Rudolfo Anaya
(b. 1937)

Rudolfo Anaya celebrates in novels, stories, essays, plays, and poems the legacy of the Mexican American ancestral heritage. In most of his works, he explores the cultural identity of the Chicano people.

Anaya was born in the small village of Pastura, New Mexico, in 1937. When he was very young, the family moved to nearby Santa Rosa on the llano estacado (the high plains) in the eastern part of the state, where Anaya's father worked as a sheep and cattle rancher. Anaya's deep attachment to nature and natural beauty is rooted in his childhood, as is his fascination with the Mexican and Indian oral tradition. During Anaya's youth, his large family gathered nightly to tell stories, anecdotes, and riddles. "I was always in a milieu (social environment) of words," he recalls, "whether they were printed or in the oral tradition."

Anaya graduated from Albuquerque High School in 1955 and went on to study business. Switching his major to English, he received a master's degree from the University of New Mexico in 1968. Aspiring to become a writer, he began work on his novel Bless Me, Ultima in the mid-1960s. Around this time, Anaya abandoned his efforts to imitate such leading American novelists as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. "I made a simple discovery," he has commented. "I found I needed to write in my voice about my characters, using my indigenous symbols." For several years, Anaya taught English at public schools in Albuquerque. He then began to teach creative writing and Chicano literature courses to university students.

Anaya's writing is deeply rooted in the Chicano heritage. During the 1960s, together with other writers, artists, and social activists, Anaya pioneered the Chicano Movement. The members of this movement promoted the civil rights, cultural identity, and future of the Chicano people. For many Chicanos, migration from rural communities to the cities after World War II presented a conflict between the pressure to assimilate to mainstream culture and loyalty to traditional cultural values. The Chicano Movement sought to preserve and revitalize the Chicano cultural heritage, as well as to insure workers' rights and to end existing social and economic prejudice.

Anaya's first novel, which took him nearly seven years to write, was published in 1972. The novel is the story of Antonio Márez, a young boy who grows up in a small New Mexico village in the 1940s. The novel's title character, Ultima, is a curandera (traditional folk healer) who lives with the Márez family. Reviewers admired Anaya's skillful and imaginative handling of setting and of the main character's emotional conflicts. In addition to winning the Premio Quinto Sol National Chicano Literature Award, Anaya received national recognition.

During the 1970s, Anaya published two more novels. In Heart of Aztlán (1976), the story focuses on a family that moves from the rural countryside to live in a city. As in much of Anaya's work, the style of this novel combines realism with fantasy and mythology. In Tortuga (1979), Anaya dramatizes the year-long ordeal of a young boy who must undergo therapy for paralysis. The thematic similarities of these novels with Bless Me, Ultima are striking, and Anaya has said that the three works "are a definite trilogy in my mind."

In 1982, Anaya published The Silence of the Llano, a collection of short stories. He has also written an epic poem, The Adventures of Juan Chicaspatas (1985), as well as several plays. His most recent works include Zia Summer (1995), Rio Grande Fall (1996), and Shaman Winter (1998).

Commenting some years ago about his writing career, Anaya remarked,"If we as Chicanos do have a distinctive perspective on life, I believe that perspective will be defined when we challenge the very basic questions which mankind has always asked itself: What is my relationship to the universe, the cosmos? Who am I and why I am here?"

Oral tradition is the passing of songs, stories, poems, legends, proverbs, riddles, lullabies, and jokes from generation to generation by word of mouth. Folk songs, folk tales, and myths all come from the oral tradition. No one knows who first created these narratives and poems, often told in different versions.

The tradition of Mexican American cuentos (stories) has been particularly significant for Rudolfo Anaya. The stories Anaya heard as a child in New Mexico were full of Indian mythology and folklore, overlaid with Spanish and Mexican cultural elements. He says of the storytellers he heard in his youth, "It was the magic of their words and their deep, humble humanity which must have sparked my imagination."

In two of his books, The Legend of La Llorona (1984) and Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of Quetzalcoatl (1987), Anaya explicitly addresses well-known tales from the oral tradition. He has also co-edited three anthologies of oral materials: Ceremony of Brotherhood (1980), Cuentos: Tales from the Hispanic Southwest (1980), and Cuentos Chicanos (1980, Chicano Stories). He upholds the oral storytelling tradition by telling cuentos to his grandchildren, and he has turned some of these stories into children's books.

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