SOURCE: “Borrowed Homes, Homesickness, and Memory in Ana Castillo's Sapogonia,” in AZTLAN: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, Fall, 1999, pp. 73–94.

In the following essay, Socolovsky highlights the contradictory elements of Máximo Madrigal, the anti-hero of Sapogonia: hero versus antihero, power versus loss of control, exile versus tourist, memories of the past versus the present, and Madrigal's homesickness for his fatherland versus his yearning for a motherland.

We pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth designed to keep us in our place.

—Salman Rushdie, Shame

In this paper, I examine the formation of home through ideas of tourism and exile, homesickness, and houses, in Ana Castillo's second novel, Sapogonia. I claim that the protagonist of the novel, Máximo Madrigal, manipulates and borrows...