Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters is a novel about the difficulty of friendship in which the shared past of two women, Alicia and Teresa, is recounted and reflected on in letters from Teresa. But this simple description belies the wealth of complications in the novel; not the least of which is the breakdown of the friendship or, at least, of the communication between the pair. For, despite the intensity of the connection over the decade they have known each other, the letters from Teresa make it clear that the two women have, in the long run, missed each other--in the sense of never having managed to fully comprehend each other. The immediately apparent cause of this failed connection is the random noise generated by patriarchal power plays that seems to clutter up their channels of communication. The problem, however, also casts a wider net. The difficulty the two women face, which is symbolized by their geographic distance from each other, is the variety and number of differences between them. Despite the fact that their relationship was initially based on having spontaneously overcome difference, and in spite of Teresa's literary efforts to destroy the barriers between her self and Alicia's other, there is a separateness that cannot be fully overcome. Coming from an artist who works with words Teresa's letters represent her creative attempt to understand and break down the walls between them--the walls that have traditionally kept each woman separate from nearly every other woman as the patriarchy wisely sought to divide and conquer.
The letters in the book can be read in various combinations, suggested by Castillo, depending on whether the reader prefers a conformist, cynical, or quixotic approach. But, as Gonzales-Berry points out, the reader can also do a "traditional chronological reading," which also happens to be the only reading that includes the entire text (116). Without having taken the other approaches...