Yolanda Luera, a talented, promising poet and fiction writer of the United States-Mexico border, is a student, wife, and mother of three children. To date she has published exclusively in Spanish. Although she is ambivalent about writing in English, there is some considerable promise in this regard. She has a keen sense of the pain of the life of the poor, especially of women, and of the language and wisdom of the common people, as well as their will to endure. Her writing is artistically salted with a wry, picaresque sense of humor.

In 1950 Luera's parents, Pedro Luera and Amada Salas de Luera, moved from Sinaloa and Durango in northern Mexico to Mexicali, where she was born on 4 March 1953. The family moved to Tijuana in 1958 and lived there until 1970. Her education in Mexico, after the sixth grade, included secretarial school for six months, after which she worked for...