Professor and essayist Debra A. Castillo, one of the most recognized figures in cultural studies and specifically Hispanic studies in the United States, passed away on Sunday, October 5, at the age of 72.
Her daughter confirmed the news after the unexpected announcement began to spread among a wide community of scholars and intellectuals, who throughout October 6 have expressed, in numerous publications, the respect and admiration inspired by her intellectual and investigative work—including her frequent role as a mentor—as well as her personal charisma and warmth.
An Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, and President of the Latin American Studies Association (2014-15), Castillo specialized in topics such as contemporary narrative in the Spanish-speaking world, theater, gender studies, and cultural theory, and taught courses on Latinx, Migration, and Border Studies.
She also served as editor for the journals Latin American Literary Review, Diacritics, and Letras Femeninas (Book Review section). She was the (co)author or (co)editor of more than twenty books and at least 150 academic articles.
Among these works are The Translated World: A Postmodern Tour of Libraries in Literature; Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism; Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction; Border Women: Writing from La Frontera (with María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba); Re-dreaming America: Toward a Bilingual Understanding of American Literature; South of the Future: Speculative Biotechnologies and Care Markets in South Asia and Latin America (with Anindita Banerjee); The Scholar as Human (with Anna Sims Bartel); Centering Borders: Narrative Explorations in South Asia and Latin America (with Kavita Panjabi and Debaroti Chakraborty), and Latin American Literature in Transition (with Mónica Szurmuk).
Many of her colleagues, students, and collaborators bid her farewell on social media this Monday.
According to Bolivian writer Edmundo Paz Soldán, Debra A. Castillo was “someone who taught the path without needing to let you know she was teaching you,” and, above all, he said: “From her, you learned that the most important thing was to create a community. She created it in the most natural way possible. That is why so many of us feel her loss today.”
For her part, Liliana Colanzi expressed gratitude for “her generosity, her breadth of spirit, her innate kindness.”
“Thank you for supporting so many of us and helping us to imagine ourselves from a critical and creative potency,” also expressed writer and academic Mayra Santos Febles.
