In the following essay, Rodriguez del Pino reviews Méndez's contributions to Chicano literature.

The craft of writing is a demanding skill. Not many are able to achieve it. Most of us spend all of our young years—from elementary school through college—learning it, and yet some of us graduate almost illiterate. If this is true, for learning the craft of writing, how much more difficult is it to be a good writer of literature? Until very recently, the writer or novelist needed good training in literature, money to support himself or herself, and time to write. Writing was an endeavor of the upper classes or of individuals willing to give up everything for the love of art. It certainly was not for the working classes, for the poor, or for the uneducated. Very few with these drawbacks ever succeeded. In 1971, Edward Simmens wrote: "At...