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Tino Villanueva |
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Tino Villanueva emerged as an important voice of Chicano expression in the early 1970s. A poet and an academic, his personal endeavors as a writer were stimulated by the struggle for socio-political emancipation and the heightened cultural awareness that characterized the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poetic voice for him is an existential affirmation of being by which one achieves salvation from silence, chaos, and annihilation.
Villanueva was born on 11 December 1941 in the south-central Texas town of San Marcos, where he lived in a dusty barrio. His parents were migrant field workers, an occupation that Villanueva found embarrassing. In a 1985 interview with Wolfgang Binder he recalled his feelings as a schoolchild: "The teachers would ask, 'What are you going to do, Johnny, during the summer"' And the Anglo kid would say, 'I'm going to visit my aunt in Detroit.' 'And how about you, Sally"' 'We're going to North Dakota to take a trip to the Badlands,' or 'We're going to California.' And I remember that the Chicano kids--the migrant Chicano kids--were too embarrassed to admit that during the summer it was no vacation for them, that they were going to do a lot of stoop labor.
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