City Life
In 1952, when Anaya was a teenager, his family, like many other families, was forced by changing economic conditions to move to the big city of Albuquerque in search of wage-labor work that was quickly replacing the traditional lifeways of small-scale subsistence farming. The move to the city facilitated a time of accelerated personal growth and intellectual expansion for the young Anaya; adventures, experiences, observations, and insights that are reflected in detail in his prose and poetry. For example his novel, Alburquerque, according to Anaya, “looks at my city, Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the traditional cultures of the Rio Grande, at the Chicano, Native American, and what’s happening all around us in the city. Change, new people coming here, new industry, money, politics, what all these have to do with my life and my community” (Dick and Sirias, 150).
After graduating from high school in 1956, he first enrolled in business school, and then at the University of New Mexico, where he discovered his interest in literature. After receiving his B.A. in English he began his teaching career at the elementary and then secondary levels. Before long, however, his own passion for learning led him back to the University of New Mexico for an M.A. in English, followed by another M.A., this time in guidance counseling. In 1974, after the unprecedented success of Bless Me, Ultima, Anaya was invited to teach at his alma mater. Despite never obtaining a PhD, Anaya’s talent and commitment to teaching earned him a full professorship at the University of New Mexico, where he taught creative writing until his retirement in 1993.
“At the university level,” says Anaya, I got a B.A. and an M.A. degree in literature in the English Department, and never once read a novel by a Chicano.” When Anaya began to work on Bless Me, Ultima in the 1960s, the term “Chicano literature” did not even exist, and there were no models, no examples to draw on or compare to. But with the rise of the Chicano movement there was a sudden “explosion of creative work, literary work, people with the same yearnings that I had, the same desires to write about their own life from the inside point of view, from a real knowledge point of view” (Dick and Sirias, 96). The timing, then, was just right for a young, aspiring author to experiment with a novel that was rooted in a bilingual culture, a rural landscape, and the integrated Mexican-American traditions that weaved ancient indigenous wisdom with the Catholic faith. In 1972, when, after many rejection, Bless me, Ultima was finally published, it shone brightly on the stage set by the Chicano movement. “We were asking ourselves who we were and where we wanted to go” (Dick and Sirias, 96), Anaya recalls, and the novel gave clear and resonant voice to those long-silenced questions.
In 1966, Anaya married Patricia Lawless, a fellow graduate student in the guidance counseling program at the University of New Mexico. The two shared many interests such as literature, teaching, and of course counseling. Over the course of Anaya’s writing career, Patricia was not only an encouraging fan, but a talented editor and important critic of his work. She herself was a writer, a teacher, and had a long career as a counselor at Cibola high School in Albuquerque. Rudolfo and Patricia were married for 34 years and had two daughters, Elynn and Melissa, several grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren at the time of Patricia’s passing, at the age of 85, in 2010.
