberal-minded” as they believed themselves to be, would look upon my invitation to discuss sexuality with all the reservations set upon society centuries before. They would not take my endeavor as serious intellectual discourse. Furthermore, being that as politicized Latinos we were already up against the block of the “white literary junta” it would appear to them as frivolous if we “simply” engaged in poetry about sex. My lot, according to them, was to remain true to the collective goals of the pueblo, which of course, were male defined. There would be those, I predicted, who would flatly dismiss me as a nymphomaniac or a lesbian (read: man hater.) Of course, my chapbook was not a personal “invitation” but a tragically overdue proposal to discuss within our various communities our spiritual, political, and erotic needs as a people.

My world in Chicago at that time was primarily Mexican, Latino, Christian, mostly Catholic and overlaid with the amorphous leftist politics of the mid-1970s. We were in the throes of the White Feminist Movement, the introduction of The Pill and new literature discussing human desire, The Joy of Sex, Kinsey Report, Masters and Johnson, and the book that made an impact on me, The Hite Report.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.