From a Washington Post obit by Harrison Smith headlined “Rudolfo Anaya, novelist who helped launch Chicano literary movement, dies at 82”:
Rudolfo Anaya, who helped spark a Chicano literary renaissance with his 1972 novel “Bless Me, Ultima,” a lyrical coming-of-age story that drew on Southwestern myth and folklore while exploring Mexican American identity, died June 28 at his home in Albuquerque. . . .
Mr. Anaya was dubbed the godfather of the Chicano novel, a title that was largely the result of his critically acclaimed debut, “Bless Me, Ultima.” Mixing Spanish and English in its descriptions of the New Mexico llano, or flatlands, where Mr. Anaya was raised, the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was adapted into a 2013 film.
He later wrote dozens of novels, plays, nonfiction books and poetry collections while teaching at his alma mater, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and in 2016 received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. . . .
Mr. Anaya rose to prominence during the Chicano Movement, which began in the 1960s as Mexican Americans campaigned for political, economic and cultural empowerment while reclaiming a term that was long used as a pejorative. As Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta championed the rights of migrant farmworkers, writers such as José Antonio Villarreal, Tomás Rivera, Miguel Méndez and Mr. Anaya gave voice to Chicano identity in their work.
It took him seven years, and at least as many drafts, to write and publish “Bless Me, Ultima.” His breakthrough came one day in the 1960s, when he felt a presence in his office and turned to see an elderly woman standing in the doorway.
“She asked me, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m writing a story,’ ” Mr. Anaya told a C-SPAN interviewer in 2013. The visitor replied, “You’ll never get it right until you put me in it,” and identified herself as Ultima — a curandera, or healer, who “filled the novel with her soul.
Written from the perspective of Antonio Márez, a young boy growing up in 1940s New Mexico, “Bless Me, Ultima” chronicled his struggles with his Catholic faith and his friendship with Ultima, who uses local herbs for medicine, battles a malevolent barkeeper and has a spiritual connection with an owl. . . .
The manuscript was rejected by dozens of publishers before receiving a newly created Chicano literary prize from Quinto Sol, a small California press that published the novel and other milestones of Chicano literature.
“Bless Me, Ultima” was followed by two semi-autobiographical books that formed a loose trilogy about growing up in New Mexico: “Heart of Aztlán” (1976), about a family that moves from the countryside to the city; and “Tortuga” (1979), about a boy recovering from a crippling accident that mirrored Mr. Anaya’s own childhood neck injury. . . .
“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 for myself,” Mr. Anaya once told Publishers Weekly. “Writing for me is a way of knowledge, and what I find illuminates my life.” . . .
His later works included “Alburquerque” (1992), which used the city’s original name and examined municipal politics; “Zia Summer” (1995), the first in a series about a Chicano detective named Sonny Baca; and “The Man Who Could Fly” (2006), a short-story collection.
“What Anaya explores in these stories and in his earlier novels may strike some as rather old-fashioned,” wrote Los Angeles Times reviewer Adam Hill. “Some critics have complained that his mythic morality tales and a vision more attuned to universal struggles fail to capture the contemporary issues of Chicano identity. . . . But his fiction is better understood in the larger context of storytelling as essential for anyone’s spiritual sustenance.”. . .
Mr. Anaya was scheduled to publish a children’s book in his bilingual “Owl in a Straw Hat” series later this year. It was part of a decades-long effort to make room for Chicano writers in American literature — and not, he said, build a new tradition from scratch.
“We can present our own perspective, and in such a way present to the world the workings of our imagination, filtered through a very long and rich culture,” he told Bruce-Novoa. “But ultimately it will be incorporated into the literature of this country. The role of the next generation will be to assure that we are not given secondary status, or the back shelves of the libraries.”
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