SOURCE: “Inner and Outer Realities of Chicano Life: The New Mexican Perspective of Leroy V. Quintana,” in Perspective on Contemporary Literature, Vol. 12, No. 12, 1986, pp. 20-28.

In the following essay, Benson explores the significance of multicultural and family influences on Quintana's poetry.

The poetry of Leroy V. Quintana opens up for us a world and a vision which until now has remained inaccessible to the majority of American readers. Many of Quintana's fellow Chicanos from outside New Mexico consider it remote as well, for the particular kind of mystical fatalism that gives its stamp to his people is essentially unknown and widely misunderstood (Gerdes 249). It is the product of centuries of cultural fusion, and is only marginally related to the political activism which produced a new flowering of Chicano arts in California, Colorado, and Texas over a decade ago. Thus, it has remained somewhat hidden from view.

The original...