Randy Lopez Goes Home (review)

Renowned Chicano writer and National Medal of Arts honoree Rudolfo Anaya explores familiar and fresh realms in his latest novel, Randy Lopez Goes Home. Anaya traverses the boundaries of life and death to weave an allegory, a parable of hope and recovery twined in a synthesis of ancient and modern mythologies—both Anglo and Latino.

Randy Lopez has led a life not unlike many contemporary Chicanos in the United States. A product of the American public school system, Randy has worked in fast food and construction and served in the US military. As a young man, he left his home and family in northern New Mexico to make his mark upon the world. His return to his hometown of Agua Bendita prompts him to seek aspects of a strayed identity and a forgotten mestizo culture. Randy soon realizes that the unanswered questions of his life now drive an otherworldly quest as he journeys in the fantastical realms of Agua Bendita, a place neither here nor there, but "elsewhere."

Randy is not alone in elsewhere. With his trusty dachshund Oso, he encounters a hodgepodge of legendary figures and Hispanic and Western European archetypes. But why is Randy in this place and why can no one, including childhood friends and family, remember him?

Randy's quest begins on a traditional, Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, as he rides an old swayback mare into Agua Bendita, a postmodern realm of tricksters and ghosts where stories, like personages both real and mythical, change to fit the teller's needs. Here worlds magical and mundane collide, and the ancient holiday acts as a stage where the drama of life and death enfolds the traditional logic of the waking mind's reason and the magical reality that infuses a historical scene available only to the Latino imagination. As Randy continually questions aspects of life, death, religion, race, culture, and the nature of spiritual transformation, Anaya's complex philosophy emerges.

The characters Randy meets, from the Devil and La Muerte (Death) to various incarnations of female deities, a Zen master, and a personal spirit guide named Unica, are held together by a single theme: Randy's quest to return to Sofia, his long-lost love. He must build a bridge, says his childhood librarian, because "to be separated from each other is the greatest sin" (53). This then becomes his purpose: to build a bridge in the realm of death where the politics of the living yet reign.

Wrought throughout the pages of Randy Lopez Goes Home is a touching, funny, and thoughtful story that is profound and enigmatic. There are many morals here and quite a few lessons on how to break through the binaries that have separated cultures and peoples of the American Southwest for centuries. Inspiring and symbolically packed, Randy Lopez Goes Home is ultimately a novel of healing. A short, but challenging read, the novel will engage laypersons interested in cultures of the American Southwest as well as students and scholars of Chicana/o studies and borderlands studies.