ChupaCabra Meets Billy the Kid (Volume 21)

Chicana & Chicano Visions of the Américas

by Rudolfo Anaya

After years of working with at-risk youth, Chicana social worker Rosa Medina leaves Los Angeles’s gang-ridden barrios and street violence to settle in the New Mexican village of Puerto de Luna. Her goal: to write a novel about Bilito—Billy the Kid. It all sounds straightforward enough, but things get more complicated—and a lot more exciting—when Rosa is transported back in time to 1879, where she participates in the infamous Lincoln County War, riding alongside Bilito. How Rosa achieves this fantastical feat of time travel, and what she discovers about herself, Bilito, and her Nuevomexicano heritage, unfolds through the course of this novel by master storyteller Rudolfo Anaya.

As she travels in time, Rosa passes into an alternative reality inhabited by extraordinary creatures, including shapeshifters, extraterrestrials, Bigfoot, and ChupaCabra. Readers familiar with Anaya’s previous ChupaCabra mysteries will remember the heroine’s earlier dealings with the elusive monster, a frightening creature of Hispanic folklore. But new dangers are also lurking for Rosa in the land of her ancestors, as a secret group of scientists known as C-Force threatens to clone ChupaCabra to create an army that will rule the world. As she encounters the Nuevomexicana women whose families suffered during the Lincoln County conflict, Rosa finds new reasons to fear the ChupaCabra—and to fight against the forces that threaten to shake the county to its core.

With her laptop computer in her saddlebag, Rosa rides into the Lincoln County War and accompanies Bilito on his last ride. By the end, her very soul is transformed, as she realizes that the same evil forces that propelled the violence along the Pecos River are much more resilient than she had hoped. In the finest tradition of magical realism and historical fiction, Anaya invites us to consider the ways that the supernatural reveals the realities of the past—and of our own times.
 

184 pages, Hardcover

Published August 30, 2018

About the author

Rudolfo Anaya lives and breathes the landscape of the Southwest. It is a powerful force, full of magic and myth, integral to his writings. Anaya, however, is a native Hispanic fascinated by cultural crossings unique to the Southwest, a combination of oldSpain and New Spain, of Mexico with Mesoamerica and the anglicizing forces of the twentieth century. Rudolfo Anaya is widely acclaimed as the founder of modern Chicano literature. According to the New York Times, he is the most widely read author in Hispanic communities, and sales of his classic Bless Me, Ultima (1972) have surpassed 360,000, despite the fact that none of his books have been published originally by New York publishing houses. His works are standard texts in Chicano studies and literature courses around the world, and he has done more than perhaps any other single person to promote publication of books by Hispanic authors in this country. With the publication of his novel, Albuquerque (1992),Newsweek has proclaimed him a front-runner in "what is better called not the new multicultural writing, but the new American writing." His most recent volume, published in 1995, is Zia Summer.

"I've always used the technique of the cuento. I am an oral storyteller, but now I do it on the printed page. I think if we were very wise we would use that same tradition in video cassettes, in movies, and on radio."

from
http://www.unm.edu/~wrtgsw/anaya.html
and
http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_reso...

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this book picks up where ChupaCabra and the Roswell UFO left off, the final book in this trilogy goes back to what made the first book so good. It explores the relationship of contemporary people with the mythology of New Mexico. In this case, university professor Rosa Medina finds herself pulled back in time to experience the last three years of Billy the Kid's life. Seeing Billy's life through the eyes of a modern professor and seeing how Billy interacted with the people of places like Lincoln, Fort Sumner, and Las Vegas is easily the stuff of a 5-star book. The ChupaCabra of the title seems to exist as both a government-created monster and a manifestation of people's fear. Ostensibly, it chases Rosa back through time to recover secrets she stole in the previous book. However, we actually have very little of ChupaCabra in this book. The creature itself fades as the story progresses, probably because Rosa's fear fades as she learns about New Mexico's past. I felt this part of the story could have been better fleshed out.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenges: Hey, Readerathon - Feb/Mar 2021 - Next in series/sequel (1); Creature Feature Reading Extravaganza Oct 2020 - Cryptoid (4); Reading Goal Posts/Stacking the Series - Priority Two/Tier Five. The third book in Anaya's Chupacabra series, and No. 21 in the Chicana and Chicano Visions of the Americas series. Chupacabra and Bigfoot (Patas Grandes) act as satirical analogs for the stories humans create to deal with our shadow selves. Cryptids and the sci-fi element of bending time aside, this is a story about the creative process in general, and the writing process in particular. How time is bent, the responsibility of the creative to find the 'soul passage' that recognizes the past in our present and future, and the amplification of the multi-voices of time make it possible for our varied realities of experience to be heard in story.

[Garrett]

Of all the wonderful things I read in my Latino Literature in the United States class, this was undoubtedly the most questionable. So much and yet so little happened.

[Xochi Ruiz · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF, it was mostly the same thing over and over and i got tired of it.

[Nicole]

This was such a creative concept for Anaya. I believe this was his 2nd to last book written before his passing. I have read a lot of his work and it is inspiring that he came up with such a creative plot and was still growing as a writer even into his final years.

The chupacabra series could have been better marketed by the publishers.i own all three books and there isnt anything uniform about them indicating a series. Book #1 has cool golden slash marks on its cover...representing claws. That would have been a cool look for the whole series.

Also, there is historical information in a summary format about Billy the Kids and the Lincoln County war placed at the books end. Imo the publisher should have placed this at the front of the book because it does help the reader follow all the characters and events of the plot