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While award-winning author Rudolfo Anaya is known primarily as a
novelist, his genius is also evident in dramatic works performed
regularly in his native New Mexico and throughout the world. "Billy
the Kid and Other Plays" collects seven of these works and offers
them together for the first time. Like his novels, many of Anaya's
plays are built from the folklore of the Southwest. This volume
opens with "The Season of La Llorona," in which Anaya fuses the
Mexican legend of the dreaded "crying woman" with that of La
Malinche, mistress and adviser to Hernan Cortes. Southwestern lore
also shapes the title play, which provides a Mexican American
perspective on the Kid--or Bilito, as he is known inNew
Mexico--along with keen insight into the slipperiness of history.
"The Farolitos of Christmas" and "Matachines" uncover both the
sweet and the sinister in stories behind seasonal New Mexican
rituals. Other plays here address loss of the old ways--farming,
connection to the land, the primacy of family--while showing the
power of change. The mystery "Who Killed Don Jose?" uses the murder
of a wealthy sheep rancher to look at political corruption and
modernization. "Ay, Compadre " and "Angie" address aging and death,
though with refreshing humor and optimism. Elegant and poetic,
intense and funny, these are the plays Anaya considers his best.
The author tells how each originated, while Cecilia J. Aragon and
Robert Con Davis- Undiano offer critical analysis and performance
history. Both Anaya fans and readers new to his work will find this
collection a rich trove, as will community theaters and scholars in
Chicano literature and drama.
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin
American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia - unable, or
unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous
populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano
documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino
culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in
collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as
intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At
once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans
have ""come home"" in a profound sense: they have reasserted their
right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos
Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have
brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition
of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of
indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican
conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical
gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important
artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste)
paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists
including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He
also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco
de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence
on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for
meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale
landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home!
shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an
argument for social justice and a renewal of America's democratic
ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.
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The Essays (Paperback)
Rudolfo Anaya, Robert Con Davis-Undiano
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R750
Discovery Miles 7 500
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"The storyteller's gift is my inheritance," writes Rudolfo Anaya in
his essay "Shaman of Words." Although he is best known for Bless
Me, Ultima and other novels, his writing also takes the form of
nonfiction, and in these 52 essays he draws on both his heritage as
a Mexican American and his gift for storytelling. Besides tackling
issues such as censorship, racism, education, and sexual politics,
Anaya explores the tragedies and triumphs of his own life.Collected
here are Anaya's published essays. Despite his wide acclaim as the
founder of Chicano literature, no previous volume has attempted to
gather Anaya's nonfiction into one edition. A companion to The Man
Who Could Fly and Other Stories, the collection of Anaya's short
stories, The Essays is an essential anthology for followers of
Anaya and those interested in Chicano literature. Pieces such as
"Requiem for a Lowrider," "La Llorona, El KookoOee, and Sexuality,"
and "An American Chicano in King Arthur's Court" take the reader
from the llano of eastern New Mexico, where Anaya grew up, to the
barrios of Albuquerque, and from the devastating diving accident
that nearly ended his life at sixteen to the career he has made as
an author and teacher. The point is not autobiography, although a
life story is told, nor is it advocacy, although Anaya argues
persuasively for cultural change. Instead, the author provides
shrewd commentary on modern America in all its complexity. All the
while, he employs the elegant, poetic voice and the interweaving of
myth and folklore that inspire his fiction. "Stories reveal our
human nature and thus become powerful tools for insight and
revelation," writes Anaya. This collection of prose offers abundant
new insight and revelation.
In the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico's Mora
Valley harbors the ghosts of history: troubadours and soldiers,
Plains Indians and settlers, families fleeing and finding home.
There, more than a century ago, villagers collect scraps of paper
documenting the valley's history and their identity - military
records, travelers' diaries, newspaper articles, poetry, and more -
and bind them into a leather portfolio known as ""The Book of
Archives."" When a bomb blast during the Mexican-American War
scatters the book's contents to the wind, the memory of the
accounts lives on instead in the minds of Mora residents. Poets and
storytellers pass down the valley's traditions into the twentieth
century, from one generation to the next. In this pathbreaking
dual-language volume, author A. Gabriel Melendez joins their ranks,
continuing the retelling of Mora Valley's tales for our time. A
native of Mora with el don de la palabra, the divine gift of words,
Melendez mines historical sources and his own imagination to
reconstruct the valley's story, first in English and then in
Spanish. He strings together humorous, tragic, and quotidian
vignettes about historical events and unlikely occurrences,
creating a vivid portrait of Mora, both in cultural memory and
present reality. Local gossip and family legend intertwine with
Spanish-language ballads and the poetry of New Mexico's most famous
dueling troubadours, Old Man Vilmas and the poet Garcia. Drawing on
New Mexican storytelling tradition, Melendez weaves a colorful
dual-language representation of a place whose irresistible
characters and unforgettable events, and the inescapable truths
they embody, still resonate today.
This guide to Native American history and culture outlines new ways
of understanding American Indian cultures in contemporary contexts.
"Native American Studies" covers key issues such as the intimate
relationship of culture to land; the nature of cultural exchange
and conflict in the period after European contact; the unique
relationship of Native communities with the United States
government; the significance of language; the vitality of
contemporary cultures; and the variety of Native artistic styles,
from literature and poetry to painting and sculpture to performance
arts. This thematic approach places history, culture, and
intellectual production in the contexts of politics and power.
Using specific examples throughout the book, the authors portray
the culture of Native Americans from the viewpoints of Native
people as well as from those of non-Native Americans.
Readers of Rudolfo Anaya's fiction know the lyricism of his prose,
but most do not know him as a poet. In this, his first collection
of poetry, Anaya presents twenty-eight of his best poems, most of
which have never before been published. Featuring works written in
English and Spanish over the course of three decades, Poems from
the Rio Grande offers readers a full body of work showcasing
Anaya's literary and poetic imagination. Although the poems
gathered here take a variety of forms - haiku, elegy, epic - all
are imbued with the same lyrical and satirical styles that underlie
Anaya's fiction. Together they make a fascinating complement to the
novels, stories, and plays for which he is well known. In verse,
Anaya explores every aspect of Chicano identity, beginning with
memories of his childhood in a small New Mexico village and ending
with mature reflections on being a Chicano who considers himself
connected to all peoples. The collection articulates the themes at
the heart of all Anaya's work: nostalgia for the landscape and
customs of his boyhood in rural New Mexico, a deep connection to
the Rio Grande, the politics of Chicanismo and satire aimed at it,
and the use of myth and history as metaphor. Anaya also illustrates
his familiarity with world traditions of poetry, invoking Walt
Whitman, Homer, and the Bible. The poem to Isis that concludes the
collection honors Anaya's wife, Patricia, and reflects his
increasing identification with spiritual traditions across the
globe. Both profeta and vato, seer and homeboy, Anaya as author is
a citizen of the world. Poems from the Rio Grande offers readers a
glimpse into his development as a poet and as one of the most
celebrated Chicano authors of our time.
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