BOOK REVIEW : Anaya’s Tale of ‘Alburquerque’: An Old Name, and Same Old Story : <i> “ALBURQUERQUE,” by Rudolfo Anaya; University of New Mexico Press: 1992; 288 pages, $19.95 cloth.</i>

In his first novel since 1979, Rudolfo Anaya--author of the classic Chicano novel “Bless Me, Ultima”--hopes to reveal more than the correct spelling of Albuquerque. He says he wants us to see New Mexico’s largest city in a whole new light.

But for anyone who’s been to a large city with a significant Latino population, this contemporary story of family, politics, love and reaffirmation of identity in “Alburquerque” is one that we’ve seen before.

The tale is pretty standard stuff--an ex-Golden Gloves champ’s search for his real father intertwined with a ruthless wanna-be Spanish blueblood attorney’s dreams of turning the Duke City’s downtown into a desert Venice by rechanneling the waters of the Rio Grande into canals. But Anaya’s trademark magic realism and barrio lingo elevate it above the norm.

One particularly poignant scene is his description of a matanza, in which the old men of the neighborhood scold the younger men for making a mockery of the traditional slaughtering of the pigs.

The spelling of the city’s name, as legend has it, was changed when an Anglo stationmaster in the 1880s painted Albuquerque without the first R on a railroad sign, supposedly because he couldn’t trill the R.