Mr. Finch: Let's start back in Meso-American times. One of the points that reoccurs throughout Massacre of the Dreamers, that I think you have in common with a lot of writers -- as it happens, especially women, is an idea that we envision race something different from an issue of black or white with everyone else following in between. You talk about the Meso-American, the indigenous roots of Xicanisma, which you spell with an X, which nominally, I suppose, has to do with the Mexican heritage population in North American. North American defined from borders but as geographic and people borders. One of the things that reading "Massacre of the Dreamers" that was new to me was that you take this kind of patriarchal story and the battle of the patriarchy with the matriarchy back into indigenous American history, and one of the figures who emerges very changed from what a lot of people, even in the multi-culti circles, might feel is the figure of Moctezuma.

Ms. Castillo: You know when we began the -- in that the Chicano/Latino movement there was a romantic idea about the victimization of the people that we know as the Aztecs. It was, in fact, a very militant, militaristic society, and there was, in fact, maybe not racism, but ethnicism. You know, there were many, many, many wars and sacrifices on other indigenous people. And these are the people that helped the handful of Spaniards that came to overthrow the Aztecs, the people in power. Moctezuma was the patriarch. He had no less than perhaps a hundred-fifty women in the palace, women that were having children. If you had money, as in most cultures, you could do that. The common people didn't have a hundred-fifty wives. So, there's that side of society that we don't know about. Of course, history always depends on who is telling it. And as I started to do some of my research and understanding who I am as a Mestiza, who has, obviously, a lot of indigenous Indian blood Because of our history, my personal history of migration -- my family are Mexican background; we ended up in Chicago in the last generation. It was very hard to know what that history is. We also don't get it in history books in the United States. We don't really know the indigenous side of US history, much less in Mexico or Central America. So it took a great deal of investigation. In fact, about seven years of investigation went into that.

This is different to me from the white feminist movement in the sense of the white feminist who has also done research on their goddesses in Northern Europe and so on. This was different for me because of the obscurity of indigenous history on this land where we live, and I think that was very important. Also I think because of racism, in addition to sexism, was important to understand who indigenous people once were, or how they thought. It's also important to understand our history as women, as females in our society, five, six, seven hundred years ago, and that wasn't very long ago, in terms of history. This country is only, you know, a little over two hundred years. It's a baby in comparison to some of the nations of the world. So those things are not things that a Latina in the US, will ever have a chance to hear about. And all of that is part of knowing who you are.

If our discussion about racism in the United States is always ultimately a dichotomy between the Anglo and African-American, white and black, all the people that fall in between have their own very specific experiences, that's not been given a lot of attention when you discuss racism. And so it was important for me, as a brown woman, who is neither black nor white, to find out about herself, and also to discuss approximately seven million women's experience in the United States.

Mr. Finch: Not an easy task to do in 340 some pages.

Ms. Castillo: No. And there are a lot of words. I look at the print, it's kind of small print, it looks intense to me. I know, it took seven years -- it was really hard. It didn't come easy to me. Not just the writing of it because I'm a self-taught writer, and this was the first time that I had worked in the essay form so I was teaching myself how to write essays, how to develop a thought, which isn't the same thing as developing a story or a poem. Very very different. The other thing is that as a poet and as a fiction writer, you can state anything you want, and who's going to argue with you about it?

Mr. Finch: There's no fact checking.

Ms. Castillo: No. There isn't any point in it. It's your opinion. It's your reflection, your reaction, your own opinion. When you write a critical -- and this isn't personal essays, these are critical essays -- then you have to prove ever single thing you say.

Ms. Cinader: You mentioned as we were speaking before we started rolling the tape about the reception of Chicana women, which, of course, is a huge category in itself and could be divided down into quite a number of women -- different sorts of women with different backgrounds. A lot of what's in here is difficult for the women who you've directed this book mostly towards. Although, I would say, of course, it's a book for anyone and everyone to read. But what is in here that is, even though it's obviously meant as empowerment for these women, why is it so difficult for them to accept or to deal with some of the ideas that you've put out in this book?

Ms. Castillo: Well, it's -- if we're going to use words such as empowerment, understanding may be how we use it in this context, empowerment on the level of economics, the Mexican-American woman, the Mexican woman in the United States is the lowest paid worker in this country, as well -- lesser than African-American women. So we're talking about a woman, first of all, that has very little economic recourse. Empowerment here might mean self-understanding, some historical understanding, a sense of cultural pride, once you understand some of your history or who you are in the world. It's very very hard when you're a woman who makes very little money and has a lot of responsibility. In addition to that, although not all Mexican women or all Latinas are Catholic, we are one of the Church's greatest constituencies. So what I have done in this book is -- I've also had to -- was forced to look at our religiosity because we're very religious beings. And this is part of our identity. This is part of who we are, whether you go to mass or not. Whether you have a very strict sense of your participation in the Church or whether you've dismissed it, but it's still been part of your family background. And then say I, well, I don't know if God, um, is on our side. In so many thousands of words, I said that -- not quite like that in the book. That's something that can really be very offensive to someone. I am also a great devotee of the Goddess of the Americas, of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as she is known by the Catholic Church. She is the Mother Goddess, and in Mexican society, in Mestizo society, and in Mexican-Indian society, she is the Mother Goddess. But because of the hierarchy of the Church, they can't give her that kind of credit. So they acknowledge that, but it's very sacrilegious to attack the Church or to attack God as the big father in the sky. So I understand why it would be very unsettling and even,offensive to that particular woman that I'm trying to talk to, in terms of self-empowerment.

Ms. Cinader: To take that a step further. A friend of mine is actually just finishing -- she's from Scotland, and she's just finishing the Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and I think it's had a great affect on her with these stories that she's heard from childhood to see a reinterpretation of Morgan LeFay, who most woman -- or in most interpretations we see her as sort of an evil woman that caused all of the bad things that happened in King Arthur's story. I see a similarity in that to the story of Malintzin, in that you described her as well as somebody who -- was a traitor, according to legend, and yet you have a different interpretation of her history and what that would mean for women looking back and trying to see some meaning in that time.

Ms. Castillo: Well, Malintzin was a young woman who was given over as a slave and woman and became the interpreter of Cortes. She was approximately fourteen years old, as far as I understand, at this time. In history, she was also a very religious being. Again, the transition from her religion to Catholicism was very easy because it was a hierarchal religion. But getting away from her and making the connection with her and other archetypes in society, there is a pattern that as we move away from a matriarchal, feminine, mother centered world, which was maybe who knows when, forty thousand years ago -- as we begin to move all over the world and we become more and more God/Sky focused, the female does begin to lose a great deal of her creative powers and becomes more associated with everything that's bad and negative and will ultimately destroy you.

So I was attempting to bring out some of our own personal history, as Mexican women, to make that connection with other women, with Eastern religions, with European, and with North African beliefs. There is a pattern of doing that. It doesn't surprise me that we see that over and over again in all the mythology. That's part of the empowerment of a more military society. We live in a military society right now. You know, I always hear from Latino men, a great deal of praise about the mother. You know "in my house my mother did this and she raised all the children, and we worship her, we adore her," and there is a certain sense of power that she has, and to my mind it is one that falls very short. For example, the father will say to the son or the daughter, "listen to your mother". "Respect your mother". So remember now, the command is really coming from the father to uphold that place for the mother within the home. And so even within the home, it's still, only up to a certain level is she actually being able to exercise that power. I feel it's very patronizing to exalt the sufframent of women in a military aggressive society. In the case of Malintzin she was blamed for the downfall of the empire.

Mr. Finch: There's even, again, the name escapes me, but there is even a warrior queen that you evoke who actually died on the field of battle and led, I'd guess we call it a co-ed army.

Ms. Castillo: Well, up until the Eleventh Century A.D., there were -- in Central Mexico, there were queens that had real power, and these people that I'm referring to in my book are called the Toltecs. When we get to the point in history where the Spaniards come, and there is the conquest over the Aztecs, the Aztecs worship the Toltecs as their ancestors, and any Aztec worth his salt would say he descended from the Toltecs. Now the Toltecs were also a matrilineal society, so your blood lineage would be through your mother. Those queens, at that time, were also warriors. That particular queen was called Xochitl, and it was said that when she died on the field in battle, her blood announced the end of the Toltecs. I personally interpret that to mean that that was also the end of the matriarchy because there are no more queens of that stature after that.

Ms. Cinader: You're giving the example of the father in the home, and that right away brings to my mind the fact that many women who are raising children without fathers in the home, without the fathers anywhere, without even support of the fathers in financial ways a lot of time, and that, I think, is an important theme in your book. I've thought for some time that, the real revolution is going to happen when women get together, and, of course, that includes the white women's movement needs to open up and see that it is a question of race and class, as well.

Ms. Castillo: Well that was also one of the reasons why I set upon writing Massacre of the Dreamers. There is a chapter there -- there are two chapters. One chapter looking at the history of Chicana feminism and beginning in 1968 when a lot of the movements in this country and around the world had an impetus, we were affected just like all of the leftist movements by the male leadership. Now I felt that was very important for us to look at the evolution of where that's taken us. There's another chapter very different -- on a very different theme that has to do with the cannery workers in Watsonville. Most of them now are Mexican women. Many of them are single mothers who led a strike in 1986. These were the most unlikely people to be, not only politically active, but also in the United States, and so I wanted to look at that and see what happens to that kind of person as she becomes a political being.

So part of getting there is understanding what we've done in the last twenty and thirty years as activists, as men, as women, as Jewish-American, African-American, Asian-American for us to be able to work better together. Now I think, in terms of the "women's movement" in the world, that is the greatest revolution that we're going to have, but it's not a revolution that you go out with your weapons and there's bloodshed. It's a revolution that takes maybe a hundred, two hundred, maybe five hundred years. Think about the thousands of years it's taken for us to get to this place where we accept war as a fact of life. Every day right now there is a war going on somewhere in the world, and we accept that that's the way it has to be. We say things like, "we have to fight for peace". We believe those kinds of things. So it's so much ingrained in us, there is no way that we can talk about understanding the feminine overnight in one generation or two generations. So my little grain of corn that I contributed to this process was "Massacre of the Dreamers" and trying to understand what we have to do as Mestiza women, as Chicano men and women to integrate ourselves to the world struggle of bringing back the feminine.

Ms. Cinader: And for men and women.

Ms. Castillo: Yes, because men are just as much damaged, just as much hurt by the history of patriarchy.

Mr. Finch: One of your comadres, also a native of Chicago, said off the top of her head, and maybe it's a statement that you're all very well familiar with, "we have the word macho because we understand it is a problem", as opposed to other cultures that don't even have a word for that thing. There's a chapter here called, Macha or La Macha. This envisioning of once again the woman at the center.

Ms. Castillo: Part of the problem for women, I think all women in this society, but I was focusing on the women of my own culture, has been the taking away of our sense of self on many different levels. One of them is our sense of self psychologically, another one is physically, what we call spiritually. Your soul. Your center. And the history of our selves as sexual beings. In the Catholic Church, you only have sex to have a child. It's better to be abstinent, if you're not going to have a child, in fact. At least, that holds true for the Catholic women.

Mr. Finch: And, of course, menstruation. The difference between how Catholics see mentruation and how women, such as in "So Far From God" know it as the moon time.

Ms. Castillo: Yes. It's been noted by Native American women scholars and other cultures, old cultures in the world that that was a time of great power. It is part of the cycle of the female. But for the history of Christianity, this is a very, very, dirty and scary time in male culture when women bleed. And in the Bible, in the Book of Leviticus, women shouldn't be touched or looked upon, it's as if you put her out in the stable or something. So, in any case, we get to this point now where we still have a lot of those remnants on how we look at ourselves. And so I think that part of that is understanding, yes, that this is a time of not only understanding your femaleness, but understanding who you are as a female. La Macha is an ironic term that I made up that challenges, the macho attitude because the minute a female in a very traditional culture begins to take on some of the characteristics that we associate with men, that is maybe you are not in a traditional marriage but have several lovers. Maybe you're a lesbian. Maybe you are a construction worker, anything that is associated with maleness they call you a macho. Just very simply a man. S I used it sort of sardonically, in the sense of women experimenting, celebrating, understanding their bodies, their sexuality. Often we believe -- those of us who were indoctrinated by Christianity, that if you just went and had sex whenever, you would be equating yourself to an animal. And, in fact, the animals only have sex when they're reproducing. Women, because of our cycle -- the female body has evolved and is free from that, so we can have sex anytime and enjoy sex. You have orgasms. It's only the animals that have sex when they are in heat. So, no, in fact, we're acting like human beings when we celebrate our sexuality and our desires.

Like I said in my book, I was hoping to focus in on a particular woman that is so much ignored by society. And I appreciate that you say that it's not just bound by this country but indigenous women throughout and Mestizas and in Mexico those who are so heavily influenced by the Catholic colonization of the Spaniards. So that we can begin to understand ourselves and understand why we are so unhappy. We live in a very violent society. We are now hearing about domestic violence and especially about violence on children. That has always been a reality for society because we live in a very violent aggressive world.

Ms. Cinader: That was something I wanted to touch on that really struck me in your essays was, I think the figure that you gave was that one out of three children are abused in the home when they are growing up. And that really blew me away to think in terms of those numbers and that they may even be greater. And it struck me that -- just as we sort of have this dichotomy with the good woman and the evil woman, there's the Prostitute and the Virgin and so on. And in a way the ability to divide women into those categories has, in a certain sense, made it possible for our society to continue the way it is structured. I wondered if that is the same with the abuse of children. If this hidden abuse and ability of men to have that kind of power over the lives of the children in their home is also an outlet that somehow permits our society to continue in its rather perverted way.

A. Castillo Well of course this is the problem with talking about the abuse of children and talking about the abuse of women and the abuse of children in the home by either sex.

Cinader It struck me as the norm.

A Castillo What else would you expect where you have such a predator oriented society? The statistics on incest and child molestation are approximately one out of two for females, one out of three for boy children. Because of machismo in society; I'm not talking about Mexicans, I'm talking about this country because of that, most males have never reported being molested. And only now that its something that's being discussed, and people are going into therapy and there's a lot of discussion around early sexual abuse, the statistics have narrowed to that because they're finally admitting it. It's not only the girl child that's being abused in the home, but it's the boy child being preyed upon. The statistics from the US Census Beaureau calls us, all of us, Hispanic, with Spanish speaking background, but more than fifty percent are of Mexican background. The Hispanic woman, one out of three families is lead by females and one out of two of that female lead household lives below the poverty level. Those are phenomenal figures to look at I think, in terms of where we see the propensity of violence and poverty.

Cinader That could be seen either as a positive or negative thing to see a female head of a household. It can mean that this is a woman who has taken steps towards her independence. On the other hand you bring up the fact that it is the mothers of especially young children who tend to really be excluded from the affairs of other adults. When I hear it on the news it always sounds like such a negative thing, a single mother, and I see it more as a double edged sword, because certain things will change.

Castillo Most of the time its not even a choice. And we also know we have a very high teenage mother rate. So you have thirteen year olds, fourteen, fifteen years old, young women who are mothers, who are certainly going to be single mothers because they're not married, it might have been planned in the sense that it's very popular right now to say "I want to have a baby". So they didn't use protection and got pregnant intentionally, but many times it isn't a choice. I have been a single mother of a son who's twelve years old now, and I feel that I do my best to be a role model and an example to him as a person, as a brown person in the world. That yes, you can do these things, you can command respect in the world, and you can do whatever you want. I also understand that because of the way the world is we still also have the sense of "who is your father?". So his father has been a father in his life, active in his life, so there's no romantization of who that wonderful father might have been. He's got a loving father who's been in his life. But it's also financially, very very hard when you're a single woman , a single woman of color. And I'm a single woman of color but who also has an education, is an artist, but because I'm an artist and a writer I've also struggled financially. But most women of color in this country are at the bottom rung economically. So it's all fine and well to say I'm independent, and I like to say that, I really like having my space and my life and direct my lifestyle, but it's not always the choice.

Cinader It's not always the choice. And yet there still is a power in there that you speak of, that even in passivity there's a power in enduring, and in a sense that's where we need to go. I think you were saying that in moving toward finding that femine ideal again for all of us, that that is where it is in that sense of strength and persevering and lasting...

Castillo Yes. Independence doesn't meen that you're going to go out there and be very confrontational and be very aggressive. There is a certain way to get the things that you want without doing that. In a chapter about mothering and being the daughter of a mother, and what that means, and being the mother of a child. We look at the statistics and know that there are lots of households led by women. I also encourage support, if the father isn't around, or if the father has other things, other families to take care of. I understand all the dilemmas of being a single mother and encourage a woman to have a network of comadres and compadres who can help her parent. You don't have to be a mother yourself. You don't have to be female. A male friend can come and say "once a month I'm going to take the kids out to do something", or "I'm going to give you the evening so you can go out and do what you need to do to keep your sanity". It's important for us to have people in our children's lives who participate, that are not necesarilly from the child's biological family.

Cinader I think one other thing you touched upon that fascinates me is how language defines us. Pushing toward creative uses of language and re-defining language. You were talking about learning how to write an essay and here you have pushed the art of the essay to another frontier where you're reading it and here is a poem that fits into the narrative of the essay and even taking things and putting them into bold text and dividing certain things into columns. This is all very experimental and interesting.

Castillo I have a very active left brain and right brain. So while I'm doing analysis the right brain wants to play and bring out the drama and so I also included som poetry, Toltec poetry in translation, to illustrate the point I am making, for example, when I talk about storytelling to our children. How important it is to spend some time with our children. You don't have to go out and buy a book of fairytales. You can sit there and tell them stories about your life when you were a child or your family's life. You know, keep all the bad stuff out, you don't want to give them nightmares and terrorize them, but you tell them about how things were so they have a sense of place. Right next to that I have a Toltec poem. The Aztecs as I said prayed to the Toltecs. These were their ancestors. And they would tell their children, "you are going to be brave and beautiful as the Toltecs were". And they had a poem for the boy and a poem for the girl. These are the kinds of things they said to their children to prepare them for the world. So yes, as a poet it was very tempting for me to play with the form. But at the same time because of the commitment that I have to contributing to social change, I did the serious research and analysis that academia demands.

Finch The final chapter is called the Resurrrection of the Dreamers. And you begin it with a brief excerpt from the Physicist Steven Hawkings, from "A Brief History of Time", and he says, or I should say he writes because he can no longer speak at all, "in an infinite universe every point can be considered as the center." In the reading that I've done I can understand the import of that as someone who works trying to bring a greater sense of cultural wealth specifically to US culture. But is it an infinite universe if we talk about class isuues, if we talk about ethnic issues, if we talk about migration, immigration, welfare, education for all, even if we talk about the health of the human being, it seems that the argument against that is "we don't have enough money to support you people" "we don't have enough jobs to allow you to migrate back and forth across a political border". I think it's conscious that you've really put your finger on exactly where the hottest part of this argument lies, at least in the US. That idea of "the resources are gone now. Never mind who wasted them, but you can't have any more".

Castillo It can be very disheartening. And it can fill you with despair, as Moctezuma felt. If we are looking at it in the sense that we have come to this point, and we have burned our bridges almost completely, in terms of natural resources, in terms of human resources, so my point, and I love Steven Hawkings as a physicist, my point is that if we feel that way, then yes you feel that I am only one person, that's the lesson of the Massacre of the Dreamers. I am only one person what can I do? And I am only one person who has very little power in the world what can I do? If we feel that way then all the little points of the Universe end up being swallowed by the whale. And so I do see the infinity in terms of the entire globe and that each of us has to participate actively in some way to make that change, otherwise it is the massacre of the dreamers, it is the end.

There is a great sense of helplessness in this country in terms of the national government. There was for a long time with the Republicans in office. There's been a lot of disappointement with the Democrats. And we know that the Republicans are gearing up to come back a lot harder. At the same time there are a lot of people who if we don't allow ourselves to be beaten down into apathy, we can do something. We have to do something. My energy goes into my writing and speaking and doing these kinds of things. I wish I could do more. I wish I had the time and energy to do more. But that's what I've chosen to do and I think that if each of us looks into ourselves and understands what our strength is, you know, because each of us has a strength, we all have within ourselves the ability to speak and to act, to know where our best place is for that. You want to work in community work, you can do voter registration, education if you feel inclined to work with children, but we all have to do something because obviously the wheels are going very fast and we are getting very close to the end of the world. And I'm not meaning the end of the milennium or the end of the century but the end of the physical resources that we have.