DOÑA CLEANWELL LEAVES HOME

A new collection of stories from a grande dame of Chicana literature.

“Being who you are isn't static,” says Ada, a middle-aged nurse in the story "Ada and Pablo." She should know: Everything she thought was stable about her life in Mexico City with her husband, Pablo, has become unfamiliar, from a surprising new friendship at work with a young, handsome doctor, to physical changes wrought by menopause. Most unsettled of all is her decades-long marriage to Pablo, as rumors and suspicions swirl about his behavior. Ada is not the only character tangled in this web of secrets in Castillo’s collection, comprising seven long stories and a very brief prologue. A gay man whose accomplished sister, a professor in Chicago, dies suddenly goes through her papers and learns she had a secret life in Mexico that extended far beyond what he ever could have imagined of her (“Ven”). An architect visits the site of one of his elderly father’s oft-told family legends to discover the facts behind it (“Cuernavaca”). In the memorable title story, set in the mid-1970s, 18-year-old Katia, a budding feminist near the top of her Chicago high school's graduating class, is sent to Mexico by her father to retrieve her mother, who has abruptly abandoned the family. Katia, obsessed as she is with learning what being a woman truly means—how free a woman’s freedom can actually be—is shocked when she arrives in Mexico and learns her mother has fallen in love with another woman. Throughout these stories, Mexico is the source of both mystery and clarity, whether through characters’ histories as immigrants or children of immigrants, or because, as happens frequently, the characters in these tales must travel there, like Dorothy to Oz, to unlock knowledge which often has the potential to alter their lives.

Castillo’s truth-seeking characters leave an impression.