Cultural Heritage, Social History and Fractured Identity: The Character Esperanza in So Far from God (1993), by Ana Castillo

Ana Castillo is a Chicana writer who unravels the experiences of her community, focusing especially on the (im)possibilities of Chicana women's existence in relation to Anglo society. This article, in turn, is dedicated to the character Esperanza, one of the members of a family of five Chicana women, in the work So Far from God (1993), written by this writer. Thus, the objective of this manuscript is to analyze the construction of the character Esperanza, observing her agency in the face of a fractured, oscillating and, in certain aspects, rigid identity, amidst the cultural and social context that demands the mestiza consciousness for survival. To this end, various theoretical perspectives were used, such as Gloria Anzald & uacute;a and Ana Castillo's own theoretical work to observe the development of specific issues of the Chicana situation; Stuart Hall and Maria Antonia Oliver-Rotger regarding the category of identity; among others. Thus, bibliographical research was developed with an analysis method aligned with literary sociocriticism and feminist criticism. In conclusion, it was observed that the character oscillated between conceptions that Western positivist rationality does not reconcile, making the sense of incoherence and disharmony inevitable when dealing with a reality that is not based on the white American logic that shouts its fictitious homogeneity. Despite this, the character does not give up on her journey even in death, circumventing the institutions of power and returning ectoplasmically to continue seeking conocimiento and stimulating conscientizaci & oacute;n and action among the women in her family.