SOURCE: “Celebrating the Old Ways,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 30, 1992, p. 8.

In the following review, McIlvoy offers a positive assessment of Alburquerque.

Alburquerque is an archetypal story of a young man's initiation into self-acceptance and, finally, kinship with others. The truth offered in Rudolfo Anaya's newest novel is deceptively simple: Tu eres tu. You are who you are.

In Bless Me, Ultima, Heart of Aztlán, Tortuga, Silence of the Llano, and his works of nonfiction, this extraordinary storyteller has always written unpretentiously but provocatively about identity. Every work is a “fiesta,” a ceremony preserving but reshaping old traditions that honor the power within the land and la raza, the people. One account in Alburquerque explains:

It was in the fiestas of the people that I discovered the essence of my people, the Mexican heritage of my mother. There is a chronicle of life in the...