Quote by Rosario Castellanos: “Reading is an act of resistance.”

To read — especially books that the powerful would rather you didn't — is to claim your own mind. Reading builds the capacity for critical thought, which is the foundation of any challenge to authority or oppression. Access to books is never politically neutral.

Castellanos worked in indigenous communities in Chiapas in the early 1950s, witnessing firsthand how illiteracy kept Mayan communities politically disenfranchised. The Mexican state's literacy campaigns were simultaneously tools of assimilation, and Castellanos understood reading as a contested political terrain.

Mexican poet, novelist, and diplomat who used literature to confront the racial and gender hierarchies of mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Her novels Balún Canán and Oficio de Tinieblas drew on indigenous Mayan experience and the violence of colonial social structures.