Rudolfo Anaya’s Shifting Sense of Place

Abstract

Few writers have been acknowledged to so completely and fully write about their landscapes as Rudolfo Anaya.¹ The “Poet of the Llano,” as he has been called, has, to a large degree, written New Mexico into existence. The Chicano perspective of New Mexico is Anaya’s vision, and few readers can view the llano and not see young Antonio roaming the windswept hills, learning from Ultima and struggling between his father’s dream ofthe Spanish conquistadors, riding the hills after having crossed the wild seas, and his mother’s indigenous heritage calmly farming near the river. Nature and landscape have always been essential elements in the fiction of Anaya. He readily acknowledges that his “earliest memories were molded by the forces in [his] landscape: sun, wind, rain, the llano, the river. And all of these forces were working to create the people that walked across [his] plane of vision” (“Writer’s Landscape…” 1977: 99). According to Anaya, the Chicano worldview “was centered in community and its relationship to the earth” (1991: 234), and he traces the origin of this worldview to the Pueblo Indians, considering “the recognition of the Earth as mother (la sagrada tierra)” (1991: 239). He is particularly known for the mythic forces behind his landscapes and for the grounding of his Chicano heritage in la tierra, using the word in Spanish which he feels

conveys a deeper relationship between man and his place, and it is this kinship to the environment which creates the metaphor and the epiphany in landscape. On one pole of the metaphor stands man, on the other is the raw, majestic and awe-inspiring landscape of the southwest; the epiphany is the natural response to that landscape, a coming together of these two forces.

(“A Writer Discusses” 1977: 46)