Reyes Cárdenas's creativity, mystically connected tragicomic images, and freedom from poetic tradition have set him apart from and often ahead of the avant-garde of Chicano literature, while at the same time revealing his inherent connections to the image, soul, and sociopolitical movements of the Chicano-Indian Southwest.

Born and raised in Seguin, Texas, Cárdenas is the eldest son of a Chicano family typified by financial poverty but also by an aesthetic-cultural wealth of philosophy and creativity, unique even within Chicano barrios. Because of frequent migrant work in the fields of West Texas, where he and his family picked cotton, Cárdenas did not enter school until age ten. His mother died in childbirth at the hands of a country doctor when Cárdenas was twelve, and his father retreated to a mechanic's job in the desert, an episode Cárdenas describes in...