Alma Villanueva has produced a richly varied and original body of work. Her poems, narratives, and plays maintain a highly personal tone and a unifying line of thought: the mysterious, ancient, and nature-bonded condition of womanhood and its stark contrast with an alienated modern world based on masculine principles, values, and objectives. Her passionate view of the world from the feminine perspective is her best contribution to Chicano literature. Although she deals with suffering, injustice, and human weaknesses, the final impression is always that of the joy of life and of confidence in a larger, almost sacred, scheme of things.

Villanueva was born in Lompoc, California, on 4 October 1944 to a German father she never knew and a Mexican mother. Her Mexican grandfather was a Baptist minister who had a college degree in philosophy, wrote poetry, and edited a newspaper in Hermosillo, Mexico. Her maternal grandmother, who raised her...