Ana Castillo sits in her blue-walled living room clutching a soft beige pillow, her hand displaying a big yellow cameo ring with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

She doesn't consider herself a Catholic, but she wears the ring out of reverence. Besides, she believes in spirituality and positive energies.

You can feel the good, calm vibrations emanating from artworks in her Uptown duplex-portraits artists have done of her, a bright- colored altarpiece and a big painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, two small sculptures of indigenous women from Oaxaca, three framed pictures of her 17-year-old son Marcel, and a painting of the twin sisters Las Cuatas Diego.

A reknowned Latina writer in the United States, Castillo is getting ready to devote her energy to her next challenge-a newly created five-year appointment she begins this fall as a writer-in- residence at DePaul University, where she will also be teaching Latino literature.

"I think it's going to be good for both of us. DePaul is a progressive university and a community service institution," said Castillo, clad in a plain knee-length black dress and black sandals, bare legs, her thick black hair slightly falling on her face and full red lips. Definitely looking young at 47.

Castillo accepted the position mainly because her son Marcel loves Chicago and will attend DePaul University.

"(Motherhood) completely changed me as a woman. I was a very different woman before. I did not have the compassion I have now."

In her fifth and latest book of poetry, I Ask the Impossible, Castillo compiles an eclectic collection of poems about love with compassion, her son Marcel, the Aztec gods, death, friendship, the Zapatista revolution and even Nastassia Kinski.

Other recent works include a children's book, My Daughter, My Son, The Eagle, The Dove. Her book of essays Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma won the 1995 Gustaves Myers Award for outstanding book on human rights. In 1993, she garnered the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in Fiction for her novel So Far From God. She has been a teacher and guest lecturer in more than 20 colleges and universities during the past 25 years.

Castillo began working on I Ask the Impossible in 1990 after her father's death, and it was ready for publication in 1997. But then she switched publishers and the book finally came out last year.

Love me withered as you loved me new, says the poem "I Ask the Impossible," which opens the book.

"I sort of pictured my mother and father as they were growing older, but my father did not grow old, he died young (at age 57)," she said.

The walls turn from blue to yellow in the hallway of Castillo's home, and the posters and paintings continue telling her life story all the way to the kitchen.

Two of those art pieces are "My First Holy Communion"(1996) and "Carmen La Coja" (1998), both painted by Castillo herself. Carmen La Coja (Carmen The Limp), the protagonist of her 1999 novel Peel My Love Like Onion, takes a life of her own in the picture, where she comes out of a lotus.

In the kitchen, a wooden table, dyed emerald green and with hand- painted birds, stands like a monument from the Mexican state of Jalisco. Behind it there is a wooden Russian china cabinet from the 19th century, also dyed an emerald green. On the walls, pottery dishes from Puebla.

They are all as much part of Ana Castillo as Carmen La Coja, the title of the newly released Spanish language version of Peel My Love Like an Onion.

Carmen La Coja, a Chicana version of Bizet's tragic opera heroine Carmen, is a flamenco dancer with a leg rendered useless by polio who ends up keeping her two lovers and becoming a famous flamenco singer.

But she is also the symbol of Castillo's particular theory on feminism for Chicanas or Mexican-American women, which she calls Xicanisma.

It's a feminism deeply rooted in culture but one that hasn't reached an ideological cohesiveness, Castillo said. That feminism should be reached through "individual negotiation."

"In her case (Carmen La Coja), she did something that was very likely not the thing I would encourage my students to do. She already knew she was disenfrachised . . . and she went out with the gitanos (gypsies), who were even further . . . disenfrachised."

Castillo advises her female students who want to become professional "to take assessments of who we are as a people, but as individuals they have to be accountable to themselves and to their own consciousness, what can you do, what can one person do: 'I am Puerto Rican, I am from Logan Square, I know I am not going to represent all Latinos, maybe I can't even represent all the Puerto Ricans, but I can work here.' '"

This need to respond to an individual consciousness stems from Castillo's experience in the Latino nationalist movement of the 1960's and 1970's, where she said she never subscribed to "a strong nationalist line" but to the plea of other women of color.

"Very early on I started assessing the differences for myself as a woman from the male point of view. My bond is with women who were not responsible for what (Ferdinand) Marcos brought to the Philippines or for the Maquiladoras (young women, usually between 14 and 20 years old, who commonly work in bad conditions and earn below the minimum wage in manufacturing jobs along the U.S.-Mexican border) working for American companies."

It is always about the journey, whether you are Quixote or Arawak, it's always about the journey is the first line of the book, Castillo said.

"The only thing I can do is to tell you about my journey. But to tell you that I am going to define the journey, I can't," she said, folding her arms and showing her cameo ring with the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Ana Castillo

Poet, novelist, artist, xicanista

Age: 47

Lives in: Uptown

Last book published: I Ask the Impossible (2001)

Working on: Spirit, Sex, Eternal Love

Other works:

My Daughter, my Son, the Eagle, the Dove (2000).

Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999). Carmen La Coja (Spanish version, 2000).

Loverboys (1996).

So Far From God (1993).

Sapogonia (1990).

The Mixquiahuala Letters, 1986.

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