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Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya was born in the rural village of Pastura, New Mexico. His
father came from a family of cattle workers and sheepherders, and his mother’s family
were farmers. When Anaya was a small child, his family moved to Santa Rosa, New
Mexico. In 1952, they relocated to Albuquerque, where they lived in the Barelas
neighborhood. Spanish was spoken at home, and Anaya did not learn English until he
started school.
After graduating from high school in 1956, Anaya attended business school for
two years, but found it unfulfilling. He transferred to the University of New Mexico,
where he graduated in 1963 with a degree in English. He then worked as a public school
teacher in Albuquerque from 1963 to 1970, and in 1966, he married Patricia Lawless,
who would serve as his editor over the years. She encouraged him to pursue his literary
endeavors, and over a period of seven years, he completed his first novel, Bless Me,
Ultima. Dozens of publishing houses rejected the novel, but finally, in 1972, a group of
editors at El Grito, a Chicano quarterly, accepted the book. Bless Me, Ultima went on to
win the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol award and is now considered a classic Chicano
work. It was chosen as one of the books of The Big Read, a community-reading program
sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. It is also one of the literary works in
2009 of the United States Academic Decathlon. Anaya followed Bless Me, Ultima with
Heart of Aztlan (1978) and Tortuga (1979), forming a trilogy.
In 1974, Anaya accepted a position as an associate professor at the University of
New Mexico. He became a full professor in the Department of English Language and
Literature in 1988. Since retiring from the University in 1993 as a Professor Emeritus,
Anaya has continued to write, completing—among other works—the novel Alburquerque
and the Sonny Baca quartet of detective novels.
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