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5 ”The Pleas of the Desperate” Magical Realism, Latinidad, and (or) Collective Agency in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, a romping and inventive account of four Mexican American sisters (Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and La Loca, translated as Faith, Hope, Charity, and The Crazy One) and their mother, Sofi, has clearly established its credentials as a progressive, politically concerned novel, and thus its place in the U.S. Latina/o canon.1 The novel’s pressing and overt themes, including gender inequity, challenges to cultural hegemonies (such as AngloAmerican dominant culture or the earlier Spanish cultural domination of indigenous culture in Mexico), and the environment, are all topics that place it squarely at the heart of a “resistant” Chicano/Latino tradition. Also frequently commented on is the novel’s “magical realist” style; the observation that Castillo writes in a magical realist tradition, along with comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez, predominates in her popular and critical reception. The New York Times Book Review, for example, called the novel a “magical realist account” (Sandlin 22); the Los Angeles Times review (penned by Barbara Kingsolver) noted that Castillo had moved her writing “a step further into the domain of North American magic realism, a tentative genre descended from the politically astute masterpieces of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende.” Kingsolver recommended, “Give [Castillo’s novel] to people who always wanted to read One Hundred Years of Solitude but couldn’t quite get through it. This one has levitating children and birds dropping out of the sky, too.” And, in a somewhat grumpier vein, James Polk complained in the Washington Post, “Have we had enough of the magical yet? Is there still room on the world’s bookshelves for another Hispanic novel set in a dusty town where [. . .] the marvelous is commonplace?” (D6).2 Later scholarship has repeatedly returned to this critical classification,3 with good reason: at times Castillo’s novel seems literally to scream magical realism from its pages. Of course, such critical affirmations themselves work to write Castillo firmly into a U.S. Latino/Latin American canon often characterized wholesale (and erroneously) by its use of a magical realist form. In this critical and readerly propensity we can see another manifestation of the underlying assump- 140 On Latinidad tion that a metaphorical umbilical cord connects U.S. Latinos to our Latin American countries of origin. After all, as Laura P. Alonso Gallo has observed, “Magic realism [. . .] happens to be the best—perhaps the only—known Latin American literary style among Anglo Americans” (244). U.S. Latinos and Latinas are so essentially tied to our Latin American roots, according to this thinking , that the single writing tradition of which Latino/a authors are assumed to be a part is Latin American; and that “tradition” itself is reduced to the magical realist fiction of the Latin American “Boom” of the 1960s and 1970s. Even Latino/a writers can participate in the essentialist equation between a generalized “Latin American” identity, presumably passed on (by blood or culture) to Latinos, and magical realism. As Gustavo Pérez Firmat comments in Tongue Ties (2003): Perhaps more than other types of serious writing, Latino literature caters to the limitations of its audience, which expects that the author and her stand-ins will act as cultural tour guides [to/in the countries of origin]. [. . .] And what does Latino literature teach? For the most part, what its readers already know, or think they know, about Latinos, Latinas, and Latin Americans: That they are slightly wacky, somewhat mysterious , very sensuous, and definitively spiritual. Julia Alvarez illustrates her admiration for a “compañero writer” with this anecdote: “I remember discovering Gabriel García Márquez and giving the novel to my father. He just couldn’t put it down, and I told him, Papi, this is called magical realism. He said, what do you mean—this is the way we think!” (Alvarez, “Interview” 140–41; qtd. in Pérez Firmat, Tongue Ties 140) Pérez Firmat picks up on this interesting use of “we,” and rightly so.4 For Alvarez , here, participates in the construction of a panethnic identity that includes Colombians currently living in Mexico, like García Márquez, and Dominicans currently living in the United States, like Alvarez’s father (not to mention Dominican Americans raised in the United States, like Alvarez herself), suggesting that “we” all think in magical realist terms. Delia Poey has astutely...

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