Detective Fiction and the Creative Process: Rolando Hinojosa

Rolando Hinojosa’s production as a writer is well known to Chicano literature scholars and to those who enjoy reading well-written, enlightening and interesting fiction. The author, a native of Mercedes, Texas, grew up speaking Spanish as a small child and later mastered the English language. He writes equally well in both languages, and his recurrent characters, whom we meet as adolescents in his first book, Estampas del Valle 1973 , also speak Spanish in this initial installment, but gradually change to English as they enter the English speaking world of advanced education and work in the following volumes. In subsequent works, therefore, they speak both languages, and in the most recent ones they function primarily in English, for example in Ask a Policeman.