Ana Castillo’s Appropriation of the Family Saga in So Far From God
Keywords:
family saga, appropriation, Chicana literature, Ana Castillo, So Far From GodAbstract
Ana Castillo’s most critically acclaimed novel So Far From God (1993) can be considered a recent example of the family saga genre, as it reports the life story of Sofi and her four daughters. However, rather than concentrating on an upper-middle-class white family in a patriarchal setting, Castillo has appropriated the established genre to write a text of Chicana resistance, portraying working-class women as the bearers of spiritual values and social progress. Thus, the focus shifts from male to female characters, who are seen as powerful and independent rather than dominated by men; in fact, Sofi’s husband is absent for the most of his daughters’ lives. In turn, while all the traditional themes of family sagas, such as the history of a family depicted through several generations as well as romance and marriage, are present in the text, they are depicted in a new context. Finally, instead of portraying the family as striving to use money and property as a means of social advancement, Castillo shows the majority of her characters as caring about their wider community. Thus, this paper seeks to examine more closely which particular changes the author has made within the set of the genre’s conventions.
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