(throwing grains of salt every which way...)
OK, i'm passing out salt so y'all can take everything i say here with at least one grain. I teach at UNM (where Anaya IS professor emeritus and IS high profile still) and I teach Chicano and Latino literatures. (Oh no, the dreaded college teacher weighs in! :p ) So my view of Anaya's lit. and the current trend towards Chicano/"indigenous" separatism are colored by my position here, as well as by the fact that I'm Chicana myself.
Anaya: I find most of his writings pretty dreadful. They present a highly romanticized, unrealistic vision of what it means to be New Mexican or Chicano nowadays. His mysteries, which feature detective Sonny Baca, rely much too heavily on deus ex machina in the form of New Agey stuff (supposedly deeply-rooted Mexican indigenous beliefs, but it's all fairly contemporary in his rendering). His books are male-centered and have shallow, unimportant and sterotypical female characters. I much prefer other authors that Gooseman mentioned that do a much better job at representing contemporary Chicano culture without relying on stereotypes of Chicanos and wholesale dismissals (such as of anglo or peninsular cultures). Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Gary Soto, Alfredo Vea, Helena Maria Viramontes, Pat Mora, for instance, present a complex vision of Chicano/as.
They do all write in English. Why? Well, why not? Rodriguez's *Hunger of Memory* presents a deeply politicized view of why Chicanos should use English. The more practical side is that, as we live in the U.S. for more and more generations, Spanish is no longer the "creative" language because it is no longer the strongest or dominant language, even for bilinguals.
That said, I think it is important for any student of Spanish language who happens to be Chicano to learn all the variations (or that there are variations, at least) that Spanish presents us with, from Caribbean sound-dropping to Argentinian vos, to the vosotros form in Castilian. I have seen or heard of too many UNM students who expect their regional Spanish to be understood everywhere, enacting in a very unselfconscious way the "ugly American" stereotype on another level. ("What, you don't know what zacate is? I'll just say it louder and louder till you do get it!)
The need to understand that Spanish has many variations parallels the need for our young people to realize that demonizing any one part of their biological/cultural/historical makeup does our communities no good. We look "anglo", we look "latino," we look "indigeous"; we have blue, green, brown, and black eyes; we speak Spanish, we speak some Spanish, we speak no Spanish, we don't even understand "taco"; we are Republicans and Democrats and Greens; y'all get the idea... I could probably go on forever and you'd get bored (if you're not already!
)...
my point, essentially, piggybacking on your complaint, lamaestra, is that as long as Chicano/Latino communities idealize and romanticize some distant past, we neglect to focus on the here and now and the MANY MANY problems that face our diverse communities today, from immigration to economic self-sufficiency, to my pet peeve, a DECENT LIBERAL EDUCATION FOR ALL!
ahem. I'll put away my soapbox now. Hmmm... it was a pretty big one, huh?