She received her B.A. in 1975.
Castillo's experience as a student at Northeastern Illinois was largely negative, she explained in the interview, because "the extent of the racism and the sexism of the university in a city like Chicago discouraged" her from becoming an art teacher. She went on: "by the time I was finishing my B.A.--and it took a lot of work to get scholarships and grants to get through the university system--I was really convinced that I had no talent. I couldn't draw and I had no right to be painting." As a result of these experiences, Castillo stopped painting. During her third year of college, however, she resumed writing poetry.
These first poems were a response to her grandmother's death. In the introduction to My Father Was a Toltec (1988) she claims to have been "possessed suddenly to compose from a place so deep within it felt like the voice of an ancestor embedded in a recessive gene." Appropriately written on the "ugly" yellow pages of a utilitarian notepad picked up at the factory where her mother worked, the poems, she says, "were short, roughly whittled saetas [couplets from a poem or song] of sorrow spun out of the biting late winter of Chicago" that allowed the child poet to work through her pain.
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