Rudolfo A. Anaya: Focus on Criticism

Published in 1990, Focus on Criticism was the first critical anthology dedicated to a Chicano author. A range of scholars and literary critics have contributed their studies of Anaya’s work to create a varied and rich collection that examines Chicano literature, for the first time, according to the conventions and standards of general literary criticism in the U.S. The bulk of the essays concentrate on Anaya’s trilogy: Bless Me, Ultima, Heart of Aztlán, and Tortuga. These novels, as well as a few of Anaya’s shorter works, are often examined in a political or social context, and emphasize Anaya’s unique use of magical realism and spiritual mysticism as literary devices that allow him to develop not only his own style as a writer, but a voice associated with the whole Chicano community. In addition to the critical essays, the volume also contains an autobiography, written by Anaya himself, and an extensive bibliography created by Teresa Márquez. The collection is not only a valuable resource for readers seeking to understand and contextualize Anaya’s work on a deeper level, but it is an important historic document as well, one that established Chicano literature as a valid segment in U.S. culture.

-Sophie Ell

"Rudolfo A. Anaya is a founder of the canon of the contemporary Chicano literary movement. Together with the late Tomas Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa, and Estrella Portillo Trambley, he was among the first winners of the Quinto Sol Prize, awarded by Quinto Sol Publications of Berkeley, California under the editorship of Herminio Rios C. and Octavio Ignacio Romano-V. The writings of Anaya, especially Bless Me, Ultima, have generated more substantive critical response than the opera of any other Chicano author. Future students of the history of Chicano literary criticism will study this body of texts as a paradigm of the evolution of approaches, emphases, and trends which characterized the beginnings of our critical analyses. They will raise the question of how Chicano literary critics developed their own perspectives, and to what extent they reflected established European schools, especially French and historicist schools of thought, filtered through mainstream American schools of literary criticism." -Excerpt from Introduction.