ANAYA'S SPIRITUAL WORLD IN ITSELF, AND IN THE CONTEXT OF CHICANO AND LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Among the readers, critics and publishers there are some who insist on using the term magical realism in relation to supernatural events which occur in Anaya's fiction. In the few years after the publication mega-success of Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), it was almost inevitable that beginning with Anaya's first and spiritually rich novel, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), many readers and reviewers might read the novel as a kind of Chicano magical realist masterpiece. Now, Anaya was aware of this and acknowledged in 1999 that a work like Tortuga, the third and last volume of his "somewhat autobiographical New Mexico trilogy -[...]-verged on magical realism". Nonetheless, Anaya never seems to have used that term in reference to Bless Me, Ultima, nor indeed to other narratives by him. And, as this study will establish, this is because Anaya recognized in the trilogy (whose second volumen is the 1976 Heart of Aztlan) the prior reality of the New Mexican cultural mestizaje between Spanish and Indigenous influences becoming one living and dynamic reality. The aim of this paper is 1) to account for and otherwise describe Anaya's own representation of an essential, enchanted, 400-years-in-development New Mexican spiritual world, and how it develops in his work; and 2) to contextualize this unique world in fiction by Mexican American and Latin American writers during the last decades of the twentieth century. Much will be gained, it will be shown, by distancing Anaya's world from a magical realist one. Think of how Isabel Allende distanced The House of the Spirits (1982) from One Hundred Years of Solitude as a profound process of inter-textual dialogue which allowed her to emerge from the tremendous shadow of Garcia Marquez and tell her own stories her way. Or, pause to consider how the spells and powers of Ultima and the Trementina sisters have as much and as little explanation as many popular and biblical beliefs in the supernatural, but how those powers and spells shape characters' lives within Bless Me, Ultima.