In 1848, the war with Mexico ended, and a large part of northern Mexico, including New Mexico, was ceded to the United States. Anglo American traders who had been trading with the New Mexicans began to settle in the territory. Today these different cultures, each with its own language and culture, live in a multicultural setting.
The Pueblo Indian revolution was the most successful Native American revolt against a European colony in the history of our country. It has much to teach us about colonial New Mexico and about relationships between different cultures. Taking this historical information as inspiration, I created the setting for Serafina’s stories. The Governor I created for this story is fictional. The actual governor of New Mexico at the time was Otermin. This is not Otermin’s story.
There are other points of information the reader might find helpful. In the Hispanic cuentos many of the characters don’t have names. I gave them names for the sake of clarity. The cuentos have been passed down in Spanish in the oral tradition for centuries, so the story and its context were well known to both storyteller and listener. That ambience is hard to recreate on paper, so I took liberties in filling in spaces, adding or deleting this or that detail. My translations follow the plots of the stories but they are not literal.
What of the colcha, the blanket Serafina was weaving? Some say it still exists, perhaps in the museum in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. Others say it was taken back to her pueblo. I wrote Serafina’s Stories in the first years of the twenty-first century. Could the colcha have survived for over three hundred years? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we found her colcha so we could verify Serafina’s existence?
There is another whispered part of the legend that tells us Serafina later married and had many children. Perhaps we are all Serafina’s children, and that is why we continue to tell stories. I wrote her story to honor her as a spiritual great-grandmother from our New Mexican past.
I believe there is inherent power in the stories of our ancestors. Folk tales began in the imagination eons ago, and they nurture our creativity today. We recognize the values and concerns of the people in the folktales. Serafina told cuentos brought to New Mexico by the Spaniards. In her own pueblo she would have told the stories of her people. Understanding and respect for other cultures can begin by learning their stories.
The harsh treatment of the Pueblo Indians by the Spaniards is documented. Colonialism has never been easy on indigenous populations. A revolution did occur, and it happened because the Pueblo people sought to throw off an opressive government that threatened their cultural and spiritual existence. Not all of the Pueblo Indians joined the revolt; some remained friendly to the Spaniards and actually fled with them to El Paso. For a better understanding of the period it is important to read the history of the time.
Eighty-two years after Oñate’s colonists settled in New Mexico the Pueblos revolted. As I interpret history, the main grievance at the root of the rebellion was the Pueblo Indians’ insistence on keeping their religion, the ways of their ancestors, their Kachina dances. It was only a matter of time before a spark ignited a rebellion, and that spark may have been the harsh punishment imposed by Governor Treviño (a real governor who served from 1675 to 1677) on forty-seven Tewa Indians. When those leaders from the pueblos plotted revolt he punished them severely. But even before Treviño’s action there are accounts of previous smaller revolts by the Pueblo Indians. The response to any act of revolution by the Spanish Governors was often harsh.
When de Vargas returned to resettle New Mexico the Spaniards had learned that in order to coexist they had to be more tolerant of the Pueblos’ religious practices. The Pueblos lost much of their original land, but even in their smaller reservations they kept alive their languages and ceremonies. Today the Pueblos exist as sovereign nations within the United States.
There are so many social, political, and religious issues to study in this important era of New Mexico history. When a culture as distinct as the one the Spaniards brought to New Mexico in 1598 met the unique indigenous cultures of the Pueblos, conflict was sure to take place. What could those in charge have done to pave the way for tolerance and understanding? What could they have done to prevent the bloodshed of revolution? Perhaps its easier to judge history than to know the motives and actions of those who actually lived in that time.
Different cultures are still meeting on the world stage, and because of lack of tolerance and understanding those differences often explode in violence. Perhaps by studying and understanding the history surrounding the 1680 Pueblo Indian Revolt we learn not to place blame, but how we can live together in mutual respect. As a wise man said, we cannot change history, but we can learn from it.
Rudolfo Anaya
Alburquerque, New Mexico
A Biography of Rudolfo Anaya
An acclaimed Chicano writer, Rudolfo Anaya (b. 1937) has become best known for his award-winning novels, such as Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Tortuga (1979), and Alburquerque (1992). Anaya, who taught at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque for nineteen years before retiring in 1993, has also published epic poems, short stories, nonfiction, plays, and children’s books. He has been credited as a leader in the Latino literary community for his groundbreaking style and his success in writing stories that capture the essence of the Chicano experience.
He was born Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya on October 30, 1937, in the small town of Pastura, New Mexico, to Martín and Rafaelita (Mares) Anaya. Anaya’s father, who came from a family of cattle workers and shepherds, was a vaquero, a horseman who worked on the ranches surrounding Pastura, and his mother came from a family of poor farmers, who were devoted Catholics. Anaya, who was the fifth of seven children, saw his parents as the two halves of his life—the wildness and uncertainty of the windswept plains of east-central New Mexico and the stable domesticity of farm life. Soon after he was born, Anaya’s family moved to Santa Rosa, New Mexico, where he spent the next fourteen years. Later, his writings would be filled with images and memories of the people who affected his childhood. His fiction draws heavily on the superstitions and myths of the Mexican American culture that comingled with the traditions of the Roman Catholic faith. In the community’s rich storytelling tradition, legend and history blended together to create stories filled with mystery and revelation.
Anaya spent his childhood on the llano, the plains, roaming the countryside with his friends, hunting, fishing, and swimming in the Pecos River. He was taught the catechism in Spanish, often asking the priest and his older sisters difficult questions about their faith. His family spoke Spanish at home, and Anaya was not introduced to English until he went to school. Despite the shock of changing languages, Anaya’s mother, who held education in high regard, encouraged him to excel in his studies. For Anaya, life was filled with unanswered questions, but he knew that he had a place within the very mystery that escaped his understanding.
Life in the small, close-knit community of Santa Rosa gave Anaya a sense of security and belonging that was torn from him when his family moved to Albuquerque in 1952. In Albuquerque, Anaya was introduced to a cultural and ethnic diversity he had not previously experienced, as well as the harsh reality of racism and prejudice aimed at Latinos. Nonetheless, Anaya’s teenage years were in many ways typical. He played football and baseball and spent a significant amount of time with his friends discussing cars, girls, and music. In school, he maintained good grades and avoided the troubles and dangers of gang life.
When he was sixteen, while swimming in an irrigation ditch with friends, Anaya suffered a diving accident that changed the course of his adolescence. Diving into the ditch, Anaya broke two vertebrae in his neck and nearly died. His convalescence was long and painful, but after spending the summer in the hospital, Anaya, fiercely determined to return to his active lifestyle, eventually recovered from his injuries. The experience produced in the teenage boy a passion for life and an appreciation for the ability of adversity to either destroy or reshape one’s existence.
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bsp; After graduating from Albuquerque High School in 1956, Anaya attended a business school, intending to become an accountant. When his studies proved unfulfilling, he enrolled in the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. If the move to Albuquerque as a young teenager had rocked Anaya’s world, university life sent him into a full-fledged identity crisis. He was a Mexican American in a social and academic setting dominated by a culture that was not his own. He found his classes devoid of relevance to his history or identity. Also, English was still his second language, and he often used speech patterns that were considered wrong by his English-speaking classmates and professors. He felt different, isolated, and alienated, with no mentors to guide or support him.
Anaya’s own questions of his place in the world as a Latino, coupled with the traditional angst of moving into adulthood and the emotional pain caused by a recently failed romantic relationship, pushed him to write as a cathartic exercise. Many of these early writings he later destroyed. Also, a freshman English class sparked his interest in literature, and he began to read poetry and novels. Despite his growing love of reading, Anaya continued to lament the absence of any authors who could serve as mentors for his unique Mexican American experience.
In 1963 he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English. He took a teaching position in a small New Mexico town and continued to practice his writing every day. In 1966 he married Patricia Lawless, who supported her husband’s desire to write and served as his editor.
In the 1960s, Anaya taught junior high and high school during the day and worked on his writing in the evenings, struggling to find his literary voice. Although he conjured up images of his past, he found that he was writing in a style foreign to that past. The words and the characters would not mix. Then Anaya had something of a mystical experience that pushed him toward the development of his own unique Mexican American style. As he labored over his writing one night, he turned to see an elderly woman dressed in black standing in his room. This vision spurred the writer into action, and a story began to flow from his pen, inspiring his first novel, Bless Me, Ultima. The old woman in black became Ultima, a healer who helps the story’s main character find his way as he comes of age.
Bless Me, Ultima tells the story of Antonio Juan Márez y Luna, a six-year-old boy growing up in rural New Mexico during World War II. Antonio is befriended by Ultima, a kindly curandera, healer, who has come to stay with his family. Through Ultima, Antonio discovers the mysteries of the plains surrounding him and learns how to use plants for medicinal purposes. But when Ultima heals Antonio’s uncle after a family of witches place curses on him, Tenorio Trementina, the witches’ father, declares war against Ultima. Much of the drama of the novel grows from the conflict between Ultima and Trementina, which plays out as a clash between good and evil.
Another theme of the book is Antonio’s struggle to understand his place in the world. Like Anaya, the boy is pulled between his father’s wandering life of a vaquero and his mother’s harmonic, grounded existence with the earth itself. He also contemplates his future—as a priest, as his mother desires, or as a scholar, as Ultima predicts. And he questions the validity of his Catholic faith, which seems powerless against pain and suffering, while Ultima’s magic heals. His struggles are exemplified in his discovery of a golden carp in the river, which as told in local folklore is a god. To simply suppose the carp may share divinity with God becomes a question of meaning that feels to Antonio like a betrayal of his mother’s faith, yet it is a question he cannot help but ask.
Although Bless Me, Ultima would receive wide acclaim upon its publication, Anaya faced serious struggles in finding a publisher who would accept his manuscript, which incorporated both English and Spanish words. After sending inquiries out to numerous publishers, he received rejections from all of them, most often because his writing was too Latino in style and language. “It was extremely hard,” Anaya told Publishers Weekly. “I sent the book to dozens of trade publishers over a couple of years and found no interest at all. The mainstream publishers weren’t taking anything Chicano and we had nowhere to go. For us, living in a bilingual world, it was very normal to allow Spanish into a story written in English—it’s a process that reflects our spoken language—but [in approaching mainstream publishers] I was always called on it. Without the small academic, ethnic, and university presses, we’d never have gotten our work published.”
Finally, Anaya happened on an advertisement from Quinto Sol Publications, a small press in California, inviting authors to submit manuscripts. He sent in Bless Me, Ultima and Quinto Sol quickly agreed to publish it. Bless Me, Ultima became a reality in 1972, seven years after Anaya had first begun writing the novel. Critics responded enthusiastically to the book, noting that it provided a new, refreshing offering to Chicano literature, and it was awarded the Premio Quinto Sol for the best Chicano novel of 1972. The new author would soon find fame among Chicano readers and scholars.
With his newfound acclaim, Anaya secured a faculty position at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where he remained as teacher and adviser until he retired in 1993. He published his second novel, Heart of Aztlan, in 1976. The book tells the story of the Chavez family, forced to move from their farm to the barrios of Albuquerque. Heart of Aztlan is a political novel that focuses on the struggles of a displaced family. While the father attempts to fight the oppressive forces that surround him, his children succumb to the temptations of sex, drugs, and alcohol, and the family is torn apart. Tortuga, Anaya’s third novel, published in 1979, completed a loosely tied trilogy that focused on the Chicano experience over several generations. Tortuga is set in a sanitarium for terminally ill teenagers. The main character is a boy who lies in the hospital in a full-body cast, partially paralyzed and unable to move. He is nicknamed Tortuga, which means turtle in Spanish, because of his cast. In despair, he tries to kill himself, but through the wisdom of another boy who is terminally ill, Tortuga learns to accept and appreciate his life. The winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, Tortuga was well received and was considered by some critics to be Anaya’s most complete and accomplished work.
Following the completion of Tortuga, Anaya branched out, experimenting with writing plays, short stories, poems, documentaries and travel journals, and children’s stories. His short stories were collected as The Silence of the Llano (1982). A Chicano in China (1986) was a nonfiction account of Anaya’s travels to China. The Legend of La Llorona (1984) and Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of Quetzalcóatl (1987) were both retellings of traditional Mexican folk stories, and The Farolitos of Christmas: A New Mexico Christmas Story (1985) was Anaya’s first children’s story. In 1985 he published an epic poem, The Adventures of Juan Chicaspatas. Anaya also served as an editor for numerous publications, as well as a translator and contributor to other Chicano works.
In 1992 Anaya published Alburquerque (the original spelling of the city’s name), the first in a new series of linked novels. The second novel, the highly praised murder mystery Zia Summer, followed in 1995. Rio Grande Fall was released in 1996, and the final installment of the loosely linked quartet was Shaman Winter, published in 1999.
Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert, published in 1996, was yet another departure in style for Anaya. The book employed an allegory to tell a mythical story. In 2000 he wrote another epic poem, this time aimed at middle and high school students. Elegy on the Death of César Chávez celebrated the life and struggles of the famed Chicano labor leader. The dust jacket and author notes provided factual details, and the poem moved the reader between grief and hope with a rallying cry for action.
Following his retirement from teaching in 1993, Anaya has devoted his time to writing and traveling. Like his mother before him, Anaya has remained tied to the land and in 2002 lived with his wife in Albuquerque, and like his father, he has satisfied his desire to wander by traveling extensively throughout South and Central America. Anaya, who spends several hours a day writing, told Publishers Weekly, “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 myself. Writing for me is a way of knowledge, and what I find illuminates my life.”
Awards
Premio Quinto Sol literary award for Bless Me, Ultima, 1970; New Mexico Distinguished Public Service Award, 1978, 1980; Natil Chicano Council on Higher Education fellowship, 1978–79; NEA fellowships, 1979, 1980; Before Columbus American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, for Tortuga, 1980; New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in Literature, 1980; literature award, Delta Kappa Gamma, New Mexico chapter, 1981; doctorate of humane letters, University of Albuquerque, 1981; Corporation for Public Broadcasting script development award for Rosa Linda, 1982; Award for Achievement in Chicano Literature, Hispanic Caucus of Teachers of English, 1983; W.K. Kellogg Foundation fellowship, 1983–85; doctorate of humane letters, Marycrest College, 1984; Mexican Medal of Friendship, Mexican Consulate of Albuquerque, 1986; PEN West Fiction Award, 1992, for Alburquerque.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.