Rudolfo Anaya’s Maize Narratives

Abstract

A major figure of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya has often engaged sociocultural issues pertaining to Indohispano groups in the US Southwest. Nevertheless, numerous studies have criticized his work within the context of the Chicano movement on grounds that it evades explicit confl ict with mainstream US society. Calling on decolonial theories as proposed by Roberto Cintli Rodríguez, Jodi Byrd, and Winona Wheeler, I propose that by reading Anaya’s texts through a decolonization lens, we can understand his work not as a counternarrative to the Americanization of the US Southwest, but rather as a narrative of Indohispano resiliency. He expresses this resiliency through the symbolism of maize, and therefore I refer to his works as maize narratives. Throughout his forty-seven-year career, maize serves as a recurring trope whose meaning shifts: from a means of affi rming one’s identity to a vehicle for kinship networks, from a marker of syncretism to a marker of loss in a globalizing world. Examining several representative works, I conclude that Anaya’s maize narratives allow the possibility of moving beyond colonizing discourse to recover communities lost to modern-day nation-states.