Such parallels between life and fiction indicate Anaya's penchant for blending the real with the imagined.
In his 1985 autobiographical sketch he wrote for Contemporary Authors Anaya speaks candidly about his family. His mother, Rafaelita, was the daughter of Liborio Marez, a farmer from the Puerto de Luna Valley, a small village on the Pecos River close to Santa Rosa. He describes the farmers of this region as a Spanish-speaking people who have been in the valley for a hundred years, migrating from the Rio Grande valley to "farm, to raise their families, to adore their Catholic God and venerate His Blessed Mother, as their forefathers had done in Spain and Mexico before them." His mother's people did everything from cleaning the irrigation ditches to making chile ristras, or red chili peppers placed on a string to dry.
Rafaelita left the valley and its life to marry a man of the llano (plains)--a working cowboy with whom she had a son and a daughter. After the death of her first husband Rafaelita married Martin Anaya. From that union came seven children--Larry, Martin, Edwina, Angelina, Rudolfo, Dolores, and Loretta.
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