The Guardians

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Background

Authorial Context: Ana Castillo and Xicanisma

Content Warning: This section discusses femicide.

Ana Castillo is a Chicana novelist, poet, essayist, editor, playwright, translator, independent scholar, and short story writer. One of Chicana literature’s most important voices, her family’s history reflects the complex, cross-border communities she depicts in The Guardians and her other novels. Castillo was born in Chicago, but her parents spent time living in both Mexico and the US, and she grew up in a bilingual household. She holds a BS in art from Northeastern Illinois University, an MA in Latin American studies from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate in American studies from the University of Bremen, Germany.

Castillo is particularly known for Xicanisma, an intervention in Chicana feminism that seeks to decolonize mainstream feminist thought and highlight the role that Indigeneity plays within Chicana identity. Through Xicanisma, Castillo opened up new avenues for discussion within Chicana feminism and explored Chicana/Xicana activism, sexual liberation, spiritual practices, labor struggles and relations, artmaking, and educational issues. Her work centers the experiences of Latina women—Chicana/Xicana women in particular—and carves out a space within broader feminist discourses to interrogate how race and colonialism shape the identities and experiences of women in the Borderlands.

The use of the letter “x” in place of “ch” in “Xicanisma” is a reference to Spanish colonizers having been unable to pronounce the “sh” sound in local Indigenous languages. They represented this sound using the letter “x” in 16th-century Spanish. The “x” in “Xicanisma” is meant to speak back to the violent, colonial encounter between Spanish colonizers and the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas to reclaim the symbol and highlight Indigenous resistance and resilience in the face of hundreds of years of colonial oppression.

The Guardians reflects Castillo’s interest in feminism, gender justice, and Xicanisma through its depiction of Regina and Tiny Tears’s and Crucita’s kidnappings by the coyotes. She explores the impact that femicide had on women in and around the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico, during the 1990s and early 2000s and raises awareness about gender-based violence in the region. All of Castillo’s writing engages in some way with Xicanisma and gender justice, and many of her other works share key symbols, themes, and motifs with The Guardians. The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) shares an interest in the intersection of race and class in Chicano communities and also depicts characters who move back and forth between the US and Mexico. So Far From God (1983) is also set in a small New Mexican hamlet and also features women raising children alone. Like The Guardians, it portrays multiple complex relationships with Catholicism and explores the way that colonization, religion, and race shape identity in the Borderlands. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (updated in 2014) is a work of nonfiction that explores Xicanisma through essays about activism and labor organizing, the roots of machismo, and the way that Catholicism impacts women’s identity and perceptions of femininity.

Literary Context: Chicano/Chicana Literature

Chicano/Chicana literature is produced by Mexican American authors. It emerged out of the Chicano movement of the 1960s, which sought to carve out a particular identity for people of Mexican descent whose families resided either for an extended period of time or permanently in the US. Chicanos can be both US-born Mexican Americans or Mexican citizens who are already established in the US. Although the terms “Chicano” and “Mexican American” are often used interchangeably, Chicano is understood as a political identity: To identify as Chicano is to understand that cultural identity cannot be separated from socio-material struggles for equality, inclusion, and acceptance within American society. Originally a pejorative term given to Mexican Americans by white Americans, its reclamation was part of the broader civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Miguel Betancourt, one of the novel’s narrators, is interested in the way that the struggle for Chicano civil rights both speaks to and is informed by other minoritarian movements, and he finds many points of connection between Chicano activism and groups like the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers.

Chicano/Chicana literature is known for the way that it articulates a distinct “Chicanismo” and Chicano self-image. It explores the impact that Indigeneity, colonization, multicultural communities, and immigration have had on Chicano individual and cultural identity in the US. Additionally, it engages with themes related to immigration, gender, social justice and activism, and politics through its depiction of the lived experiences of Chicano individuals and communities. It often employs bilingualism or incorporates Spanglish words into its text. For example, Castillo frequently uses Spanish words in The Guardians, which both crafts a portrait of a bilingual community and creates a bilingual experience for its readers. Chicano literature locates community and belonging within a connection to the land and its history. The concept of “Aztlán,” or a mythical Chicano homeland rooted in Culhua-Mexica (Aztec) legend, is central to the Chicano project and asserts the continued historical presence of Indigenous, Mexican, and Mestizo communities in a region that both the Spanish and the Americans would come to claim as their own.

Notable Chicano authors include New Mexican Rudolfo Anaya, sometimes referred to as the “father” of Chicano literature, whose works Bless Me Ultima (1972), Albuquerque (1992), Randy Lopez Goes Home (2011), and others share with The Guardians an interest in the experiences of Chicano/Chicana communities in the Borderlands. Thomas Rivera, Miguel Mendez, and Rolando Hinojosa are other early examples of Chicano authors and are still widely read. Luís Alberto Urrea explores Chicano identity and experience through both fiction and nonfiction, and his work on communities near and around the US-Mexico border has earned critical acclaim. Helena María Viramontes, Denise Chávez, and Sandra Cisneros share with Castillo a particular interest in the intersection of Chicana identity and gender, and their works have expanded the role of feminist critique within Chicano literature as a whole.

Socio-Historical Context: The Juárez Femicides

The Guardians is grounded in the real-life history of the Borderlands region, and its depiction of the epidemic of femicides in and around Juárez, Mexico, during the 1990s and early 2000s is one of its most overt moments of historical engagement. Femicide, or the killing of girls and women that is tied to their gender identity, can be both intimate and systemic. Intimate femicide is committed by men known to their victims, while systemic femicide refers to broader, society-wide patterns of murder that include kidnapping, sexual assault, torture, organ harvesting, and the abandonment of women’s bodies. Investigations into the murders of women and girls that happened in Juárez during the epidemic found that both types of femicide occurred.

In 1993, the bodies of several women were found in the Chihuahuan desert outside Juárez, Mexico, a border city situated across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Hundreds more would be found over the next 20 years, and the violence was ultimately understood as both a symptom of deeply misogynistic cultural norms and collateral damage from the area’s increasingly brutal cartel wars. Many of the missing and murdered women worked in local maquilas (garment factories). They became easy targets because they were often migrant workers separated from their families. After all, the nature of work in maquilas was inherently exploitive; the long work hours meant that they were often on the street alone before or after dark, and the temporary communities where they lived were located in areas of the city already plagued by crime and violence. Other victims of femicide were targeted by coyotes. Often in the employ of Mexican cartels, coyotes are smugglers who, for a fee, transport migrants through the dangerous Chihuahuan desert that stretches across southern New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico. At this time, it was not uncommon for coyotes to leave women stranded in the desert or even to kill them and leave their bodies in shallow graves.

Despite the horrific nature of the violence and the ever-increasing number of victims, authorities on both sides of the border were slow to investigate this epidemic of disappearances and murders. Law enforcement’s lack of interest in addressing this gender-based violence has come to characterize the official response to femicides, and that systemic failure to protect women and girls is a key point of interest in Castillo’s depiction of the femicides in The Guardians. Both Regina and Miguel care deeply about social justice, and Crucita’s disappearance brings the issue of gender justice close to home for both of them. The disappearances of both Crucita and Rafa help to explain why the personal is political for Regina and Miguel, and it shows how femicides impact individual lives. The Guardians was published in 2007, at the tail end of the epidemic of femicides in this region, and the issue would have been at the forefront of readers’ minds during the years immediately following its publication. Castillo’s depiction of the Juárez femicides thus grounds the novel within the lived history of the Borderlands and helps raise awareness for gender justice in both Mexico and the US.