num_pages: 282
description: Paloma Negra Ana Castillo's mother sings the day her daughter leaves home I don't know if I should curse you or pray for you.Growing up as the intellectually spirited daughter of a Mexican Indian immigrant family during the 1970s Castillo defied convention as a writer and a feminist. A generation later her mother's crooning mariachi lyrics resonate once again. Castillonow an established Chicana novelist playwright and scholarwitnesses her own son's spiraling adulthood and eventual incarceration. Standing in the stifling courtroom Castillo describes a scene that could be any mother's worst nightmare. But in a country of glaring and stacked statistics it is a nightmare especially reserved for mothers like her: the inner-city mothers the single mothers the mothers of brown sons.Black Dove: Mam Mi'jo and Me looks at what it means to be a single brown feminist parent in a world of mass incarceration racial profiling and police brutality. Through startling humor and love Castillo weaves intergenerational stories traveling from Mexico City to Chicago. And in doing so she narrates some of America's most heated political debates and urgent social injustices through the oft-neglected lens of motherhood and family.Ana Castillo is one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Chicana literature. She is the author of So Far from God and Sapogonia both New York Times Notable Books of the Year as well as The Guardians Peel My Love Like an Onion and many other books of fiction poetry and essays. Her newest novel Give It to Me won a 2014 Lambda Literary Award; her seminal collection Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma was re-released in a twentieth anniversary edition in November 2014; and the award-winning Watercolor Women Opaque Men will be reissued in the fall of 2016.
language: None
title: Black Dove: Mamá, Mi'jo, and Me
publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY