"I Have Always Been Here" resists the lie that Chican@ language, culture, and people are somehow foreign to the American experience, for Chican@ ancestry is as much Native American -indigenous to the U.S. Southwest - as it is now European and African. A Chican@ Beat poet from the Rio Grande Valley of deep South Texas, Carmona explores his own discovery of this truth in this, his second poetry collection, written in a natural, engaging style.