Foreword

By Lisa D. Chavez

Issue 43 • Spring 2021

Welcome to Blue Mesa Review’s second issue dedicated to our founder, Rudolfo Anaya. I came to his work late, but his books were part of a larger homecoming for me. I moved to New Mexico eighteen years ago when I began work at UNM, and at that time, I knew Anaya only by name. I quickly remedied that–that first summer I spent my days settling into my house in the Sandias, hiking to get to know the land, reading to get to know the people and history of this place my ancestors called home. I read Bless Me, Ultima, and continued with Alburquerque and others. I knew little of my Chicanx heritage before I moved to Albuquerque, but I knew that my father and his siblings had been born in the South Valley, along with previous generations of family that had been born and died along the Rio Grande. I met family from my grandmother’s side, who lived in the village of Los Padillas for many generations. I still visit the cemetery, tending the graves of generations of ancestors. Occasionally I run into the caretaker, and we discuss family, pointing to handmade gravestones, claiming one or another. The names overlap; we are probably distant cousins.

Rudolfo Anaya’s work helped me place myself back into a family history I no longer had access to: my grandparents are dead, buried not in the quiet cemetery at Los Padillas, but in southern California, where they moved to find work in the 1940s. New Mexico is just a place that my father’s generation, raised in LA, have vague memories of and little contact with, except for the care packages of green chile shipped out once a year. But in Rudy Anaya’s work, I found a way to enter imaginatively into the life my ancestors here must have known, and felt I had finally come home. And it wasn’t just his writing about generations of Nuevo Mexicanos before me that mattered: his words also helped me make sense of who I am and brought me into a deeper understanding of the complex identity of the Chicanx people. In the pages of his books, I found others like me: those with a deep connection to this land and place, to both Spanish and Indigenous ancestors, and to the roots and history and magic of New Mexico.

The world lost something precious and soulful when Rudolfo Anaya left this world in the summer of 2020. It was a bleak year for us all, a pandemic raging, a year of loss and fear, and the loss of such a generous and kind man of letters was another blow in a year full of them. Now, as the mountains and mesas of New Mexico are regreening, turning toward the business of spring, perhaps the end of the pandemic is finally visible on the horizon line. My thoughts turn to Anaya’s words: “Always have the strength to live. Love life, and if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills, I shall be with you.” Those words are Ultima’s words but are also his own. Rudolfo Anaya will always be with us.

In spite of the pandemic, this year has been something of a whirlwind. As a magazine, we achieved a lot: we put out a beautiful tribute to Mr. Anaya in issue 42, with work that honored him, as well as our summer contest winners. We also read through an enormous number of submissions for this spring–literally thousands–and we’re proud to showcase the work you’ll find in these pages. I want to thank not only our small, dedicated staff, but also the tireless readers from the BMR classes, especially this spring’s class: thank you for all your hard work. It’s resulted in this beautiful issue.

I’ll leave you with more words of wisdom from BMR’s founder: “Writing helps me to return to mythic time, the time of dreams. To recreate from depths of darkness the world of light. This is the role of the writer, the shaman of words. To dare to be born with each story into a new awareness.” Isn’t that the magic of words, of story? We’re reborn in each reading, each writing.

Welcome to Issue 43.

Lisa D. Chavez

Associate Professor, UNM English Department

Faculty Advisor, Blue Mesa Review