Before the recent discovery of romances by María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, the short stories and novels of María Cristina Chambers were considered by literary historians to be the first fiction by a Mexican American woman writer. Chambers's stories began to appear in New York periodicals in 1913. She published initially under her maiden name, María Cristina Mena, and as María Cristina Chambers after her marriage in 1916. Burton and Chambers were ignored by mainstream literary historians and have only recently been rediscovered by scholars interested in reconstructing the history of Chicano literature. These discoveries correct the commonly held assumption that the first novel by a Mexican American was José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959).

María Cristina Mena was born on 3 April 1893 in Mexico City, the daughter of a Mexican father and a Spanish mother. In 1907, at the age...