Ricardo Sánchez has written about the many forces--historical, cultural, linguistic, social, political--that have shaped and determined Chicano reality. At the same time he expresses concerns about the universal human condition and asks questions related to individual existence.

Ricardo Sánchez was the youngest of thirteen children born to Pedro Lucero and Adelina Gallegos Sánchez. He was raised in the rough district of El Paso, Texas, known as Barrio del Diablo (Devil's Neighborhood). Stifled by an educational system he would later denounce as being overtly racist, Sánchez dropped out of high school. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, and afterward he served sentences in Soledad prison in California (he was paroled in 1963) and Ramsey Prison Farm Number One in Texas (from which he was paroled in 1969). After his release in 1969 he earned a high school equivalency certificate, and, in 1974, sponsored by...