I am a brown woman, from the Mexican side of town-torn between the Chicago obrero roots of my upbringing and my egocentric tendency toward creative e… - Ana Castillo

Let us shout louder than her memory,
louder than the unheard cries
of 200,000 disappeared,
buried alive in pits,
thrown alive from planes,
butchered and bayoneted
defenseless and blindfolded
in the name of democracy.
It is real, the nightmare,
and without end.
How can we sleep?
How can we sleep?

white society insists that only European history and Greco-Roman civilization have intellectual importance and relevance to our society. The legacies of Amerindians from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego are considered primitive. The ignorance of white dominant society about our ways, struggles in society, history, and culture is not an innocent and passive ignorance, it is a systematic and determined ignorance. The omission in most literature of the history and presence of millions of residents who inhabited these lands long before European occupation forces us to read between the lines. If reading between the lines is what white feminists have had to do with the "classics," it most certainly is what we do, as educated U.S. Mexic Amerindians with all that is handed to us through literature and

And I write these few
words
into the earth
before I forget that sadness
isn't everything.