E. A. Mares is a New Mexican poet who owes his considerable success as a playwright and essayist to his rare talent for entwining poetry and history without betraying either. In his own words, he is "a writer who is Indo-Hispanic in culture, global in perspective, and as much at home in the international community as in his own mixed ethnic communities."

Born near La Plaza Vieja de Albuquerque (The Old Plaza of Albuquerque) on 17 May 1938, to Ernesto Gustavo Mares and the former Rebecca Devine, Ernesto Antonio Mares was a product of the cultural contradictions he was later the first to define in terms of the popular New Mexican concept of the "coyote," or the mixed-breed Hispanic. By the 1920s Mares's father's family had been dispossessed of their ancestral lands near Raton, New Mexico, and migrated to Albuquerque; their fate was shared by many native New Mexicans of...