Olivia Castellano was born into a life of subsistence in Del Rio, Texas, on 25 July 1944. She was the second of five children born to Secundino Peña Castellano, a Southern Pacific Railroad worker with a fifth-grade education, and Cruz Guerrero Castellano, who had left school in the second grade to help raise ten siblings. In "Canto, Locura y Poesía" (1990) Castellano recalls that in 1958 her father, "tired of seeing his days fade into each other without promise," moved his family to California where they became farmworkers. She then became serious about education, convinced that only through books and songs would she "be free to structure some kind of future" for herself.

The memories of her early Texas childhood are her source of creative energy; her work emerges from the Texas landscape. Her mythology is composed of horses, blue sky, yellow earth, and feelings of anger for...