SOURCE: “Rudolfo Anaya: ‘The Chicano Worldview,’” in Publishers Weekly, June 5, 1995, pp. 41–42.

In the following essay, Clark provides an overview of Anaya's life, literary career, and growing recognition as a founding father of contemporary Chicano literature.

From the large, east-facing windows of his home high on the mesa west of Albuquerque, N.M., Rudolfo Anaya commands a sweeping panorama of the Rio Grande Valley. The city where this legendary 57–year-old Chicano author has lived his varied and prolific literary life spreads out below, threaded by the sinuous bosque, the forest of giant cottonwoods, that flanks the Great River.

“River of dreams, river of cruel history, river of borders, river that was home,” Anaya calls this artery of water, so vital to the arid landscape of New Mexico, in his novel Alburquerque. It is a region that, with its unique, centuries-old Hispanic culture—part Spanish, part Native American—he has...