His mother's family had come from Mexico and settled in the Puerto de Luna Valley, adjacent to the Pecos River and south of Santa Rosa. On his father's side, Anaya has roots in the pre-United States history of New Mexico: Anaya's grandfather was one of the original incorporators of La Merced de Atrisco land grant in Albuquerque. According to Anaya, "The land grant which my father's family had helped incorporate consisted of a huge area of land stretching for miles along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque's south valley, and then for miles west into desert as far as the Rio Puerco." A family of farmers and cowboys, Anaya's ancestors lived a rugged life in a desolate land. In a 1990 autobiographical essay Anaya recalls the independent spirit of his mother, Rafaelita Mares, and her resolve to leave her father's valley in 1919 to marry Solomon Bonney, a man from El Llano Estacado (the Staked Plain, the region buffering Texas and New Mexico). Bonney died in 1925, and Anaya wrote of his mother's situation, "A widow with two small children has no time for a long romance. She married Martín Anaya, a man without pretensions, a man who knew how to work the cattle and the sheep of the big ranchers." Martín Anaya had a daughter from a previous marriage, and he and Mares had seven children: three boys (Larry, Martín, and Rudolfo) and four girls (Edwina, Angelina, Dolores, and Loretta).
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