Rudolfo Anaya
1 book analyzed
Biography
Rudolfo Anaya (1937-2020) was born in Pastura, New Mexico, to a family with deep roots in the state's Hispanic farming and ranching communities. He grew up in Santa Rosa, a small town on the Pecos River, and the landscape of eastern New Mexico — the llano, the river, the juniper hills — is so thoroughly present in Bless Me, Ultima that the novel is essentially a love letter to the place that made him. Anaya completed Bless Me, Ultima in the late 1960s after years of drafting; it was rejected by multiple publishers before Quinto Sol Publications, a Chicano-run press in Berkeley, accepted it in 1972. The novel won the Premio Quinto Sol, the first major literary prize for Chicano literature. Anaya is now considered the father of Chicano literature — the writer who demonstrated that Mexican-American experience was not only a valid subject for serious literary fiction but a profound and necessary one. He spent most of his career at the University of New Mexico, writing novels, plays, children's books, and essays while helping establish Chicano Studies as an academic discipline.