Thanks to the efforts of author and activist Luis J. Rodriguez and Sylvia Vasquez, the author's daughter and literary executor, and HarperCollins Publishers, a new generation has the opportunity to experience Richard Vasquez's groundbreaking first novel, one of the first works by a Mexican-American writer to be published by a mainstream U.S. publisher.  Chicano was first published by Doubleday at the height of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement.  At the time, the word "Chicano" was newly minted and just becoming a part of the American vocabulary. The novel spent some time on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list and went through numerous printings as an Avon paperback.

For the new edition, which is available in both English and Spanish, Rubén Martínez, author of Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail and The New Americans, has composed a new introduction.  In it, he recounts the extraordinary career of Richard Vasquez and the circumstances surrounding the novel's original publication.  And he places the novel in its proper historical context, exploring all the contradictions and cultural pressures the author wrestled with at that crucial moment in time.