María is the eldest of four children and spent her childhood in Mexico City, jumping from one elementary school to the next due to disciplinary issues.
Upon her return to Mexico, she read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and under his influence, initiated her career as a narrator.
She was briefly married to Luis Eduardo Gil, and later immigrated to the United States where she co-founded Acento with Benito Martínez Creel, who would become her second husband.
[citation needed] María Amparo Escandón, an instant New York Times best selling author, developed her career in the early 1970s during the Latin American Boom.
In this novel Escandón approaches her personal relationship with her own father who died of a heart attack three days after she finished writing her manuscript.
The novel also reflects a linguistic reality in bicultural California exploring the vernacular merge of Spanish and English (Spanglish), as well as different sub-culture lingoes.
Aside from teaching Creative Writing at UCLA Extension, Escandón has been an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Labs in Mexico and Brazil, as well as at the Fundación Contenidos de Creación Fiction Workshops in Barcelona, and participates as a mentor for young upcoming minority writers at the PEN Center's Emerging Voices Program.
[citation needed] Escandón has recently completed the screenplay based on her novel González & Daughter Trucking Co. and the film is currently in active development at her own production company.