Heart of Aztlan

Rudolfo A. Anaya Heart of Aztlan (1976)
I seem to recall Heart of Aztlan being important to the Chicano movement. The Chicano movement, in case you were wondering, emerged around the same time as other civil rights groups of the late twentieth century, in this instance representing the Mexican and Hispanic working classes principally in the southern United States. In Heart of Aztlan, Anaya reminds his people where they came from, reinforcing a cultural identity which was disrupted when the typical Chicano family found itself ejected from its traditional land and obliged to head north in search of work. For Anaya, this exodus represented an inversion of the Aztec origin legend wherein his people first came from the semi-mythic island of Aztlan in the north following a prophecy which, if historically specific to the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, has since become an abstract ideal serving all Chicanos.

That's my understanding anyway. I first read Heart of Aztlan back in the nineties when nary a day went by without my thinking about Huitzilopochtli*. I was trying to work out what happened next, and how Mexico coped with assimilation and syncretism. I liked it, and I got something from it, although it's about a present I barely recognised more than it's about the past. Since then, I've moved, and now live in a city with a 60% Hispanic population, so I'm getting a lot more from it. In fact the Albuquerque barrio of Anaya's book may as well be my own neighbourhood, and I'm sure it helps that I no longer need to look up any of the pachuco slang because I hear most of it daily.

That said, I can see why Anaya's big hit was Bless Me, Ultima rather than this one. Ultima tells a fairly similar story of a Mexican family moving north in search of work, but has a sharper narrative focus from what I recall, and is hence fairly dramatic in its own way. Heart of Aztlan tends to meander like a soap opera, moving from the unemployed father to the frustrated matriarch to the careless offspring hoping to get lucky at the high school, because their stories are different parts of the same thing, and the main character is the barrio itself more than its individual inhabitants. As with a soap, plenty happens - Clemente realises that neither his employer nor his union have his best interests at heart, the family integrates with its new neighbours and so on - but it feels chaotic, just as life tends to be.

The application of mythology to contemporary life is seamlessly done, and I particularly liked how la Llorana - the woman who wails at the crossroads, and Cihuacoatl in Mexica times - has become the siren of a cop car in twentieth century America; but the comparison is revealed only in the novel as a whole, and is less obvious in close up during individual passages. It's a good novel and a fairly powerful restatement of contemporary Chicano identity as the latest expression of a much older tradition, but it seems to lack the urgency of Bless Me, Ultima and at times feels like trying to read an Arboles de la Vida sculpture.

 *: Admittedly he's never far from my thoughts, even now.