Montserrat Fontes will, in time, be known as a writer who helped to redefine the Chicano historical novel. Among the themes developed in her novels are the class and racial differences in Mexico, the frontier culture on the United States-Mexico border, the search for personal meaning in an economically stratified society, and the impact of modernity on the traditional roles assigned to Mexican men and women.

Fontes was born on 5 September 1940 in Laredo, Texas, to a Mexican family with a history of land dispossession, political executions, and exile. Native to Sonora for more than two hundred years, both branches of the Gómez/Fontes clan represented the independent and rebellious Mexicans of the northern frontier, who fought against native Yaqui Indians or, when unhappy with national politics, against the Mexican government. In Fontes's family a military tradition became inseparable from a frontier culture that posed an ideological...