Bless Me, Ultima
Bless Me, Ultima is a coming-of-age novel by Rudolfo Anaya centering on Antonio Márez y Luna and his mentorship under his curandera and protector, Ultima. It has become the most widely read and critically acclaimed novel in the New Mexican literature canon since its first publication in 1972. Teachers across disciplines in middle schools, high schools and universities have adopted it as a way to implement multicultural literature in their classes. The novel reflects Hispano culture of the 1940s in rural New Mexico. Anaya's use of Spanish, mystical depiction of the New Mexican landscape, use of cultural motifs such as La Llorona, and recounting of curandera folkways such as the gathering of medicinal herbs, gives readers a sense of the influence of indigenous cultural ways that are both authentic and distinct from the mainstream.
The ways in which the novel provides insight into the religiosity of Chicano culture were first explored in 1982 in an essay titled "A Perspective for a Study of Religious Dimensions in Chicano Experience: Bless Me, Ultima as a Religious Text", written by Mexican American historian of religion David Carrasco. This essay was the first scholarly text to explore how the novel alludes to the power of sacred landscapes and sacred humans.
Bless Me, Ultima is Anaya's best known work and was awarded the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol. In 2008, it was one of 12 classic American novels selected for The Big Read, a community-reading program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2009, it was the selected novel of the United States Academic Decathlon.
Bless Me, Ultima is the first in a trilogy that continued with the publication of Heart of Aztlan and Tortuga. With the publication of his novel Alburquerque, Anaya was proclaimed a front-runner by Newsweek in "what is better called not the new multicultural writing, but the new American writing."
Owing to what some consider adult language, violent content, and sexual references, Bless Me, Ultima is often the target of attempts to restrict access to the book and was therefore placed on the list of most commonly challenged books in the U.S. in 2013. However, in the last third of the twentieth century, the novel has initiated respect for New Mexican, indigenous, and Chicano literature as an important and nonderivative type of American literature among academics.
Creation and purpose as an autobiography
Bringing Bless Me, Ultima to fruition took Anaya six years and an additional two years to find a publisher. From 1965 to 1971, Anaya struggled to find his own "voice" as the literary models he knew and had studied at the University of New Mexico did not fit him as a writer. He has also remarked on the unavailability of many authors at that time who could serve as mentors for his life experience as a Chicano. Anaya says that the great breakthrough in finding his voice as a writer occurred in an evening when he was writing late at night. He was struggling to find a way to get the novel to come together and then:This was the epiphany that Anaya believes came from his subconscious to provide him a mentor and his spiritual guide to the world of his Native American experience.
In Anaya's first novel, his life becomes the model for expressing the complex process of growing up Chicano in the American Southwest. Michael Fink characterizes Anaya's work as "the search for a sense of place." And the author tells us, "Bless Me, Ultima takes place in a small town in eastern New Mexico and it is really the setting of my home town Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Many of the characters that appear are my childhood friends."
The autobiographical relationship between Anaya and his first novel best begins through the author's own words as he reflects on his life's work as an artist and as a Chicano:
Anaya's authenticity to speak about the Chicano worldview is grounded in the history of his family. He is a descendant from the Hispanos, who originally settled the land grant in Albuquerque called "La Merced de Atrisco" in the Rio Grande Valley. Anaya chooses Maria Luna de Márez as the name of Antonio's mother, which parallels his own mother's surname, and her cultural and geographical origins: Rafaelita Mares, the daughter of farmers from a small village near Santa Rosa called Puerto De Luna. In additional ways Anaya's family and that of his young protagonist parallel: Both Rafaelita's first and second husbands were vaqueros who preferred life riding horses, herding cattle and roaming the llano, as did Antonio's father, Gabriel. Anaya's family also included two older brothers who left to fight WWII and four sisters. Thus, Anaya grew up in a family constellation similar to that of his young protagonist. Anaya's life and that of Antonio parallel in other ways that ground the conflict with which his young protagonist struggles in advancing to adolescence. As a small child Anaya moved with his family from Las Pasturas, his relatively isolated birthplace on the llano to Santa Rosa, a "city" by New Mexico standards of the time. This move plays a large part in the first chapter of Anaya's first novel as it sets the stage for Antonio's father's great disappointment in losing the lifestyle of the llano that he loved so well, and perhaps the kindling of his dream to embark on a new adventure to move with his sons to California—a dream that never would be.
Historical context
Bless Me, Ultima focuses on a young boy's spiritual transformation amid cultural and societal changes in the American Southwest during World War II. Anaya's work aims to reflect the uniqueness of the Hispano experience in the context of modernization in New Mexico—a place bearing the memory of European and indigenous cultures in contact spanning nearly half a millennium. The relationship between Anaya's protagonist, Antonio, and his spiritual guide, Ultima, unfolds in an enchanted landscape that accommodates cultural, religious, moral and epistemological contradictions: Márez vs. Luna, the Golden Carp vs. the Christian God, good vs. evil, Ultima's way of knowing vs. the Church's or the school's way of knowing.Cynthia Darche Park, a professor at San Diego State University, claims "These contradictions reflect political conquest and colonization that in the first instance put the Hispano-European ways of thinking, believing, and doing in the power position relative to those of the indigenous peoples." New Mexico experienced a second wave of European influence—this time English speaking—which was definitively marked by U.S. victory in the war between the United States and Mexico that ended with The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. According to Richard Griswold del Castillo, "The treaty established a pattern of political and military inequality between the two countries, and this lopsided relationship has stalked Mexican-U.S relations ever since."
Hispanos emigrated from Central New Spain to what was then one of the outermost frontiers of New Spain after Coronado in 1540 led 1100 men and 1600 pack and food animals northward in search of the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola.
Thereafter, the Spanish built permanent communities for the Indians along the Rio Grande and introduced domesticated animals to the area, all while striving for religious conversion of the native communities. The Spanish subjugated the native people to build mission churches in each of the new villages, but the Pueblo Indians finally rebelled in 1680 and drove the Spanish out of their land.
In 1692, the Spanish, led by Don Diego de Vargas, reconquered New Mexico. This time colonizers were able to coexist with the Pueblo Indians. The Spanish established many communities in which Catholicism and the Spanish language combined with the culture and myths of the Pueblo Indians. New Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821 and eventually achieved independent statehood in the United States of America in 1912. The mixed cultural influences and a long history of intermarriage among the Hispanos and the indigenous peoples remained largely intact throughout rural New Mexico well into the 20th century. The colonization of New Mexico by Spanish colonists resulted, therefore, in a combination of indigenous myths with Catholicism. As the Hispano community's beliefs and ways of doing things interacted with those of the Native Americans, a cultural pattern evolved in which indigenous myth maintained importance alongside Catholic doctrine.
As modernization spread across the United States with completion of the transcontinental railway in the 1860s and establishment of the Rural Electrification Administration in the 1930s, isolated rural communities were changed forever. The Second World War in the 1940s also wrought change as young men were sent to far off places and returned to their homeland bearing the vestiges of violent, traumatic experiences and exposure to a cosmopolitan world.
Because of the horrors that Antonio's brothers experienced in the war, none of them are able to integrate themselves back into the quiet life of Guadalupe; Antonio describes them as “dying giants” because they can no longer cope with the life that they left behind when they went to war. Their decision to leave Guadalupe is indirectly linked to their experiences in the war. The impact of modernization and war, therefore, did not exclude the Hispanos and indigenous peoples of New Mexico as the boundaries of their previously insular communities were crossed by these external technological and cultural influences.
Anaya dramatizes the pressures of change in the New Mexican peoples' response to the detonation of the first atomic test bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico July 16, 1945 as apocalyptic:
Tonn reminds us that both the narrated time and the moment of the novel's first appearance were periods of transition. The United States in the decades of the 1960s and 70's underwent a series of deep societal changes which some scholars deem to have been as apocalyptic to U.S. society as the detonation of the Atomic bomb was to the New Mexican peoples in 1945. Berger, cited in Keyword:Apocalypse, outlines two additional areas of post war apocalyptic representation after nuclear war, and the Holocaust. They are apocalypses of liberation and what is loosely called "postmodernity".
Anaya's writing of Bless Me, Ultima coincided with one of the principal upheavals of the move toward liberation, the Civil Rights Movement including the Chicano farm labor movement led by Cesar Chavez. Tonn points out that events surrounding the struggle for civil rights, the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and later of Martin Luther King Jr., urban disturbances such as Watts and Detroit posed deep-seated "challenges to the dominant self-image of United States Society…" "…leading to fundamental shifts in societal values and mores."
Tonn and Robert Cantú challenge the received consensus on the purpose of the novel and its relation to its past historical reality.