Silences Serve Only Predators: An Interview with Dr. Melissa Castillo-Garsow
I remember walking home from school every day with my twin sister throughout seventh and eighth grades. A man followed us home that entire year. Driving slowly in his car beside us, the man, whom we did not know, would leer at us, smile cryptically, chuckle to himself, and seem to revel in making us uncomfortable. We never told anyone, perhaps because even at that young age my sister and I had already internalized that harmful message: “well, nothing happened, so why are you complaining?” I have thought about that man a lot recently, recalling the anxiety of walking home and the fear that he might someday act on his perverse habits. He is only one example of the many forms of harassment and threats of violence I have experienced throughout my life. Only now I find myself not alone but empowered by brave survivors who resist traditions of silence, and inspired by books like ¿Y Yo También? Latinas Respond to #MeToo that remind me there is power in our stories.
¿Y Yo También? Latinas Respond to #MeToo is Dr. Melissa Castillo-Garsow’s latest editorial achievement. In this robust anthology, Castillo-Garsow compiles a broad collection of Latina essays and first-person narratives to center their voices within the wider #MeToo movement, which has largely marginalized women of color. Placing well-known and lesser-known writers, activists, and educators in dialogue with each other, Castillo-Garsow’s collection demonstrates the unique ways that Latinas have experienced violence in their families, homes, communities, and workplaces, while also illuminating the human spirit’s uncanny ability to resist and thrive. Dr. Castillo-Garsow was gracious enough to answer my questions about her forthcoming book, where she shares her experiences editing the collection and why we need to acknowledge how sexual violence intersects with the complexities of race, gender, and class.
First, let me say thank you, Melissa, for compiling such a raw, beautiful, and powerful collection of Latina voices amid a #MeToo movement that has rarely centered their experiences. So I will start there. What was your experience putting together this anthology of such deeply personal, often traumatic stories and subject matter? How did you navigate the painful material while doing all the hard work that is the typical part of editing a manuscript?
Thank you so much for this question. I think with this collection, I saw myself less as an editor in the traditional sense of the word, as someone who corrects or changes text, and more as a facilitator, collaborator, and curator. I was a facilitator in the sense that I was providing a space that previously did not exist for Latina voices in #MeToo publishing; a collaborator in that revisions and changes were suggestions, made only as a result of conversations, with the author retaining full control of their work; and a curator in that a big part of my work was putting these authors in conversation with each other. I also assisted in forming writing groups for some of the authors, who developed their pieces through peer review and writing sessions with each other. In this way, my role as editor was more like what I did for ¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets (Arte Público Press, 2017), where my goal was to create a platform for Afro-Latinx poets rather than to edit stanzas, as opposed to a scholarly volume like Scholars in COVID Times (Cornell University Press, 2023), where the pieces went through a lot more formal academic editing, from me, my co-editor, and external reviewers. Of course, this varied a bit, as the book also has scholarly articles, but even those were written and edited with the goal of accessibility.
“I saw myself less as an editor in the traditional sense of the word and more as a facilitator, collaborator, and curator.”
Thank you so much for sharing your own experiences as a survivor, Melissa. You have given me the courage to speak openly about my own experiences with violence and internalized shame. I would love to hear more about how your own experiences shaped your work as the anthology’s editor. How does your experience and knowledge as a survivor affect the vision you had for this book?
I think my own experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, rape in adulthood, and domestic violence helped me understand the non-linear process of healing. I did not even acknowledge to myself most of what had happened to me for fifteen years, despite having been in therapy for eating disorders, anxiety, and depression starting as a teen. I did not tell anyone until my late twenties and early thirties, and only slowly was I able to talk about it in a more public setting as I approached and then entered my forties. But of course, I still get anxious. I still get scared this history will be used against me or to judge me. I still feel shame; I just find it more manageable, and I find myself now with the skills to quiet my anxiety and contradict internal negative thoughts. I like to believe this helped me work with and support the contributors of this volume, as well as be known as a trustworthy person who shows up for communities and has a record of supporting Latinas.
That said, recovery is a lifelong process, and I know that for me personally, other Latina women publishing about rape, sexual assault, and experiences of shame and community silence, such as Wendy Ortiz, Myriam Gurba, and Maria Hinojosa, as well as public figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were a turning point in how I saw myself. Their examples shifted my mindset from something dirty, shameful, or my fault, to a testament to my strength and resilience. Perhaps this book can be a similar moment for others, especially since the diversity of voices in the volume provides so many different stories and reflections on the topic.
“Their examples shifted my mindset from something dirty, shameful, or my fault, to a testament to my strength and resilience.”
You write in the introduction that for many of us Latinas, it is the family where we first learn to silence our experiences with violence. It is often our women relatives who model keeping our bocas calladitas. Would you talk about this a little more? How does this anthology respond to the complexity of silence and abuse within Latinx communities?
I know in my family there are many whispers of stories, hints dropped relating to abuse, but nothing is ever discussed openly. Many other women in the volume, as well as other Latina authors, describe similar silences relating to sexual assault or other forms of abuse or violence. In some cases, there is a clear message that “we don’t talk about this,” or forms of protection are extended toward male family members who are known predators: blaming the girl or woman for her body, making excuses for men, pressuring women not to “cause problems” by pressing charges. Other times, nothing is explicitly said, but as a child you observe abuse, see that it is never addressed, and so learn to be silent. Perhaps you learn to be silent so that you are not the receiver of unwanted attention.
Latinas are burdened both as the overwhelming majority of victims and as the keepers of secrets, the fixers of conflicts, the ones responsible for the “respectability” of the family. These silences serve only predators, and so one of the themes of this book is breaking these generational and community silences.
“These silences serve only predators, and so one of the themes of this book is breaking these generational and community silences.”
One of my favorite things about your volume is how it dialogues with existing Latina literature, including fiction, that addresses sexual assault and rape. I think about how now-classic works like The House on Mango Street address sexual violence against Latinas and Chicanas, even as some readers are not aware of this. How has Latina writing about sexual violence evolved over the decades? Do you see something different happening in 2026 than you did twenty or thirty years ago?
I think you hit the nail on the head here. What was once more hidden or metaphorical is now more explicit, in books like Christine Kandic Torres’s The Girls in Queens, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s A Woman of Endurance, and Claire Jiménez’s What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez. In all of these, sexual assault and rape are central topics and may even be described explicitly in the narrative. That said, there have always been brave Latinas like Cisneros, or Josie Méndez-Negrete, whose book Las hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed, published twenty years ago, powerfully addressed incest in her Mexican American working-class family. What has changed, perhaps, is the reception, and the readiness of more Latinas to receive these topics in literature. #MeToo helped us there, but at the same time, we have not had enough of a voice in the larger movement.
In addition to providing a space for Latina writers to share their experiences with sexual violence and rape, your anthology also responds to the mainstream publishing industry’s general reluctance to print stories by women of color like those in the volume. Could you talk about this a little more?
As I discuss in my introduction, when I was researching a piece about Wendy Ortiz’s memoir Excavation and Myriam Gurba’s memoir Mean, I came across a piece by Ortiz in which she described how difficult it was for her to publish her memoir, while a fictional book by a white author with almost the same story was picked up by mainstream publishing. Continuing down the rabbit hole, I noticed how articles about the “boom” in #MeToo publishing, or about books on sexual assault and rape after the hashtag went viral in 2017, did not include books by Latinas, or many by Black or Indigenous women, with Roxane Gay a rare exception. This is not to take away from some of the important memoirs by white women that came out after #MeToo. It just seemed to me that in conversations around #MeToo, a particular type of white, middle- to upper-class, even celebrity-rich, conventionally attractive victim was being centered at the expense of other communities and of conversations around race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. Of course, Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, has said the same, particularly in relation to the movement’s original focus on advocacy for Black girls. Roxane Gay’s book Hunger was such an important intervention, from a Haitian American perspective and in the way it addressed fatphobia, and I wanted to see more of that.
“A particular type of white, middle- to upper-class, conventionally attractive victim was being centered at the expense of other communities.”
Your book is out next month, and I am so excited to see it gaining the attention it deserves. What do you want your readers to gain from the book? What do you hope they will take away?
I hope readers understand that there is a vast spectrum of experiences relating to sexual assault, harassment, and #MeToo. Beyond the more violent iterations, there are so many ways, often quiet, quotidian, and insidious, that these things are experienced by Latinas regularly and form part of our families and communities. These forms of violence fester in silence, so I hope that at a time when a lot of the #MeToo conversations seem to have quieted, this volume can reinvigorate a dialogue about safety and equality for Latinas, and about the way toxic forms of masculinity and machismo are often disguised as “culture” and dismissed.
“Toxic forms of masculinity and machismo are often disguised as ‘culture’ and dismissed.”
Thank you again, Melissa, and muchas felicidades. The book is a treasure. Any final words for our readers?
Thank you for supporting the book, and please consider sharing it with your amigas, tías, colegas, madres y abuelas, using the code RUP30 for 30 percent off preorders directly from the Rutgers University Press website.
Feel free to reach out to me at melissa.castillogarsow@lehman.cuny.edu if you would like to organize an event, virtually or in person, or just to let me know what you got out of the volume.
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