With her magical first novel, Garcia joins a growing chorus of talented Latino writers whose voices are suddenly reaching a far wider, more diverse audience. Unlike Latin American writers such as Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquee of Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa-whose translated works became popular here in the 1970s-these authors are writing in English and drawing their themes from two cultures. Their stories, from “Dreaming in Cuban” to Julia Alvarez’s “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent” and Victor Villasenor’s “Rain of Gold”, offer insight into the mixture of economic opportunity and discrimination that Latinos encounter in the United States. “Garia Girls” for example, is the story of four sisters weathering their transition from wealthy Dominicans to ragtag immigrants, “We didn’t feel we had the beat the United States had to offer,” one of the girls says, “We had only second-hand staff, rental houses in one redneck Catholic neighborhood after another, clothes at Round Robin, a black and white TV afflicted with wavy lines. ” Alvarez, a Middlebury College professor who emigrated from Santo Domingo when she was 10, says being an immigrant has given her a special vantage point: “We travel on that border between two worlds and we can see both points of view. ”

       With few exceptions, such as Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya, many Hispanic-Americans have been writing in virtual obscurity for years, nurtured only by small presses like Houston’s Arte Pubilco or the Bilingual Press in Tempe, Ariz. Only with the recent success of Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Ceek” and Oscar Hijuelos’s prize-winning novel, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” have mainstream publishers begun opening door to other Latinos. Julie Grau, Cisneros’s editor at Turtle Bay, says, “Editors may now be looking more carefully at a book that before they would have deemed too exotic for the general readership. ”

       But if Villasenor’s experience is any indication, some editors are still wary. In 1989，Putnam gave Villasenor a $75,000 advance for the hardcover rights to “Rain of Gold,” the compelling saga of his family’s migration from Mexico to California. But the editors, says Villasenor, wanted major changes: “They were going to destroy the book. It’s nonfiction; they wanted to publish it as a novel. And they wanted to change the title to ‘Rio Grande,’ which sounded like some old John Wayne movie. ” After a year of strained relations, he mortgaged his house, borrowed his mother’s life savings and bought back the rights to the book that had taken 10 years to write.

      In frustration, Villasenor turned to Arte Publico. In the eight months since its release, “Rain of Gold” has done extremely well, considering its limited distribution; 20,000 copies have been sold. “If we were a mainstream publisher, this book would have been on The New York Times best-seller list for weeks,” says Arte Pulico’s Nicolas Kanelos. The author may still have a shot: he has sold the paperback rights to Dell. And he was just named a keynote speaker (with Molly Ivins and Norman Schwarzkopf for the American Booksellers Association convention in May. Long before they gained this sort of attention, however, Villasenor, Cisneros and other Latino writers were quietly building devoted followings. Crossing the country, they read in local bookstores, libraries and schools. Their stories, they found, appeal not only to Latinos-who identify with them, but to a surprising number of Anglos, who find in them a refreshingly different perspective on American life. Still, there are unusual pressures on these writers. Cisneros vividly recalls the angst she went through in writing the final short stories for “Woman Hollering”: “I was traumatized that it was going to be one of the first Chicano books ‘out there. ’ I felt I had this responsibility to my community to represent us in all our diversity. ”