ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how Castillo's experience of growing up poor and ethnically marginalized in Chicago runs through her oeuvre. Castillo presents an opportunity to consider representations of nuevomexicanoregional identity within Chicano/a literature. The author's approach to teaching Chicano/a literature is shaped by his institutional setting. He teaches in Mexican-American Studies, a small interdisciplinary department with an undergraduate minor at a large, urban university. In this institutional setting, his goals are to help students develop close reading skills, learn to make an argument about literature, and reflect more deeply on all texts. The final two weeks of the course focus on Ana Castillo's novel So Far from God. Castillo's best-known novel presents students with opportunities to explore issues of ethnic identity, histories of struggle and oppression, gender ideologies, sexual and regional identities within Chicano/a communities, religious traditions, folklore and curanderismo, and environmentalism. Castillo presents an entry point into a discussion of curanderismo's relation to women's resilience in the novel.
