Castillo Ana - Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. 20th Anniversary Updated Edition

MASSACRE OF THE DREAMERS

ESSAYS ON XICANISMA
20TH ANNIVERSARY UPDATED EDITION

ANA CASTILLO

FOREWORD BY CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTS

2014 by Ana Castillo
Foreword 2014 by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Ests
All rights reserved. Published 2014
Printed in the United States of America
19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Castillo, Ana.
Massacre of the dreamers : essays on Xicanisma / Ana Castillo. Twentieth
Anniversary updated edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8263-5358-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8263-5359-7
(electronic)
1. Mexican American women. 2. FeminismUnited States. I. Title.
E184.M5C369 2014
305.4886872073dc23

2014006361

COVER PHOTOGRAPH: Milky Way over Bromo by Abdul Azis,
courtesy of Getty Images

For my ancestors and to the next seven generations

in Her Name, Nuestra Madre Diosa

Anyone dreaming anything about the end of the Empire was ordered to the palace to tell of it. Night and day emissaries combed the city, and Tenochtitln paid tribute in dreams....

But finding no good in the thousands offered, Moctezuma killed all the offenders. It was the massacre of the dreamers, the most pathetic of all....

From that day there were no more forecasts, no more dreams, terror weighed upon the spirit world.

LAURETTE SEJOURNE, Burning Water:
Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico

Queen Xochitl... legendary queen of the Toltecs. During her reign women were called to war service. She headed the battalions and was killed in battle; legend has it that as she died, blood streamed from her wounds, foretelling the scattering of the Toltec nation.

MARTA COTERA, Profile on the Mexican American Woman

Perhaps the greatest harm patriarchy has done to us is to strife, co-opt, and reform our powers of imagination. Moralisms, dualistic dogmas, repressive prohibitions block our imagination at its sources, which is the fusion of sexual and spiritual energies.

MONICA SJ AND BARBARA MOR,
The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

by Clarissa Pinkola Ests

The 1986 Watsonville Womens Strike:
A Case of Mexicana/Chicana Activism

Saintly Mother and Soldiers Whore:
The Leftist/Catholic Paradigm

Afterword: The Real and True Meaning of
Our Lady of Guadalupe

It wasnt supposed to happen.

No new/old voices allowed once the histories of a conquering, ancient and modern, have been authorized and more or less carved in stone by the few for and about the many.

For generations in our world, regarding the historias y true cuentos of the past... dead is supposed to be dead and done is supposed to be done.

History, by the ideations of some, was supposed to be held in a leakproof dark box, written down on a noneroding medium by the one or ten or one hundredfor and about the literally millions of souls on earth (without their commission or parity)then nailed shut, and the prevailing stories by those few taken as the only factsabout what was actually very different: a vast panorama of fissioning, severing, fusing and living, striving, laughing, weeping, hoping creative tribal children, mothers, fathers, elders, artisans, seed keepers, hunters, water finders, weavers, dancers, musicians, poets, politicians, sacerdotes, and more.

In all, for long and long, a history of a people was considered immutablenot changing, and more so unchangeable.

And/but, I would affirm strongly from being first witness to the phenomenon time and again regarding those gifted in story, which is what history is made of: there is in many an exceptional writer, in their huesos, in their bones, a beautiful charism of being able to still hear the ancient cantus firmus from long ago.

Cantus firmus means firm song, the original grouping of ascending and descending ground notes that form the basis for all variations of that melody yet to come. The cantus firmus are the bones and basis of a transmission, the heart of a person, the magneto of a peoplethat stays and stays and stays, long after any deletions and ornamentations, errors, or veerings are made to it.

Certain historias, cuentos are cantus firmus: they represent not a flattened transmission but the heart composition, the ground of riches, that lie at the center of a music, a land, a people of great heart.

My studies over seven decades now lead me to see unequivocally that every tribal group of any time and place in this world has also been overwritten, erased, represented falsely... and both slaughtered and enslavedby a more powerful groupoften using as tactics terror, murder, and starvation.

The names of those tribal groups have often been long forgotten by the traipse and trample of the few who wrote the history of vast numbers of persons subjected but not allowed to speak or write their own histories without harm to themselves or their families.

Because we are all descended from once loving, brave, perfectly imperfect, and challenged tribal groups, and that many of us are still standing is a miracle of fact, fight, and somehow inextinguishable candle in the dark luck.

That the old tribal names, clans, and groups belonging to any people of any delineated or water nation yet on earth in Ireland, the Balkans, the Caucuses, the Mediterranean, the island continents, the Northlands, China, India, Siberia, Africa, the Middle East, and... the Americasand more, are buried now, covered over by other names regarding both peoples and land masses and natural water sources and mountains, is also a truth.

And yet... some souls with a tether to true self can still remember the cantus firmus of their ancestors. And we are blessed that some still pour those transmissions with a certain pride of politic, dances, sacred objects, modern means while preserving the cantus firma... that isI dont believe, I knowbrings brave and inquiring voices dredging into the buried past and working hard to carry old and new treasure into the present light of day.

The toil is great for those who dare into being the stories. But then, in great magnitude also is the treasure of the stories forgotten, hidden, buried, forbidden for so long. It is the latter treasure of the past generations brought before present and future generations that, I believe, is the matter that matters most. And the souls who dare.

Both Ana Castillo and her work, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, were sudden, bright melodies of the old cantus firmus when the book was published in 1994. An essential heart opened for reexamination the acceptable stories that were previously understood by some to be all there is to say. But Castillo showed there was far more to show, far more to say. And said it. In spades.

Her work was conceived, written, and unleashed at a time when what I call the overculture was still barricading against new voices, barricades built for decades to protect the nailed shut and approved boxes of histories... but built, whether meant or not, to severely limit fresh ideas, to bind accountability, to muffle diverse voices from reaching through to educators, ethnic groups, readers, and viewersto add to the whole story, from the roots upward.