Rio Grande Fall by Rudolfo Anaya
(University of New Mexico Press, 1996)

Bless me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya has always been a staple in my American literature courses because of its timeless coming of age story of young Antonio Marez as well as the author’s creative use of Magic Realism, or a term I prefer and will discuss later, Mythic Realism. In addition, the novel’s setting includes excellent historical and cultural references that add to my students’ multicultural knowledge. However, several sites  on the internet provide excellent chapter by chapter synopses and character descriptions, so I decided to try anther book by Anaya that my students could not find summarized on Sparknotes!

I must first admit that I am not a fan of murder mysteries with a private investigator as the main protagonist and lots of government intrigue, especially involving illegal drugs. But after having met Anaya and hearing him read at a Western Literature Association conference in Albuquerque, I thought I would give the novel a chance. Besides, it is not available in Sparknotes or any other comparable site, so my students would have to actually read the book. In addition, a murder mystery probably would appeal to my general studies enrollees.

The plot centers around a murder at the famous Albuquerque Balloon Festival when a woman falls to her death from a hot air balloon, and the hero, Sonny Baca, is called in to investigate. I discovered that this book is a sequel to Zia Summer published in 1995, and the opening chapters had to catch me up quickly with the incidents that occurred in the previous novel that led up to this story. It was all sort of confusing, and I almost closed the book, but I persevered, and soon I became engrossed in the twists and turns of this sequel as Baca tries to figure out whodunit.

Although Anaya included the requisite number of drug cartels, rogue CIA agents, and altogether too many gorgeous women trying to lure Sonny into their beds, what saved the novel for me was not especially how the murder was solved but the cultural and historical elements of the setting and, again, his use of Magic/Mythic Realism. In reading works such as Bless Me, Ultima, I had usually been employing the literary term Magic Realism to explain unrealistic elements of a work on fiction, such as the brujas, the Golden Carp, and Ultima’s owl. According to most definitions, it is a literary technique that uses incredible or fantastic events in a matter-of-fact way to make a narrative apparently realistic. Concepts such as dreams, visions, special powers, spirits, and shape-shifting are accepted as commonplace by the reader who is expected to suspend his or her disbelief or presupposed ideas.

Author Alberto Rios on his “Magic Realism” website at Arizona State University offers many definitions of Magic Realism gleaned from authors and literary critics. I especially like this one by Angel Flores in his essay “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction”: “In magical realism we find the transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal. It is predominantly an art of surprises. Time exists in a kind of timeless fluidity and the unreal happens as part of reality. Once the reader accepts the fait accompli, the rest follows with logical precision (Magical Realism. Ed.  Zamora and Faris, p. 113-116).

However, in my research in preparation to teach Fools Crow by Native American author James Welch, I discovered a different angle to the “unreal” in literature. In Other Destinies, Louis Owens defines this unreality as Mythic Realism (213), believing that in most Native American literature, “there is no disjunction between the real and the magical, no sense that the magical is metaphorical. . . . The sacred and the profane interpenetrate irresistibly, and this is reality. If the reader can pass through that conceptual horizon, if the reader acknowledges and accepts this reality, he or she experiences an Indian world” (165-166).

A chasm exists between magic and myth. Whereas magic relies on illusions and appearance, myth, on the other hand, is an accepted belief by a particular community. According to the Handbook to Literature, “myth in its traditional sense is an anonymous, nonliterary, essentially religious formulation of the cosmic view of a people who approach its formulations not as representations of truth but as truth itself” (Harmon & Holman, 2008:359). In other words, in some cultures, when the spiritual world interacts and communicates with mortal men and women, it is not magic: it is real, it happens.

This difference will be significant in teaching any work by Anaya. In Rio Grande Fall, Sonny goes through a ceremony with a bruja who helps him find his “nagual,” or animal spirit, the coyote, and later in a climactic scene, he enters their world. The antagonist, Raven, is also a brujo although he becomes evil incarnate. It will be critical for students to understand the difference between mythic and magic realism in this story, for to some Hispanics, brujas and brujos, both good and evil, are real, and students must learn to accept the reality of the world Anaya believes exists.

Cultural and historical allusions would also make this a very worthwhile multicultural text to teach. Sonny is the namesake of Elfego Baca, an historical, New Mexican folk hero; the Festival del Otono and the burning of Kookooee, El Coco, in effigy is still celebrated; and the homeless are a cultural problem across the United States. In addition, there are references to La Llorona, the Virgen de Guadalupe, the zia symbol and the solstices, and the trickster coyote as well as historical references to the Aztecs and Cabeza de Vaca.

Perhaps the most worthwhile lesson students could take from the novel, however, is the classic theme of good versus evil. “‘Life is a struggle, back and forth, the force of evil and the force of good,’ Don Eliseo said. ‘All through the centuries, man creates the gods and the demons, and they fight, back and forth. And where does the fight take place? In the heart. El corazon is the battleground. There is clarity for the soul if a person pays attention. If you don’t pay attention, evil fills the soul. One has to pay attention, every day, every minute'” (331-332). The old man warns Sonny to take care of himself. “Those evil people are never done” (332). And since two more Sonny Baca mysteries follow this one, Shaman Winter (1999) and Jemez Spring (2005), the reader can be certain that Baca will continue to combat the forces of Raven’s evil.