In the following essay on Ana Castillo's novel So Far From God, Roland Walter examines the politics of dislocation and relocation as a "locus of possibility" for Castillo's female characters, who, he argues, relocate their consciousness from separateness to collective, radical mestiza-based consciousness which allows them a strategy of "empowerment and liberation".

In So Far From God Castillo creates communitydefined by Tomas Rivera as "place, values, personal relationships, and conversation" by means of a "speakerly" magico-realist narrative texture. The driving forces of this process are women: women who think, dream, act and relate in what Anzaldua has called a "pluralistic mode," transcending binary oppositions, a rational "dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness," in an effort to heal "the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts" (Borderlands). The keyword of this worldview, carried as in Sapogonia by...