Rudolfo Anaya and Banned Books Week
Monday, October 1st by carlaThe American Library Association sponsors Banned Books Week; this year, September 29 to October 6. Their slogan is “Free people read freely.”
Combining Banned Books Week with Hispanic Heritage Month, it seems appropriate to mention Rudolfo Anaya, whose Bless Me, Ultima, is listed as #75 of the Most Frequently Challenged Books, .
Comparable to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in many ways, Bless Me, Ultima, is the story of Antonio, a boy who matures as he struggles to reconcile two opposing religious viewpoints. Because he ultimately rejects Christianity in favor of traditional Native American beliefs and practices, the book is often challenged in schools.
Bless Me, Ultima was Anaya’s first novel, published in 1972. It was awarded the Premio Quinto Sol award, for which Anaya received $1000. Today it is considered a classic, and Anaya is often called “the father of Chicano literature.”
Anaya taught in public schools and served as a counselor at the University of Albuquerque before joining the faculty of the University of New Mexico in 1974. He continued to write novels, publishing Heart of Aztlan in 1976, Tortuga in 1979, The Legend of La Llorona in 1984, Albuquerque in 1992 (a winner of the PEN Center West Award for Fiction). He published Zia Summer in 1995, Rio Grande Fall in 1996, Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert, also in 1996, and Shaman Winter in 1999. Curse of the ChupaCabra was published in 2006.
Anaya has also published collections of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction.
He has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Governor’s Award for Literature (1980), an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree from the University of Albuquerque (1981), the Award for Achievement in Chicano Literature of the Hispanic Caucus of the National Conference of Teachers of English (1983), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Fellowship (1983), the Mexican Medal of Friendship (1886), the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities’ Excellence in the Humanities (1995), and the Luis Leal Award (2004). President George Bush awarded him a National Medal of Arts in 2002.
He retired from teaching in 1993.
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:50 am
Anaya is one of my favorite writers. It was interesting to teach Bless Me, Ultima to high school seniors. I received only one protest while teaching it over a period of about five years — from a student who had come to the US at age 15 after finishing secundaria in Mexico. He was a very well educated young man in Spanish and becoming very fluent very quickly in English. Interesting that he was the only one in all those years who didn’t want to read it. (I assigned him a different novel to read.)
After Bless Me, Ultima, the next of Anaya’s books I read was Alburquerque, mostly because of my fascination with the city and surrounding areas. Also interesting to me was the spelling he chose for the city’s name throughout the book — the original spelling from the name of the Spanish Duke who established the village. Here’s what Anaya wrote just before chapter 1 begins:
“In April of 1880 the railroad reached La Villa de Alburquerque in New Mexico. Legend says the Anglo stationmaster couldn’t pronounce the first “r” in “Albur,” so he dropped it as he painted the station sign for the city. This novel restores the original spelling, Alburquerque.”
(Aside: This reminds me of what happened with uncountable numbers of people’s names as they came into this country, many of whom through Ellis Island. One of my ancestors had the name of Smith, but he was born in Germany. My assumption is that his name was really Schmidt, but he changed it when he got to New York!)
In checking the entry for Anaya in Wikipedia, I see he has published the fourth Sonny Baca mystery — Jemez Spring. I’ll have to go hunting for that one!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolfo_Anaya
=)
November 9th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Sadly, “Huck Finn” has just recently been dropped from high school reading here in Texas. Here is a link to the story from the Dallas Morning News, 11/1:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/110107dnmethuckfinn.1c65c58d9.html
I teach at UT-Dallas, and we have a “banned books” display up at our library right now. I was very pleased to see that many of the books frequently asked about on the eNotes Q&A boards are being taught, for example, “The Chocolate War,” “The Cay,” “Walk Two Moons” and “The Slave Dancer,” among many others.
Have any of you taught these works or others? Did you feel intimidated by the system or students in your presentations?