What's a Chicano Mystery?
Did the godfather of Chicano literature write crime fiction? ¡Sí! Rudolfo Anaya, author of a lyrical coming-of-age story that appears on innumerable American literature course syllabi, wrote a series of four murder mysteries. More on that in a sec. Anaya helped found Chicano literature in 1972 when he published Bless Me, Ultima, winning the Premio Quinto Sol. (The ‘quinto sol’ or fifth sun comes from the Aztec belief that the world was destroyed four times by the gods and we are now living in the fifth world. Editorial Quinto Sol, or Quinto Sol Publications was founded in 1967 in Berkeley to publish Mexican-American authors and counter negative stereotypes about Mexican-Americans common in the US.)
Bless Me, Ultima recounts a boy’s relationship with a curandera, a healer, in rural northern New Mexico of the 1940s. While community members attend the Catholic Church and send their children to the priest for confirmation classes, they fear witchcraft, blame misfortune on curses and accuse Ultima of being a witch. Anthony knows Ultima as a wise herbalist healer who teaches him about plants found on the llano. But deaths occur, witchcraft accusations surface, and a young boy’s life is changed by violence and tragedy. The poetic language of the novel seems overdone by contemporary standards, but the story is touching. You can watch a film version produced in 2013 if you’re pressed for time (aren’t we all?)
By the way, Anaya’s tacit acceptance of non-Christian supernatural forces led to problems with school boards around the country. Even though Bless Me, Ultima entered the semi-divine realm of inclusion in the literary canon, there were many efforts to censor it from secondary curricula. It even made it onto the American Library Association’s list of ten most challenged books during the early 2000s.
Anaya wrote a handful of books for children recounting New Mexican folk tales. And he wrote two YA mysteries with quirky original concepts, The Curse of the Chupacabra and Chupacabra and the Roswell UFO. A chupacabra is a folk monster blamed for livestock deaths and other misfortunes (it means ‘goat-sucker’). In these plots it encounters drug traffickers, meth shipments, Roswell extraterrestrials and more.
His four murder mysteries follow Albuquerque PI Sonny Baca as he solves murders and struggles against an evil spirit named Raven. The stories include conventional elements like clues, bombs, drug traffickers and graphic murders along with unconventional, even non-realistic, elements like brujas (witches), guardian spirits and precognitive dreams. How does he get away with this in a genre known for realism?
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Tony Hillerman includes witchcraft in his mysteries, but the skeptical perspective of Joe Leaphorn and the agnostic position of Jim Chee give readers the option to identify with the position of a university-educated non-believer. The Sonny Baca mysteries don’t. Anaya’s books aren’t cozy fantasy, a hot genre that employs a murder mystery template in a fantasy world. Sonny Baca’s Albuquerque is a real place. Maybe we should call them magical realist crime fiction? But the novels don’t playfully exaggerate the way Garcia Marquez might.
How about the fantastic, that semi-forgotten literary genre where doubt about what is true or illusory never gets resolved? Poe played with this one, for example, when he had an unreliable narrator complain that a black cat was out to kill him; if the black cat is truly murderous it’s uncanny, but if the guy is an opium addict it’s a narrative of madness. If you never find out which, it’s the fantastic.
Anaya’s books don’t offer readers an outsider perspective. Nor do they use overblown figures to undermine the reader’s immersion in the imaginary world. And they don’t question the reality of supernatural entities. We’re plopped into the worldview of people who aren’t part of America’s dominant culture. Here healers gather curing herbs in the llano, witchcraft is blamed when someone dies and one’s spirit can enter an owl and fly away. That’s just the way it is.
The Sonny Baca murder mysteries are interesting concepts even if they don’t rate as super-successful crime fiction. And Anaya never seemed to grapple with the sexism that tainted Chicano culture. But Chicano crime fiction is a fascinating niche. Manuel Ramos has written crime novels set in the Latino neighborhoods of Denver’s north side that he calls Chicano Noir. Rolando Hinajosa set two crime novels on the Texas border. I’d love to hear about Chicano mysteries you’ve read.