RUDOLFO ANAYA
Birth: October 30, 1937 in Pastura, New Mexico
Occupation: Writer, college teacher, teacher
An acclaimed Chicano writer, Rudolfo Anaya has become best known for his award-
winning novels, such as Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Tortuga (1979), and
Alburquerque (1992). Anaya, who taught at the University of New Mexico in
Albuquerque for nineteen years before retiring in 1993, has also published epic
poems, short stories, nonfiction, plays, and children's books. He has been
credited as a leader in the Latino literary community for his ground-breaking
style and his success in writing stories that capture the essence of the Chicano
experience.
Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya was born on October 30, 1937, in the small town of Pastura,
New Mexico, to Martín and Rafaelita (Mares) Anaya. Anaya's father, who came from
a family of cattle workers and sheepherders, was a vaquero, a horseman who
worked on the ranches surrounding Pastura, and his mother came from a family of
poor farmers, who were devote Catholics. Anaya, who was the fifth of seven
children, saw his parents as the two halves of his life — the wildness and
uncertainty of the windswept plains of east central New Mexico and the stable
domesticity of farm life. Soon after he was born Anaya's family moved to Santa
Rosa, New Mexico, where Anaya spent the next fourteen years. Later, his writings
would be filled with images and memories of the people who affected his
childhood. His fiction draws heavily on the superstitions and myths of the
Mexican-American culture that commingled with the traditions of the Roman
Catholic faith. In the community's rich storytelling tradition, legend and
history were blended together to create stories filled with mystery and
revelation.
Anaya spent his childhood on the llano, the plains, roaming the countryside with
his friends, hunting, and fishing and swimming in the Pecos River. He was taught
the catechism in Spanish, often asking the priest and his older sisters
difficult questions about their faith. Spanish was spoken in the home, and Anaya
was not introduced to English until he went to school. Despite the shock of
changing languages, Anaya was motivated by his mother, who held education in
high regard, to excel at his studies. For Anaya, life was filled with unanswered
questions, but he knew that he had a place within the very mystery that belied
his understanding.
Life in the small, close-knit community of Santa Rosa gave Anaya a sense of
security and belonging that was torn from him when his family moved to
Albuquerque in 1952. In Albuquerque Anaya was introduced to a cultural and
ethnic diversity he had not previously experienced, as well as the painful
reality of racism and prejudice aimed at Latinos. Nonetheless, Anaya's teenage
years were in many ways typical. He played football and baseball, and spent a
significant amount of time with his friends discussing cars, girls, and music.
In school he maintained good grades and avoided the troubles and dangers of gang
life.
When he was sixteen, while swimming in an irrigation ditch with friends, Anaya
suffered a diving accident that changed the course of his adolescence. Diving
into the ditch, Anaya broke two vertebrae in his neck and nearly died. His
convalescence was long and painful, but after spending the summer in the
hospital, Anaya, fiercely determined to return to his active lifestyle,
eventually recovered from his injuries. The experience produced in the teenage
boy a passion for life and an appreciation for the ability of adversity to
either destroy or reshape one's existence.
After graduating from Albuquerque High School in 1956, Anaya attended a business
school, intending to become an accountant. When his studies proved unfulfilling,
he enrolled in the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. If the move to
Albuquerque as a young teenager had rocked Anaya's world, university life sent
him into a full-fledged identity crisis. He was a Mexican American in a social
and academic setting dominated by a culture that was not his own. He found his
classes devoid of relevance to his history or culture. Also, English was still
his second language, and he often used speech patterns that were considered
wrong by his English-speaking classmates and professors. He felt different,
isolated, and alienated, with no mentors to guide or support him.
Anaya's own questions of his place in the world as a Latino, coupled with the
traditional angst of moving into adulthood and the emotional pain caused by a
recently failed relationship with a girl, pushed him to write as a cathartic
exercise. Much of these early writings he later destroyed. Also a freshman
English class sparked his interest in literature, and he began to read poetry
and novels. Despite his growing love for reading, Anaya continued to lament the
absence of any authors who could serve as mentors for his unique Mexican-American
experience. In 1963 Anaya graduated from the University with a Bachelor of Arts
degree in English. He took a teaching position in a small New Mexico town and
continued to practice his writing everyday. In 1966 he married Patricia Lawless,
who supported her husband's desire to write and served as his editor.
During the 1960s, Anaya taught junior high and high school during the day and
worked on his writing after school and in the evenings, struggling to find his
literary voice. Although he conjured up images of his past, he found that he was
writing in a style foreign to that past. The words and the characters would not
mix. Then Anaya had something of a mystical experience that pushed him toward
the development of his own unique Mexican-American style. As he labored over his
writing one night, he turned to see an elderly woman dressed in black standing
in his room. This vision spurred the writer into action and a story began to
flow from his pen, inspiring his first novel, Bless Me, Ultima. The old woman in
black he had seen that night became Ultima, a healer who helps the story's main
character find his way in a coming-of-age story.
Bless Me, Ultima tells the story of Antonio Juan Marez y Luna, a six-year- old
boy growing up in rural New Mexico during World War II. Antonio is befriended by
Ultima, a kindly curandera, healer, who has come to stay with Antonio's family.
Through Ultima, Antonio discovers the mysteries of the plains surrounding him
and learns how to use its plants for medicinal purposes. But when Ultima heals
Antonio's uncle from curses placed on him by a family of witches, Tenorio
Trementina, the witches' father, declares war against Ultima. Much of the drama
of the novel grows from the conflict between Ultima and Trementina, which plays
out as a struggle between good and evil.
Another theme of the book is Antonio's struggle to understand his place in the
world. Like Anaya's own history, the boy is pulled between his father's
wandering life of a vaquero and his mother's harmonic, grounded existence with
the earth itself. He also contemplates his future — as a priest, as his mother
desires, or as a scholar, as Ultima predicts. And, he questions the validity of
his Catholic faith that seems helpless against pain and suffering while Ultima's
magic heals. His struggles are exemplified in his discovery of a golden carp in
the river, which as told in local folklore is a god. To simply suppose the carp
may share divinity with God becomes a question of meaning that feels to Antonio
like a betrayal of his mother's faith, yet it is a question he cannot help but
ask.
Although Bless Me, Ultima would receive wide acclaim upon its publication, Anaya
faced serious struggles in finding a publisher who would accept his manuscript,
which incorporated both English and Spanish words. Sending inquiries out to
numerous publishers, he received back a rejection from all of them, most often
because his writing was too Latino in style and language. "It was extremely hard,"
Anaya told Publisher's Weekly, "I sent the book to dozens of trade publishers
over a couple of years and found no interest at all. The mainstream publishers
weren't taking anything Chicano and we had nowhere to go. For us, living in a
bilingual world, it was very normal to allow Spanish into a story written in
English — it's a process that reflects our spoken language — but [in approaching
mainstream publishers] I was always called on it. Without the small academic,
ethnic, and university presses, we'd never have gotten our work published."
Finally, Anaya happened on an advertisement from Quinto Sol Publications, a
small press in California, inviting authors to submit manuscripts. He sent in
Bless Me, Ultima and Quinto Sol quickly agreed to publish it. Bless Me, Ultima
became a reality in 1972, seven years after Anaya had first begun writing the
novel. Critics responded enthusiastically to the book, noting that it provided a
new, refreshing offering to Chicano literature, and it was awarded the Premio
Quinto Sol Award for the best Chicano novel of 1972. The new author would find
fame among Chicano readers and scholars.
With his new-found acclaim, Anaya secured a faculty position at the University
of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where he remained as teacher and adviser until he
retired in 1993. He published his second novel, Heart of Aztlan, in 1976. The
novel tells the story of the Chavez family, who is forced to moved from their
family farm to the barrios of Albuquerque. Heart of Aztlán is a political novel
that focuses on the struggles of a displaced family. While the father attempts
to fight the oppressive forces that surround him, his children succumb to the
temptations of sex, drugs, and alcohol, and the family is torn apart. Although
it won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book award, Heart of Aztlan was
not as well received as Bless Me, Ultima. Tortuga, Anaya's third novel,
published in 1979, completed a loosely tied trilogy that focused on the Chicano
experience over several generations. Tortuga is set in a sanitarium for
terminally ill teenagers. The main character is a teenage boy who lies in the
hospital in a full body cast, partially paralyzed and unable to move. He is
nicknamed Tortuga, which means Turtle in Spanish, because of his cast. In
despair, he tries to kill himself, but through the wisdom of another boy who is
terminally ill, Tortuga learns to accept and appreciate his life. The book was
well received and was considered by some critics to be Anaya's most complete and
accomplished work.
Following the completion of Tortuga, Anaya branched out, experimenting with
writing plays, short stories, poems, documentaries and travel journals, and
children's stories. His short stories were collected as The Silence of Llano,
1982. A Chicano in China, 1986 was a nonfiction account of Anaya's travels to
China. The Legend of La Llorona 1984 and Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of
Quetzalcoatl, 1987 were both retellings of traditional Mexican folk stories, and
The Farolitos of Christmas: A New Mexican Christmas Story, 1985, was Anaya's
first children's story. In 1985 he published an epic poem, The Adventures of
Juan Chicaspatas. Anaya also served as an editor for numerous publications, as
well as a translator and contributor to other Chicano works.
In 1992 Anaya published Alburquerque (the original spelling of the city's name),
the first in a new series of linked novels. The second novel, the highly praised
murder mystery Zia Summer, followed in 1995. Rio Grande Fall was released in
1996, and the final installment of the loosely linked quartet was Shaman Winter,
published in 1999. Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert, published in 1996 was
yet another departure in style for Anaya. The story, which employed allegory to
tell a mythical story, was panned by critics, one of Anaya's few missteps during
his thirty years of writing. In 2000 Anaya wrote another epic poem, this time
aimed at middle and high school students. Elegy on the Death of Cesar Chavez
celebrated the life and struggles of the famed Chicano labor leader. The dust
jacket and author notes provided factual details, and the poem moved the reader
between grief and hope of a rallying cry for action.
Following his retirement from teaching in 1993, Anaya has devoted his time to
his writing and traveling. Like his mother before him, Anaya has remained tied
to the land and in 2002 lived with his wife in Albuquerque, and like his father,
he has satisfied his desire to wander by traveling extensively throughout South
and Central America. Anaya, who spends several hours a day writing, told
Publisher's Weekly, "What I've wanted to do is compose the Chicano worldview —
the synthesis that shows our true mestizo identity — and clarify it for my
community and myself. Writing for me is a way of knowledge, and what I find
illuminates my life."
Birth: October 30, 1937 in Pastura, New Mexico
Occupation: Writer, college teacher, teacher
An acclaimed Chicano writer, Rudolfo Anaya has become best known for his award-
winning novels, such as Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Tortuga (1979), and
Alburquerque (1992). Anaya, who taught at the University of New Mexico in
Albuquerque for nineteen years before retiring in 1993, has also published epic
poems, short stories, nonfiction, plays, and children's books. He has been
credited as a leader in the Latino literary community for his ground-breaking
style and his success in writing stories that capture the essence of the Chicano
experience.
Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya was born on October 30, 1937, in the small town of Pastura,
New Mexico, to Martín and Rafaelita (Mares) Anaya. Anaya's father, who came from
a family of cattle workers and sheepherders, was a vaquero, a horseman who
worked on the ranches surrounding Pastura, and his mother came from a family of
poor farmers, who were devote Catholics. Anaya, who was the fifth of seven
children, saw his parents as the two halves of his life — the wildness and
uncertainty of the windswept plains of east central New Mexico and the stable
domesticity of farm life. Soon after he was born Anaya's family moved to Santa
Rosa, New Mexico, where Anaya spent the next fourteen years. Later, his writings
would be filled with images and memories of the people who affected his
childhood. His fiction draws heavily on the superstitions and myths of the
Mexican-American culture that commingled with the traditions of the Roman
Catholic faith. In the community's rich storytelling tradition, legend and
history were blended together to create stories filled with mystery and
revelation.
Anaya spent his childhood on the llano, the plains, roaming the countryside with
his friends, hunting, and fishing and swimming in the Pecos River. He was taught
the catechism in Spanish, often asking the priest and his older sisters
difficult questions about their faith. Spanish was spoken in the home, and Anaya
was not introduced to English until he went to school. Despite the shock of
changing languages, Anaya was motivated by his mother, who held education in
high regard, to excel at his studies. For Anaya, life was filled with unanswered
questions, but he knew that he had a place within the very mystery that belied
his understanding.
Life in the small, close-knit community of Santa Rosa gave Anaya a sense of
security and belonging that was torn from him when his family moved to
Albuquerque in 1952. In Albuquerque Anaya was introduced to a cultural and
ethnic diversity he had not previously experienced, as well as the painful
reality of racism and prejudice aimed at Latinos. Nonetheless, Anaya's teenage
years were in many ways typical. He played football and baseball, and spent a
significant amount of time with his friends discussing cars, girls, and music.
In school he maintained good grades and avoided the troubles and dangers of gang
life.
When he was sixteen, while swimming in an irrigation ditch with friends, Anaya
suffered a diving accident that changed the course of his adolescence. Diving
into the ditch, Anaya broke two vertebrae in his neck and nearly died. His
convalescence was long and painful, but after spending the summer in the
hospital, Anaya, fiercely determined to return to his active lifestyle,
eventually recovered from his injuries. The experience produced in the teenage
boy a passion for life and an appreciation for the ability of adversity to
either destroy or reshape one's existence.
After graduating from Albuquerque High School in 1956, Anaya attended a business
school, intending to become an accountant. When his studies proved unfulfilling,
he enrolled in the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. If the move to
Albuquerque as a young teenager had rocked Anaya's world, university life sent
him into a full-fledged identity crisis. He was a Mexican American in a social
and academic setting dominated by a culture that was not his own. He found his
classes devoid of relevance to his history or culture. Also, English was still
his second language, and he often used speech patterns that were considered
wrong by his English-speaking classmates and professors. He felt different,
isolated, and alienated, with no mentors to guide or support him.
Anaya's own questions of his place in the world as a Latino, coupled with the
traditional angst of moving into adulthood and the emotional pain caused by a
recently failed relationship with a girl, pushed him to write as a cathartic
exercise. Much of these early writings he later destroyed. Also a freshman
English class sparked his interest in literature, and he began to read poetry
and novels. Despite his growing love for reading, Anaya continued to lament the
absence of any authors who could serve as mentors for his unique Mexican-American
experience. In 1963 Anaya graduated from the University with a Bachelor of Arts
degree in English. He took a teaching position in a small New Mexico town and
continued to practice his writing everyday. In 1966 he married Patricia Lawless,
who supported her husband's desire to write and served as his editor.
During the 1960s, Anaya taught junior high and high school during the day and
worked on his writing after school and in the evenings, struggling to find his
literary voice. Although he conjured up images of his past, he found that he was
writing in a style foreign to that past. The words and the characters would not
mix. Then Anaya had something of a mystical experience that pushed him toward
the development of his own unique Mexican-American style. As he labored over his
writing one night, he turned to see an elderly woman dressed in black standing
in his room. This vision spurred the writer into action and a story began to
flow from his pen, inspiring his first novel, Bless Me, Ultima. The old woman in
black he had seen that night became Ultima, a healer who helps the story's main
character find his way in a coming-of-age story.
Bless Me, Ultima tells the story of Antonio Juan Marez y Luna, a six-year- old
boy growing up in rural New Mexico during World War II. Antonio is befriended by
Ultima, a kindly curandera, healer, who has come to stay with Antonio's family.
Through Ultima, Antonio discovers the mysteries of the plains surrounding him
and learns how to use its plants for medicinal purposes. But when Ultima heals
Antonio's uncle from curses placed on him by a family of witches, Tenorio
Trementina, the witches' father, declares war against Ultima. Much of the drama
of the novel grows from the conflict between Ultima and Trementina, which plays
out as a struggle between good and evil.
Another theme of the book is Antonio's struggle to understand his place in the
world. Like Anaya's own history, the boy is pulled between his father's
wandering life of a vaquero and his mother's harmonic, grounded existence with
the earth itself. He also contemplates his future — as a priest, as his mother
desires, or as a scholar, as Ultima predicts. And, he questions the validity of
his Catholic faith that seems helpless against pain and suffering while Ultima's
magic heals. His struggles are exemplified in his discovery of a golden carp in
the river, which as told in local folklore is a god. To simply suppose the carp
may share divinity with God becomes a question of meaning that feels to Antonio
like a betrayal of his mother's faith, yet it is a question he cannot help but
ask.
Although Bless Me, Ultima would receive wide acclaim upon its publication, Anaya
faced serious struggles in finding a publisher who would accept his manuscript,
which incorporated both English and Spanish words. Sending inquiries out to
numerous publishers, he received back a rejection from all of them, most often
because his writing was too Latino in style and language. "It was extremely hard,"
Anaya told Publisher's Weekly, "I sent the book to dozens of trade publishers
over a couple of years and found no interest at all. The mainstream publishers
weren't taking anything Chicano and we had nowhere to go. For us, living in a
bilingual world, it was very normal to allow Spanish into a story written in
English — it's a process that reflects our spoken language — but [in approaching
mainstream publishers] I was always called on it. Without the small academic,
ethnic, and university presses, we'd never have gotten our work published."
Finally, Anaya happened on an advertisement from Quinto Sol Publications, a
small press in California, inviting authors to submit manuscripts. He sent in
Bless Me, Ultima and Quinto Sol quickly agreed to publish it. Bless Me, Ultima
became a reality in 1972, seven years after Anaya had first begun writing the
novel. Critics responded enthusiastically to the book, noting that it provided a
new, refreshing offering to Chicano literature, and it was awarded the Premio
Quinto Sol Award for the best Chicano novel of 1972. The new author would find
fame among Chicano readers and scholars.
With his new-found acclaim, Anaya secured a faculty position at the University
of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where he remained as teacher and adviser until he
retired in 1993. He published his second novel, Heart of Aztlan, in 1976. The
novel tells the story of the Chavez family, who is forced to moved from their
family farm to the barrios of Albuquerque. Heart of Aztlán is a political novel
that focuses on the struggles of a displaced family. While the father attempts
to fight the oppressive forces that surround him, his children succumb to the
temptations of sex, drugs, and alcohol, and the family is torn apart. Although
it won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book award, Heart of Aztlan was
not as well received as Bless Me, Ultima. Tortuga, Anaya's third novel,
published in 1979, completed a loosely tied trilogy that focused on the Chicano
experience over several generations. Tortuga is set in a sanitarium for
terminally ill teenagers. The main character is a teenage boy who lies in the
hospital in a full body cast, partially paralyzed and unable to move. He is
nicknamed Tortuga, which means Turtle in Spanish, because of his cast. In
despair, he tries to kill himself, but through the wisdom of another boy who is
terminally ill, Tortuga learns to accept and appreciate his life. The book was
well received and was considered by some critics to be Anaya's most complete and
accomplished work.
Following the completion of Tortuga, Anaya branched out, experimenting with
writing plays, short stories, poems, documentaries and travel journals, and
children's stories. His short stories were collected as The Silence of Llano,
1982. A Chicano in China, 1986 was a nonfiction account of Anaya's travels to
China. The Legend of La Llorona 1984 and Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of
Quetzalcoatl, 1987 were both retellings of traditional Mexican folk stories, and
The Farolitos of Christmas: A New Mexican Christmas Story, 1985, was Anaya's
first children's story. In 1985 he published an epic poem, The Adventures of
Juan Chicaspatas. Anaya also served as an editor for numerous publications, as
well as a translator and contributor to other Chicano works.
In 1992 Anaya published Alburquerque (the original spelling of the city's name),
the first in a new series of linked novels. The second novel, the highly praised
murder mystery Zia Summer, followed in 1995. Rio Grande Fall was released in
1996, and the final installment of the loosely linked quartet was Shaman Winter,
published in 1999. Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert, published in 1996 was
yet another departure in style for Anaya. The story, which employed allegory to
tell a mythical story, was panned by critics, one of Anaya's few missteps during
his thirty years of writing. In 2000 Anaya wrote another epic poem, this time
aimed at middle and high school students. Elegy on the Death of Cesar Chavez
celebrated the life and struggles of the famed Chicano labor leader. The dust
jacket and author notes provided factual details, and the poem moved the reader
between grief and hope of a rallying cry for action.
Following his retirement from teaching in 1993, Anaya has devoted his time to
his writing and traveling. Like his mother before him, Anaya has remained tied
to the land and in 2002 lived with his wife in Albuquerque, and like his father,
he has satisfied his desire to wander by traveling extensively throughout South
and Central America. Anaya, who spends several hours a day writing, told
Publisher's Weekly, "What I've wanted to do is compose the Chicano worldview —
the synthesis that shows our true mestizo identity — and clarify it for my
community and myself. Writing for me is a way of knowledge, and what I find
illuminates my life."