SOURCE: An interview in Partial Autobiographies: Interviews with Twenty Chicano Poets, edited by Wolfgang Binder, Verlag Palm & Enke Erlangen, 1985, pp. 221-29.

In the following interview, originally conducted in May 1982, Zamora discusses the origin of her poetic vocation, her major literary influences, and her contribution to twen-tieth-century Chicano literature.

[Binder]: When were you born and where?

[Zamora]: I was born in Aguilar, Colorado, a little village at the foot of twin mountains called Spanish Peaks in Southern Colorado, on January 20, 1938.

Which members of your family had immigrated to the US?

Toribio Ortiz, one of the first settlers to this country before it was a United States, is the only "immigrant" on the paternal side of my family, insofar as I know. On the maternal side, the Borrego family, too, were one of the first families to arrive here. But my maternal grandfather and his family are Indian. The actual...