On Her Own Terms: Ana Castillo Discusses Sexuality, Identity, and Life-Then and Now.

Ana Castillo is a prolific and celebrated author of novels, poetry, short stories, and essays on gender and sexuality, feminism, and Chicanx experiences. Born and raised in Chicago, Castillo's works include The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), So Far from God (1993), Massacre of the Dreamers, Loverboys (1996), and black dove: mamá, mi'jo, and me (2016) among others. Castillo is the recipient of several awards including the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the International Latino Book Award, and the Lambda Award. In this interview, Liliana C. Gonzalez and Stacy I. Macias discuss Castillo's reflections on the political and cultural moment in which Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About was published. Macias and Gonzalez also explore Castillo's encounters with the problematics of identity politics and consider Castillo's evolution as an activist and creative writer.

Afterword: Scanning the Chicana lesbian body politic: knowledge, practice, identity.

Chicana Lesbians The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About ushered in the fulfillment of editor Carla Trujillo's vision for an anthology that would recognize and demystify the existence of Chicana lesbians. Our deep and critical affection for Trujillo's anthology prompts us to acknowledge the expansive potentiality of Chicana Lesbians yet also recognize the historical specificity of its relevance and legibility. While our deep affection urges us to reflect on the myriad ways to love on an object like Chicana Lesbians including how this text has been read, engaged, and critiqued, we also acknowledge-just as Trujillo opined in the anthology's introduction-that we, too, want and need more. A reappraisal of this text requires that we recognize how scholars, activists, and artists may unwittingly be relying on thematic approaches and methods of construction popularized in the late 1980s-early 1990s. Rather than perceive these inclinations on purely nostalgic, unimaginative, or regressive terms, we instead understand these tendencies as callings- to return to earlier submerged moments and techniques. Such phenomena surface via a Covid-19 pandemic temporality, slowing time and thus shaping how to reevaluate the palimpsestic outlines of Chicana lesbian cultural and scholarly production. Guided by these traces, we are arguing that Trujillo's anthology formed what would become the Chicana lesbian body politic forged at the crossroads of Chicanismo, women of color feminism, lesbian identity politics, working-class consciousness, and transnational solidarity sensibilities. Chicana Lesbians provided some early queerly racialized sexual grammars that continue to circulate in the present evidenced through the authors' uses and references in both volumes of this special issue.

"Somos contra la 'queer-ificacíon'"/"We reject the queer-ification of lesbianism": lesbian political identity and anti-queer politics among Mexican lesbians and queer Chicanas-Latinas.

This essay provides a critical personal reflection contemplating a 2006 Mexico City-based cross- border dialogue in which sharp divisions emerged between a set of Mexicana lesbianas-declaring their pro-lesbian feminist and anti-queer politics-and a set of queer Chicanas- Latinas-pronouncing their queer women of color politics. The vexing exchange occurred on the eve of the 3rd annual Marcha Lésbica, an explicitly radical lesbian feminist political gathering and at the time the largest public action of its kind to be held in Latin America. I draw new insights about key historical and contemporary lesbian political identity issues by reviewing how Mexican lesbian politics informed by feminism and critiques of neoliberalism produced challenges to the U.S. based participants. I reframe the value of the lesbian Mexicanas' "anti- queer" proclamation, an affective statement especially unpopular in that period given the provincializing glance at lesbian politics and identity in the U.S. Finally, I revisit this difficult moment to historicize how lesbian remains a freighted category of political identity for Chicanas-Latinas who abide by women of color and trans coalitional politics, while it also opens up affinities for meaningful though precarious cross-border identifications. This multilayered reflection argues for a situated understanding of the meanings that can be ascribed to lesbian identity and politics, which are highly contingent upon spatio-temporalities. Thus, the category "lesbian" is replete with instructive energies whether as an affective critique of queer epistemologies that move along a Global North to Global South axis, or as a reminder of the limits of coalitional politics built across nation-state borders.