SOURCE: “Rebellion and Tradition in Ana Castillo's So Far from God and Sylvia López-Medina's Cantora,” in MELUS, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer, 2000, p. 83.

In the following essay, Sirias and McGarry compare Castillo's So Far from God and Sylvia López-Medina's Cantora, noting similar characters and situations in both novels, but contrasting the characters' responses and actions.

The Chicana “voice” in literature, according to Ramón Saldivar, comprises a discourse that creates “an instructive alternative to the exclusively phallocentric subject of contemporary Chicano narrative” (175). As Cordelia Chávez Candelaria reports, Chicana/Latina and other women writers have struggled for centuries to attain the right “to express and assert the validity of woman-space and the textured zone of women's experience” (26). Over the last two decades, the body of work that Chicana novelists have contributed to the totality of Chicano artistic discourse has managed to expand the formally predominant socio-political themes of...