Ana Castillo

"One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man's response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair . . . will depend very much on what we do today." That was Richard Nixon in 1969. Today, almost 40 years later, we have experienced a population boom unmatched in the nation's history, much of it engineered by policies that many Americans deem obsolete. And, though this country was built on redressing misfortune -- our numbers fed by Old World prejudice, Russian pogroms, the African slave trade, the Irish potato famine, Latin American desperation -- there are those who, like Nixon, see limits to America's bounty. There is only so much our borders can stand.

Ana Castillo's family has been on this soil for generations, and yet she is drawn to the hard questions of immigration. Her very name bespeaks a struggle: Castillo, as in castle -- a hard-won promontory, a hearth to guard.

It is no coincidence, then, that her new novel, The Guardians, is about our troubled border, a no-man's land secured by and against Mexicans -- a battleground in which America is the vaunted and fickle prize.

Her father was a night laborer in a Chicago bookbindery; her mother, an assembly-line worker in a television factory. When, in the mid-'80s, those businesses moved to Southeast Asia, the family understood the price of globalization. Demoralized and bitter, her father soon died.

But Castillo had been radicalized long before that. By the time she was in high school in the late '60s, she was an activist, talking up race issues. At Northeastern University, she felt acute alienation: there were no Chicano professors, no one teaching the history or literature of a huge segment of the U.S. population. Angry and determined to change things, she began to write.

Today, she is a poet, essayist, novelist and teacher -- one of the most accomplished Chicanas of her generation, whose works are read in many languages around the world. Among her best known are: So Far From God (1993) and Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999). Relocating last year from her native Chicago to a remote border town in New Mexico, she has pursued the Mexican American story with a rare combination of fury and calm.

"I am tenacious," she says, "single-minded" in her determination to show how little attitudes toward Hispanics have changed since the racism her family encountered in the early 1900s.

"I write in order to fight the dragons," she says.

She is castle rock. Like her name.

-- Marie Arana