Success Quote by Ana Castillo

Castillo’s line looks almost too clean to trust, and that’s the point: it reads like a self-help aphorism until you remember who’s speaking. Ana Castillo’s fiction has never treated happiness as a private consumer choice; it’s a contested resource, rationed by gender, class, language, and history. “Our goal should be to achieve joy” smuggles a political claim into a simple sentence. “Goal” implies discipline, planning, and a future tense - not a mood, not a lucky break. “Achieve” makes joy something earned against resistance, not discovered while scrolling.

The subtext is a rebuke to cultures that train marginalized people to settle for survival, to accept endurance as the highest virtue. Castillo’s characters often live in the aftermath of migration, patriarchy, and religious constraint; in that landscape, joy can feel suspicious, even irresponsible. The sentence flips that suspicion back onto the systems that benefit from it. If you’re always managing scarcity - money, safety, respect - you’re less likely to demand pleasure, beauty, or ease. Castillo frames joy as a legitimate destination, not a guilty detour.

The pronoun “our” matters, too. It’s communal, not purely individual, nudging joy away from the solitary “wellness” industry and toward shared conditions: time, dignity, belonging. Read in the context of Chicana/Latina feminist writing, the line becomes strategy: insisting on joy as an ethical project, a refusal to let suffering be the only proof of seriousness. Joy here isn’t escapism; it’s a measure of freedom.