Rudolfo Anaya Reading Challenge

SANTA ROSA — The third annual Rudolfo Anaya Reading challenge inspired Santa Rosa students to read over 800 books, with middle and high schoolers creating 70 art projects. Santa Rosa High School students were challenged to read local author Maximiliano G. Tenorio’s “Too Far From Heaven” while middle and elementary students were challenged to read Southwest titles that featured Hispanic/Latino, Native American, cowboy, and other local themes. “It is great when students get excited about reading which can be rare these days,” said Darrel Gomez, Santa Rosa Middle School English Language Arts teacher. “The Rudolfo Anaya Reading Challenge allowed our students to read and learn about Hispanic and Native culture. This project was an effective way to get the students to learn about an author who has ties to the community.” The challenge ran for a month and ended on Oct. 30, on” Rudolfo Anaya I Love To Read Day,” which was passed into law by the state Senate in 2019 as a day dedicated to the celebration of Anaya’s legacy of promoting youth literacy in New Mexico. Over the last three years, students in the Santa Rosa Consolidated School district have read 2,137 books for this challenge.

Rudolfo Anaya: The Magic of Words

Rudolfo Anaya: The Magic Of Words is a 26-minute documentary film on the life and writing of one of the founders of Chicano literature. About the film: The producer/director of Rudolfo Anaya: The Magic Of Words, David Ellis, first met the author almost twenty years ago while making another film on New Mexico – Land of Enchantment, broadcast by The Disney Channel. He interviewed Rudolfo Anaya for that film and found him to be fascinating and eloquent, the perfect subject for a film, himself. Many years later, when Ellis was looking for a subject for another New Mexico project, he approached Anaya who enthusiastically agreed to work with the filmmaker on this documentary. The first scenes filmed were interviews with Anaya in Albuquerque, New Mexico; other interviews followed with literary scholars and the writer’s friends – in Los Angeles, Albuquerque and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Finally, footage was added of New Mexico’s magnificent landscape, historic film from the 1960s and family photos.

Middle school and high school students can learn a great deal from Anaya’s inspiring life. His personal story demonstrates that while our lives can be sometimes unpredictable and unfair, hard work, determination and education can help overcome even the most difficult life experiences. The program features interviews with Anaya and his wife Patricia and friends and colleagues. Other scenes include footage of the endless plains of eastern New Mexico where Anaya grew up; dramatic reenactments from Anaya’s childhood; a visit to an Albuquerque herbal healer, and film of New Mexico’s magnificent landscape. Rudolfo Anaya: The Magic Of Words is a vital reference to the Hispanic culture of New Mexico. While Anaya’s cultural identity is drawn from his experiences growing up in the American Southwest, his stories transcend time and place and are invaluable in understanding the quest of all people for cultural identity, recognition and mutual respect.

New Mexico Holidays with Authors, Pat Mora and Rudolfo Anaya

 Purchase a book for someone special, or make time to visit your local library to check out books, by New Mexico authors, Pat Mora and Rudolfo Anaya.

How Green Chile Came to NM

 Read by David at the Farmington Public Library for Guys Read!  Chile Roasting process!

Remembering NM Chicano Author, Rudolfo Anaya

The Godfather

Author Rudolfo Anaya talks about "Bless Me, Ultima" and new stories to come.

by Carmella Padilla photos by As Noted

No More Bullies! Owl in a Straw Hat!

Review from Publisher Marketing:

This masterfully written children's book by New Mexico's favorite storyteller is a delightful tale about a young owl named Ollie who lives in an orchard with his parents in northern New Mexico. Ollie is supposed to attend school but prefers to hang out with his friends Raven and Crow instead. Ollie's parents discover he cannot read and they send Ollie off to see his grandmother, Nana, a teacher and farmer in Chimayó. Along the way, Ollie's illiteracy causes mischief as he meets up with some shady characters on the path including Gloria La Zorra (a fox), Trickster Coyote, and a hungry wolf named Luis Lobo who has sold some bad house plans to the Three Little Pigs. When Ollie finally arrives at Nana's, his cousin Randy Roadrunner drives up in his lowrider and asks Ollie why he's so blue. "I'm starting school, and there's too much to learn, and I can't read," Ollie says. "I can't do it." Randy explains that he didn't think he could learn to read either, but he persevered, earned a business degree, and now owns the best lowrider shop in Española! Ollie finally decides he is ready to learn to read. The characters and the northern New Mexico landscape in Owl in a Straw Hat come to life wonderfully in original illustrations by New Mexico artist El Moisés.

Contributor Bio:  Anaya, Rudolfo
Rudolfo Anaya, considered the father of Chicano literature, is the author of the beloved classic Bless Me, Ultima, which was adapted into a major feature film in 2013. In 2016, Anaya received the National Medal of Arts presented by President Barack Obama. His children's books include Rudolfo Anaya's The Farolitos of Christmas, The First Tortilla, Roadrunner's Dance, The Santero's Miracle, and Serafina's Stories. Anaya is professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico where he taught for thirty years. He lives in Albuquerque.

Moises Salcedo and Rudolfo Anaya

Famed New Mexican author, illustrator collaborate on animal adventure


In this Thursday, April 5, 2018 photo artist Moises Salcedo, left, of Albuquerque, who goes by the name, sits amid his artwork at his home and studio.  (Photo:  Morgan Lee/AP)

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La Ultima Exhibición

Bless Me, Ultima: The Reading

October 14 at the National Hispanic Cultural Center from 9 am to 8 pm

The National Hispanic Cultural Center will present a beginning-to-end reading of Rudolfo Anaya’s acclaimed novel, Bless Me, Ultima. The reading will take place in the NHCC Art Museum where an exhibition, La Ultima Exhibición, enters its final month. Over 40 dignitaries, New Mexico authors, youth, adults and elders (including school students) will read, each for 15 minutes, between 9 am and 8 pm. The general public is invited to attend any part of the day-long reading as well as tour the exhibition before it concludes on November 11.

The reading is free and open to the public with museum entrance fee.

More about the exhibition:

The La Ultima Exhibición, curated by Augustine Romero, features visual interpretations of Rudolfo Anaya’s celebrated book, Bless Me, Ultima (1972)–a portrait of life in rural New Mexico as seen through the eyes of a young boy during World War II. Anaya tells of the spiritual healer, Ultima, as she guides young Antonio on a magical and moral journey in this novel that has inspired artists for decades. Romero curated a previous iteration of this exhibition in 2006 at the South Broadway Cultural Center and the NHCC Art Museum is thrilled to host the re-imagined version twelve years later. Featured artists include: Jesús “Cimi” Alvarado, George C’de Baca, Sylvia Ortiz Domney, Christian Michael Gallegos, Roberto Gallegos, Eric Garcia, Kristina Gonzales, Nacho Jaramillo, Al Na’ir Lara, Chisim Bernal Lujan, Oscar Lozoya, Chris Ray Melendez, El Moisés, Derrick Montez, Paloma Paz Nava, Gabriel Luis Powers, Chris Rivera, Rebecca H. Hernandez Rosser, and Catalina Salinas. Augustine Romero is an acclaimed visual artist and the curator of the South Broadway Cultural Center and the Kimo Theater for the City of Albuquerque.

Event Navigation

• « First Page to Last Page Reading of Bless Me, Ultima in the NHCC Art Museum

GUADALUPE COUNTY



SANTA ROSA--Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me Ultima has donated funds to purchase a painting by Eric Garcia from Albuquerque. The painting is from one of his books Bless Me Ultima. Eloy Garcia, father of the artist, delivered the painting to the Moise Memorial Library. He is pictured with Librarian Joan Chavez and assistant Rhonda Chavez..

Bless Me, Ultime, now is an opera!

FEBRUARY 18-25

National Hispanic Cultural Center

1701 4th Street Southwest, Albuquerque, NM  87102

Bless Me, Ultima – the most famous New Mexican novel, now is an opera.

Opera Southwest, along with the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque and Opera Cultura in California, is thrilled to have commissioned an opera based on Rudolfo Anaya’s best-selling novel Bless Me, Ultima. The composer, Héctor Armienta, has worked with Mr. Anaya on the libretto and the resulting piece will be an historic event.

My Land Sings by Rudolfo Anaya

A magical collection of 10 stories based on the folklore and oral traditions of Mexican and Native American cuentistas
Rich in the folklore of his ancestors, Rudolfo Anaya’s tales will delight young readers from across the globe. In stories both original and passed down, this bestselling author incorporates powerful themes of family, faith, and choosing the right path in life. In “Lupe and la Llorona,” a 7th grader searches for the legendary Llorana; in “The Shepard Who Knew the Language of Animals,” a shepherd named Abel saves a snake and gains the ability to understand the language of animals; In “Dulcinea,” a 15-year-old dances with the Devil. Other tales feature coyotes, ravens, a woodcutter who tries to cheat death, the Virgin Mary, a golden carp, and a young Latino who seeks immortality.
 
Deeply rooted in ancient mythological beliefs, these accounts of enchantment are as beautiful and mysterious as the Rio Grande itself—and serve as a testament to the lost art of oral storytelling.
 
This ebook features illustrations by by Amy Córdova.

New Mexico Magazine & Rudolfo Anaya

Forty-five years ago, when he introduced a curandera named Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya set off a literary eruption. The lauded author reflects—and looks ahead to new stories and new adventures.

By CARMELLA PADILLA | Photography by AS NOTED

Above: Anaya at home with his sister Edwina Garcia.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY: STEVEN ST. JOHN 

AND WITH ULTIMA came the owl. … On a starry night in September 2016, I am camping near the New Mexico–Colorado state line and reading Bless Me, Ultima in the shadowy light of a kerosene lamp. I am preparing for an interview with Rudolfo Anaya, the New Mexican author who wrote the groundbreaking novel, published in 1972. Before falling asleep, I read about Ultima’s owl:

Its soft hooting was like a song, and as it grew rhythmic it calmed the moonlit hills and lulled us to sleep. Its song seemed to say that it had come to watch over us. The next morning, my husband asks if I heard the owl outside our tent, hooting quietly in the night. I wonder if, as Anaya wrote, the owl had always been there.

THE MAJESTIC FIGURE of an owl sits on a post above the backyard garden of Anaya’s northwest Albuquerque home. The bird faces east toward the distant Sandía Mountains, looking, one imagines, to the llano beyond, the spacious plains of east central New Mexico where Anaya was born.

While the owl’s practical task is warding off garden pests, it reminds me of the soft-hooting, wide-winged owl that swoops through Bless Me, Ultima with an air of power and mystery. The owl was the protective spirit of Ultima, the spirit of the night and the moon, the spirit of the llano! wrote Anaya, establishing the sense of place, language, mood, and imagery that propelled him to international acclaim as the “godfather of Chicano literature.”

With Bless Me, Ultima, Anaya wrote New Mexico into literary history. In the book, the owl, the elderly curandera (healer) Ultima, and six-year-old Antonio Márez y Luna converge in 1940s-era Las Pasturas, a small village suspended in a fragile space between Ultima’s otherworldly wisdom and Antonio’s real-world experience. Through them, and the countless characters in Anaya’s subsequent works of fiction and nonfiction, children’s books, poetry, and essays, the author illuminated what it means for him to be a New Mexican.

“The heart of New Mexico is, for me, the people, la gente—los compadres, las comadres, los tíos, las tías, los vecinos,” Anaya says on this autumn afternoon. “It’s the connection and the understanding between my Indo-Hispano cultures. If people don’t make that connection, they don’t understand New Mexico.”

IN 2017, Anaya marks 45 years since the publication of Bless Me, Ultima. During that time, he has made an indelible impact as a writer, educator, and cultural icon. Now 79, he has received countless honors for his storytelling and literary activism, including, this past September, the prestigious National Humanities Medal. In a White House ceremony, President Barack Obama commended Anaya for works that “celebrate the Chicano experience and reveal universal truths about the human condition,” and as a teacher who “spread a love of literature to new generations.” After issuing a fist-raising shout of “¡Viva Obama!” Anaya characteristically shifted the accolades back to his beloved childhood home, saying, “Tell Santa Rosa this is for them.”

Even as Anaya’s oeuvre draws the world’s attention, his focus remains on his New Mexican gente. His passion for preserving his culture and his ongoing pursuit of his craft consistently open new doors of expression—a novel set on the llano, The Sorrows of Young Alfonso, was released last year; a new children’s book is in progress; and preparations are under way in Albuquerque for the 2018 world premiere of an opera based on Bless Me, Ultima, a collaboration between Opera Southwest, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and the California-based Opera Cultura.

“The artist has to continue to challenge himself,” he says, “to always go deeper and deeper and ask, ‘What is human nature like?’”

Anaya’s desire to transform experience into art, and his persistence in a mainstream publishing industry that once rejected his bilingual expression and Chicano vision, paved the way for generations of New Mexican writers. Perhaps most notable is the literary luchadora Denise Chávez of Las Cruces, an American Book Award–winning writer.

“For me, a young woman growing up in the desert of southern New Mexico, Bless Me, Ultima was a beacon of hope and gave me respite from the lack of seeing my own kin come to life in art and words. I thought to myself maybe someday, too, I could become a writer,” Chávez says. “When I did meet Mr. Anaya and he became my mentor and teacher, I was challenged further when he asked me, point-blank and without fanfare: ‘So what are you going to do? Become a writer or what?’”

I first met Anaya in the pages of Bless Me, Ultima in the seventh grade. I met him a second time as a student in his creative writing class at the University of New Mexico (a class that, for a reason I can’t remember and now regret, I dropped). A lifetime later, I meet him again in the spacious home on a verdant corner lot where he and his wife, Patricia, rooted themselves in 1976. The two designed the house with detail and imagination that reflected their special bond as teachers, writers, and readers. Everywhere, there are books. The room they conceived to read in is round.

“My wife and I said, ‘This room will be a room to read and be quiet and love in,’” he says. “If a problem comes up, it will go round and round and round. It won’t have a corner to stay in.”

Anaya is charming, down-to-earth, handsome, humorous. He is comfortably dressed, a telling sign of a writer used to spending many hours at a desk. Patricia died in 2010 after 44 years of marriage, but, he declares, “We’re still here together.” I listen to the master storyteller speak as if he were writing, watch the light of imagination flicker in his eyes. Naturally, he weaves anecdote and experience into a narrative of his own life and that of his characters.

“One reason that I wrote Bless Me, Ultima was because, to me, the people I grew up with were so beautiful, I didn’t want them to disappear. I knew a book could be timeless. I knew the characters could be preserved.”

RUDOLFO ANAYA WAS BORN ON the threshold of World War II, in the vast, windswept cradle of Guadalupe County. He was delivered by a local curandera in the village of Pastura, the eighth of ten children whose first language was Spanish. His mother’s people were farmers, his father from a generations-long family of vaqueros(cowboys) who drove cattle and sheep. On the hardscrabble llano, few would have predicted Anaya’s famous future. But if one believed in destiny, as did his mother, Rafaelita Máres Anaya, the child was fated to write.

“I was crawling, and my mother put a few items in a circle and put me in the middle,” Anaya says. Years later, she told him, “You went to the paper and the pencil.” She may have simply been giving him toys to play with, but more likely, he says, “she put those things there to divine. She knew things that the world around her didn’t know.”

Anaya was raised in nearby Santa Rosa according to the old ways—in a culture steeped in nature, Catholicism, hard work, and the cuentos (folk tales) of a centuries-old oral tradition. “My parents, uncles, aunts, they always talked about what they were doing, where they were working, what happened that day. Sooner or later, they’d be telling a story from the old days,” he recalls. “We were very poor, but proud of the hard work that provided what we had.”

In 1951, when Anaya was 14, his father, Martin, moved the family to the Albuquerque barrio of Barelas, joining one of Anaya’s older brothers who had left Santa Rosa after the war. There, Anaya encountered tragedy and opportunity.

At 16, he dived into an acequia and hit bottom. “I went into instant paralysis,” he says. “I couldn’t move, couldn’t save myself. My friend had to pull me out.” A spinal cord injury sent Anaya to Carrie Tingley Hospital in the town of Hot Springs (now Truth or Consequences). Doctors bound him in a body cast that stretched from the top of his head to below his waist. A hole in the plaster shell exposed his face. Rather than watch the world he could no longer maneuver, he looked within.

“I was encased, kept a lot to myself,” he says of his two-month hospitalization. “With that solitude, I began to enjoy reading as never before. Literature was giving me a lifeline.”

 

Above: Anaya receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Obama last September.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY: OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA

Eventually, Anaya walked again, though it took years to fully regain his strength and movement in his neck. He came home, graduated from Albuquerque High School, and in 1958 enrolled as an English literature student at UNM. With few Hispano peers or professors, he again kept company with books. Inspired by the works of Shakespeare, American writers Walt Whitman and Thomas Wolfe, and the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics, he began writing seriously.

 “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” Anaya says with a dramatic flourish and a chuckle, quoting the French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “That’s the kind of poetry we wrote.”

Neither of Anaya’s parents received schooling beyond second grade, but his mother, especially, supported his educational direction. “My mother understood that what I was doing was very important. She made sure I had a place, a little desk and a typewriter and a light. She would tell her vecinos [neighbors], her comadres [friends], ‘Estas escribiendo.’ He is writing.”

Soon, Anaya had produced volumes—poetry, short stories, and other budding works. Then, one life-changing night in 1963, he lit the fireplace and threw the pages of his latest romantic novel into the flame. He knew he had something more meaningful to say.

“By the time I got to the story of Ultima, I had settled down and begun to look at my own sense of place,” he says. “I asked myself, ‘What is there?’ The people, la gente, the stories they tell. We believed in the oral tradition. It was alive.”

The tradition merged myth with reality. “There were stories about brujas [witches]. People knew them, they talked to them, they said, ‘Be careful,’” he says. There were stories about the owls that lived along the river bosque. “Often the witch turns into an owl to travel.”

From this intersection of land and lore, Anaya created a character—an aged curandera(or was she a bruja?) whose way of being and seeing personified the solitude and struggle of the llano. He imagined her faithful companions—a boy who looked up to her and an owl who watched over her. He shaped a storyline highlighting themes of family, faith, nature, good and evil, and, of course, destiny.

He called her Ultima, literally “the last one.” She was an old soul in a time and place long past. She led him back to the beginning and into the future:

She took my hand, and the silent, magic powers she possessed made beauty from the raw, sun-baked llano, the green river valley, and the blue bowl which was the white sun’s home. My bare feet felt the throbbing earth and my body trembled with excitement. Time stood still, and it shared with me all that had been, and all that was to come.

THE BACK COVER OF MY 1972 edition of Bless Me, Ultima quotes Anaya as the recipient of the Premio Quinto Sol national award for Chicano literature: “Writing is not easy. It is a lonely and oftentimes unappreciated endeavor. But I had to keep creating. I had to keep trying to organize all the beautiful, chaotic things into some pattern.”

It had been a long road from inspiration to bestseller. After seven years of writing and rewriting, Anaya’s manuscript had no traction among mainstream publishers. His mix of English and Spanish confounded editors, though it accurately depicted the bilingualism of nuevomexicanos. But the Premio Quinto Sol changed everything. Independent publisher Quinto Sol released the book and gave Anaya a $1,000 prize. The book’s national exposure coincided with the Chicano cultural and civil rights movement, placing him at its vanguard. He began receiving invitations to colleges and universities in California, the early hub of the movement, to read and sign. “That’s when the world opened up for me,” he says.

Anaya’s introduction to Chicano politics was profound. It expanded his knowledge of New Mexico’s intertwined history with Mexico, whose flag flew over the state from 1821 to 1846. It inspired his identification with his Indo-Hispano heritage, that unique merging of indigenous Mexican, Spanish, and Native American bloodlines that constitutes many modern-day New Mexicans’ DNA. It also opened the door to Aztlán, the mythical point of origin of the Aztec peoples, an area believed to have once encompassed the southwestern United States. Chicanos adopted Aztlán as an ideological and geographical space to be reclaimed.

“When I was writing Bless Me, Ultima, it was all about nuevomexicano culture,” he says. “But I have always been interested in mythology and legends. It wasn’t until the Chicano movement that I began to read about the Aztec world and the lost connections between Mexico, Aztlán, and the United States.”

Chicano politics heightened Anaya’s awareness of the plight of the campesinos, the farmworkers and other laborers who, then and now, struggled for civic equality and social justice. “The Chicano movement was a universe of ideas, a universe of ‘Let’s get things done,’” he says. “We were going back to a different kind of past. We realized we have the right to this place. We have a right to education.”

Anaya was not without his critics. “There was one small group of Chicanos in California that thought Bless Me, Ultima wasn’t socially relevant. They thought all literature should be Marxist,” he says. In a 1973 review in this magazine, author Fray Angélico Chávez, also a native New Mexican, quibbled over the book’s witchcraft theme as “not a true picture of Hispanic New Mexicans in general” and wondered whether Anaya has “a Mexican mental background rather than a New Mexican one.”

Nonetheless, Anaya remained firmly committed to the movement, to writing, and to the promise of education. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UNM, he began a 29-year teaching career. The first decade took him from Harrison Junior High, in the South Valley, to Valley High School to the since closed University of Albuquerque. When Bless Me, Ultima’s success prompted an invitation to teach at UNM, he stayed for 19 years. Even with the day jobs, he says, “I was writing at night, writing all the time.”

In Heart of Aztlán, Tortuga, The Silence of the Llano, and other early works, Anaya honed his brand of magical realism and autobiography. A Chicano in China, a 1986 travel journal, launched his exploration of non–New Mexican subjects and themes. In 1987, The Farolitos of Christmas became the first of his many New Mexico–based children’s books. Between 1995 and 2015, he took on the mystery genre in four books featuring Albuquerque private eye Sonny Baca. And in the 2013 novel The Old Man’s Love Story, he confronted his grief over Patricia’s death with poetic pathos and profound love.

Bless Me, Ultima has now sold nearly two million copies in English and more than 80,000 in Spanish in the United States alone; has been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and French; and is on reading lists in schools nationwide. The book was adapted for a feature film in 2013. Next year comes Mexican American composer Hector Armienta’s opera.

As “an epic story of universal truths,” Armienta says, Bless Me, Ultima is a natural for local and global operagoers. Anaya is working closely with Armienta to develop his characters for the stage, while funds are being raised to take the production beyond Albuquerque.

“There are transformations in our lives,” Anaya says. “The same is true of artworks. Ultima has kept transforming herself. If the characters I write about are worthy of being made into other forms of art, I have to let them live for future generations.”

If Anaya has one wish for future New Mexicans, it is for them to read. One of his latest children’s books, inspired by the Rudolfo Anaya Summer Reading Program in Río Arriba County, features an owl from Española. The bird spends so much time playing with Raven and Crow that none of them learn to read. The book, to be published by the Museum of New Mexico Press in fall 2017, follows the trio to Wisdom School and tracks their adventures in literacy.

“I’m so interested in the children reading about the cultures here, but also worldwide, learning through novels about New Mexico or China or India or Brazil,” he says. “Very often we don’t have the money to take a trip, but we can visit so many places through reading.”

After guiding generations of readers across New Mexico’s llano and beyond, “the godfather” has become the elder. Age hasn’t dimmed Anaya’s desire to preserve his people’s special ways and place; it has added wisdom and insight to his stories. It has also carried the profound sorrow of losing his spouse and caused debilitating arthritis in his back. Still, he is heeding the lessons of Ultima: She taught me to listen to the mystery of the groaning earth and to feel complete in the fulfillment of its time.

“There’s pain and sadness, and it affects my life, but I’m the most grateful man in the world,” he says. “I still have my home and my family and I’m still writing. I pray every night, and I thank my abuelitos for their hard work. I’m grateful for the struggles that brought me here.”

The afternoon wanes, and Anaya and I close the book on our conversation. Later, I realize that his greatest legacy is teaching us that words and books are life. Places changes, people are transformed, but stories endure.

Anaya confirms this a few weeks later when I talk to him again. He tells me he is thinking about writing a new poem.

“The pear tree in the yard has been changing color,” he says. “If you pay close attention, you see that the story is more than just the tree. Each leaf has a history. How many stories are there?”

—Carmella Padilla is featured in Storytellers.

Siembra, Latino Theatre
The Season of La Llorona
November 3 – November 13

By Rudolfo Anaya
November 3-6, & November 10-13, 2016
7:30 pm—Thursday-Saturday
2 pm—Sunday
Rudolfo Anaya, acknowledged as the foremost author of New Mexican Hispanic culture and folkways and acclaimed as the founder of modern Chicano literature, has written over 40 books and plays; this is his first play. His exploration of the Mesoamerican legend of La Llorona, the “Wailing Woman,” gives both historic and human depth to the well-known myth. Presented in partnership with Teatro Nuevo México.
$18 w/ $3 discount for students, seniors, & NHCC members; $10 Thursday shows only

Unveiling of Rudolfo Anaya Bust

November 10

6 pm
Join the National Hispanic Cultural Center for an unveiling and dedication of Reynaldo “Sonny” Rivera’s sculptural bust of Rudolfo Anaya in the Center’s History and Literary Arts Library from 6 to 7 pm, in advance of the Center’s presentation of Mr. Anaya’s work The Season of La Llorona in the Roy E. Disney Center for Performing Arts at 7:30 pm. This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.

Generously donated by Mr. Anaya, the sculpture was accepted as a general acquisition of the NHCC by its Board of Directors in August 2016, and will be on display in the History and Literary Arts Library. The sculpture is the original prototype from which bronzed busts of Mr. Anaya have been reproduced; the latter currently reside at the Albuquerque Museum and the Rudolfo Anaya Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The installation of Mr. Anaya’s portrait in the Library and this dedication were made possible thanks to the generous support of New Mexico Mutual.

Free community event

A beloved native New Mexican, Mr. Anaya is an educator and renowned writer. Considered the father of contemporary Chicano literature, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015 and the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in 2001. Mr Anaya was raised in Santa Rosa and Albuquerque. His most famous works include Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Heart of Aztlán (1976), and Tortuga (1979). More recent works of fiction include Randy Lopez Goes Home: A Novel (2011) and The Old Man’s Love Story (2013).

The NHCC has proudly worked with Mr. Anaya since its opening in October 2000, and has presented many of his works, including the current presentation of The Season of La Llorona as part of the Center’s Siembra: Latino Theatre Season, and the planned 2018 presentation of an opera adaptation of Bless Me, Ultima.

University of New Mexico honoring Rudolfo Anaya with lecture

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The University of New Mexico will pay homage this week to acclaimed Mexican-American novelist Rudolfo Anaya, who was recently awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

The lecture was created through a donation from the Pastura, New Mexico-born author who also founded the school’s creative writing program.
Novelist and poet Rigoberto Gonzalez is scheduled to speak Thursday at an event that is part of the Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Lecture on the Literature of the Southwest. Anaya’s novel “Bless Me, Ultima” was made into a movie in 2013 and an opera based on the book is in the works.
Gonzalez said he is honored to speak at the Anaya lecture, especially since Anaya mentored him as a young writer.  Read more from the Albuquerque Journal