A Study Guide for Alma Luz Villanueva's "Indian Summer Ritual"

Indian Summer Ritual

Alma Luz Villanueva

1994

Introduction

Alma Luz Villanueva is a Chicana poet of Yaqui Indian descent. She has written volumes of poetry, short-story collections, and novels and is especially eloquent in addressing issues surrounding women and feminism and the individual's relation to the greater world. In her own life, moving away from urban areas to increasingly rural locales allowed her to regain a lost connection with nature and attain creative self-fulfillment.

Indian Summer Ritual is an incantatory poem highlighting the importance of the individual's connection to nature through an experience of the poet's—in fact her first experience in the world outside her mother's womb, the experience of her birth. The setting is tranquil, even idyllic, as Indian summers often are. With the oppressive heat of real summer past, Indian summer offers a renewed warmth in which one is inclined to simply bask peacefully. Such a tone pervades the poem, offering a backdrop for a night and day in which the relation to the world established by the poet is essential to her humanity. The poem can be found in the anthology In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States (1994) and in Villanueva's own collection Desire (1998).

Author Biography

Villanueva was born on October 4, 1944, in Lompoc, California, on the Pacific Coast northwest of Los Angeles. Her father, a German, was gone before she was born, leaving her to be raised by her Mexican mother's side of the family; her grandmother, Jesús Villanueva, a Yaqui Indian medicine woman, was her primary caretaker, raising the young Alma in San Francisco's Mission District. She may have in part inherited her literary talent from her grandfather, a poet and newspaper editor who lived in Hermosillo, Mexico, but her grandmother was the strongest influence in her life, telling stories, relating Mexican traditions, and singing prayers to the sun in the morning. The grandmother also taught her to memorize Spanish poetry for recitation at church.

Villanueva's grandmother died when