You chose, as I choose to despair, or not on a given night or day. That despair turned inside out you called love. - Ana Castillo

It has been said of me and of my writing that I am in search of identity, as indeed we all are, which is a fact of living in a world of fragmented selves. White men (and white women) have always attempted this through their writing; and because they are members of dominant society, their search was considered representative of all, therefore, universal. On the other hand, the search by those of us who come from marginalized cultures in the United States is categorized as a sociological dilemma or a schizophrenic self-perception.

The Mexic Amerindian woman has inherited the sexism instituted by dominant Mexican and U.S. society compounded by the sexism within certain oppressed indigenous cultures. In neither the creative literature nor the ethnographic documentation, did I hear her speak for herself. Only in 1992, the quincentenary of European conquest, was the world delivered the voice of one Mesoamerican woman, the Mayan Rigoberta Menchu who received the Nobel Peace Prize for her ongoing activism on behalf of her people's human rights.

according to las feministas, feminism was "a very dynamic aspect of the Chicana's heritage and not at all foreign to her nature."" Contrary to ethnographic data that portrays Chicanas as submissive followers who are solely designated to preserve the culture, the feminists did not see herself or other women of her culture as such. While the feminist dialogue remained among the activists in el Movimiento, one sees in Encuentro Femenil that there indeed existed a solid initiative toward Chicana feminist thought, that is, recognition of sexism as a primary early on as the late 1960s. Clarifying the differences between the needs of the Anglo feminist and the feministas was part of the early feminista's tasks.