With the publication of five novels in the 1990s Graciela Limón established herself as one of the key voices in the new Chicana fiction of the post-Chicano Movement period. Her novels cross the literal and figurative borders of the Americas and bring the issues of feminism, social justice, popular religiosity, and cultural identity to the forefront of Chicano letters. They also address larger public concerns about the dynamics of multiculturalism. Her well-crafted, readable experiments with narrative express the postmodernist preoccupation with the erosion of the borders between high and popular culture.

The second of three children and the only girl, Graciela Limón was born in Los Angeles on 2 August 1938, to Mexican immigrants--her father was from Sonora and her mother from Jalisco--who had met in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Her father, Jesús Limón, was a truck driver for the Los...