ON a cool, breezy New Mexico evening early last summer a crowd of over 300 people converged on the auditorium of the University of Albuquerque for an evening of fiction readings and classical guitar music. On most campuses in the East you'd have to hunt to find even three people who recognized the name of Rudolfo Anaya, the novelist who was the main attraction that night.
Out West, though, Anaya, at 44, stands as one of the leading figures in a rapidly growing, loosely confede rated group of Mexican-American fiction writers, poets, play wrights and critics thatstretches from Houston in the east to Los Angeles in the west and from Denver in the north to El Paso and Laredo in the south. They call this region ''Aztlan,'' after the mythological place of origin of the ancient Aztecs, which was situated, according to all reports both historical and mythological, in what is now the southwestern United States, the homeland where they first constituted themselves as a people and from which they emigrated southward into the Valley of Mexico.
But, if Aztlan is a place, it is also a state of mind, a homeland at once simpler and more complex than the lands of origin of the U.S. Jews and Italians and Arabs and Greeks and blacks. Unlike other hyphenated Americans, only the Chicanos actually reside in the location of their ancestors. Some of the certainty afforded by this fact came through in Anaya's voice -rich as mahogany, terse as a stream - when he read selections from his first, and still most popular, novel, ''Bless Me, Ultima,'' a book that won the Quinto Sol prize for fiction in 1972 and that in more than a dozen paperback printings, brought out by Tonatiuh International in Berkeley, has sold over 100,000 copies.
''There is a time in the last few days of summer when the ripeness of autumn fills the air,'' he told the audience in the words of his adolescent narrator, Antonio, whose education into the world of family, society, work, death, magic and morals comprises the story of the book. ''I lived that time fully, strangely aware of a new world opening up an d taking shape for me. In the mornings, before it was too hot, Ulti ma and I walked in the hills of the llano, gathering thewild herbs an d roots for her medicines. We roamed the entire countryside a nd up and down the river. I carried a small shovel with which to dig, and she carried a gunny sack in which to gather our magic harvest .'' Anaya's effect on a crowd is mesmerizing. He is a man completel y at home with himself and his culture.
In an interview in a valuable new volume edited by Yale professor Juan Bruce-Novoa and recently published by the University of Texas Press under the title ''Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview,'' Anaya puts it this way: ''Everybody is into roots now, since (Alex) Haley. When people ask me where my roots are, I look down at my feet and I see the roots of my soul grasping the earth. They are here ... in the Southwest. ... I still live in New Mexico. I have traveled to many places, but have no desire to leave New Mexico. Here I can look around and have a feeling that these hills, these mountains, this river, this earth, this sky is mine. I feel good in it.''
For some Chicano writers and ideologues, vast political connotations, rather than new and impressive works of art, grow out of such feelings. Those connotations began to be perceived in the Southwest only in the 60's, but they will continue to affect politics in this part of the country for a long time to come. The Chicanos are among the oldest immigrants to the North American continent. Ironically enough, only in the past 20 years have Chicano writers emerged to add their pieces to the puzzle we call American culture. Professor Bruce-Novoa and most other commentators on this phenomenon point to 1959 and the publication of ''Pocho,'' a powerful but uneven novel by Jose Antonio Villareal, a writer living in California, as the start of modern Chicano literature.
HISPANIC-AMERICAN culture had hardly been infertile before that, but it was essentially oral, passing along its wit and wisdom from generation to generation by means of traditional tales and anecdotes. The proximity to Mexico and the closed nature of a rural, agricultural way of life kept congress with cities, formal education and the surrounding Anglo culture to a minimum. Paradoxically, this very isolation has helped to preserve the vitality of preliterate Southwest Hispanic culture.
''Once there was a poor man who earned his living cutting wood in the common land of the land grant and selling it in the village,'' goes the opening tale of ''Cuentos, Tales From the Hispanic Southwest,'' a volume just published by the Museum of New Mexico Press. It is a bilingual edition of nearly two dozen of the finest stories from the oral tradition of the region, collected by Stanford ethnologist Juan Rael, selected and adapted by New Mexico educator Jose Griego y Maestas and put into English versions by Anaya. Another tale tells of a poor woodcutter who steals a chicken and goes off into the woods to roast and eat it. First God the Father, then Christ and then the Virgin Mary appear to him and ask for a portion, but he refuses them all on the grounds that they are biased toward the rich. Only when Dona Sebastiana, the incarnation of Death, appears to him does the woodcutter share his food, for he knows that Death plays no favorites.
