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chapter 5 RUDOLFO ANAYA’S SONNY BACA SERIES GOVERNING THE SELF IN A SEA OF CHANGE While other mystery writers like Manuel Ramos and Lucha Corpi participated in the Chicana/o Movement as activists, Rudolfo Anaya took on special significance for la causa Chicana. Along with other cultural workers such as Alurista, Corky Gonzales, and Luis Valdez, he was one of the heralds and scribes of cultural nationalism. His writing in general , and Bless Me, Ultima (1972) in particular, provided a vital resource for a better understanding of the relation of Mesoamerican cultural practices to Chicana/o identity. He illustrated how spiritual, mystical, and mythical beliefs could be recuperated and synthesized to bring to realization a distinctive, self-empowered Chicana/o subject that was deeply invested in making claims on indigenous and Spanish culture as it forged a unique ‘‘New World’’ identity. Later, writing some two decades after the demise of the Chicana/o Movement in 1975, Anaya again turns to the mystical elements of New Mexico as he stages his battle between the forces of good and evil in his Sonny Baca trilogy— Zia Summer (1995), Rio Grande Fall (1996), and Shaman Winter (1999).1 In other words, he pursues a cultural nationalist articulation of Chicana /o identity at a time when that articulation lacks an explanatory power for grappling with the conditions and circumstances of contemporary Chicana/o subjects. Though written in a hard-boiled style, Anaya’s detective fiction swerves interestingly away from liberal conceptions of the political sphere associated with hard-boiled detective fiction from the 1930s to the 1960s. As Sean McCann persuasively argues in Gumshoe America (2000), hard-boiled crime fiction provided a cultural analog to the political debates about liberalism and the governance of society. According to a liberal model of the State, individuals submit to laws that they may feel are not their own or with which they may disagree because such a submission is in their rational self-interest. During the New Deal era the government sought to check the political and economic elites who were shaping political and business affairs in such a way that the individual’s rational self-interest was no longer served. Thus the conception of liberal society passed through a number of rearticulations (16–35). McCann deftly argues that ‘‘in their efforts to imagine a democratic literature and a reformed literary marketplace, the creators of hard-boiled crime fiction [Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Chester Himes] turned successively to analogs of each of these political visions [i.e., the evolving liberal ideology from the 1930s to the 1960s]’’ (35). Written some three decades after the terminal point of McCann’s argument, Rudolfo Anaya’s Sonny Baca series offers a different vision of governance and self-interest. As articulated in the Baca series, the governance of the Nuevo Mexicana/o depends not on the laws of State, but on a struggle between good and evil that is connected to rescuing the ‘‘ways of the ancestors.’’ In other words, the success of the social contract and the longevity of the Nuevo Mexicana/o population hinge on understanding the history, mythology, and folkways of those whom Anaya identifies as the ‘‘señores y señoras de la luz’’2 (the lords and ladies of the light). I am not suggesting that these Nuevo Mexicana/o subjects have transcended the authority and power of the State. Indeed, as Foucault ’s model of governmentality would suggest, these other forms of governance, while sundry in their realizations, are still immanent to the State.3 I would not want to pretend, that is, that the practices of differing forms of governance in the Baca series set Anaya’s Nuevo Mexicana/os in a transcendent position to State governance. But if we consider the relationship between the rhetoric of governance and the detective novel, we see a shift in Anaya from the liberal model McCann charts, with individuals submitting to laws for rational self-interest, to a practice of governance in the Baca series staked to community interest .To understand this shift, the discourses of race, origins, history, and spiritualism through which these strategies of governance and identi- fication operate must be analyzed. These discourses become grounding elements in Sonny’s struggle to shore up his identity so that he will be best prepared to battle the forces of evil, as represented by the series’s antagonist, Anthony Pájaro (aka Raven). Unlike...

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