Diana López, writing under the name of her maternal grandmother Isabella Ríos, holds a distinguished place in contemporary Chicano literature. Her novel Victuum (1976), a bildungsroman, is one of the earliest Chicano novels and the first Chicano work to deal with the world of a psychic. Victuum experiments with both form and content, thus foreshadowing a trend which has characterized much Chicana fiction succeeding it.

López was born in Los Angeles, California, the oldest of nine children. Her father, an American Indian, is a descendant of a northern New Mexican tribe on his father's side and Chihuahua Indians on his mother's side but grew up within the Hispanic cultural heritage in Las Cruces, New Mexico. During the Depression, at the age of fourteen, he traveled with his family to California in search of employment and settled in Camarillo to work in the fields...