Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima tells the story of a young boy who is forced to grow up quickly amid violence and family turmoil. Sixyear- old Antonio “Tony” Marez lives with his family in rural New Mexico, but the remoteness of the setting does not translate into an idyllic or pastoral life. By the second chapter, Tony has witnessed the killing of a man and has begun to question the ways of the world around him, including the way in which his own identity will be defined. In searching for his identity, Tony begins to realize that he must reconcile the many opposing expectations of his family and his community if he is to learn the answers for which he hungers.

Tony’s life is fraught with opposing forces. One of the primary conflicts in the novel is the tension between his parents. Tony’s father comes from a line of nomadic cowboys who ranged over the llano, the plains, never staying too long in any one place: “These were the people of my father, the vaqueros of the llano. They were an exuberant, restless people, wandering across the ocean of the plain.” His mother, on the other hand, is a descendant of farmers who settled down and grew crops.

The house in which Tony’s family lives represents these two conflicting ways of life: while they have settled onto a piece of land where they have a small farm, they are just on the border of the llano. Tony’s parents’ desires for their son stem from their relationship with the land. His mother wants Tony to be a farmer and maybe even a priest—she says, “I pray that he will take the vows, that a priest will return to guide the Lunas”—while Tony’s father wishes that his sons will pull up roots and move west so that he can live vicariously through them: he complains, “Another day and more miles of that cursed highway to patch! And for whom? For me that I might travel west! Ay no, that highway is not for the poor man, it is for the tourist.” Tony fears that no matter what he chooses to do in his life, and no matter how he chooses to live with the land, he will be denying some part of his blood.

Another issue encountered by Tony is that of religion. His mother is a devout Catholic, even praying that Tony will one day become a priest. Tony himself appears to be devoted to the Catholic faith, attending catechism and taking the priest’s words to heart. However, when a friend tells him about the golden carp, a pagan god, the possibility that there is another god besides the Christian one forces him to question his entire world view. He wonders, “if the golden carp was a god, who was the man on the cross, the Virgin? Was my mother praying to the wrong God?” Soon after, he sees the curandera Ultima succeed where the priest has failed: “The power of the doctors and the power of the church had failed to cure my uncle. Now everyone depended on Ultima’s magic. Was it possible that there was more power in Ultima’s magic than in the priest?” In the very next chapter, Tony first lays eyes on the golden carp. When he sees the pagan god, he thinks:

The power of God failed where Ultima’s worked; and then a sudden illumination of beauty and understanding flashed through my mind. This is what I had expected God to do at my first holy communion!

The character of Florence adds to Tony’s confusion about religion. Florence, a friend of Tony’s, does not believe in God and asks probing questions to which Tony has no answers. When Florence asks, “You mean I can . . . do a million bad things and then when I’m about to die I just go to confession and make communion, and I go to heaven,” Tony answers “Yes,” but thinks “No, it didn’t seem fair, but it could happen. This was another question for which I wanted an answer.” Tony prays that he will be given the answers when he takes his first communion, but again he is disappointed: “A thousand questions pushed through my mind, but the Voice within me did not answer. There was only silence.” Faced with this silence, among his conflicting beliefs and doubts, Tony is forced to make his own way.

Tony is also caught between two cultural worlds: his Spanish-speaking family and friends, and the English-speaking circle he finds at school. Until Tony first goes to school at age six, he has heard and spoken only Spanish. Suddenly, he is inundated with a new language, new food, and new faces—and the other children are not friendly towards this child whom they perceive as different. Tony must learn to live in both of these worlds if he is to become the “man of learning” his mother envisions.

The structure of the novel helps to reveal the conflicts and ambiguities in Tony’s life. For instance, the reader quickly notices that, while the novel is written for readers of English, it helps to have a grounding in Spanish as well: all of the chapter headings are in Spanish, and sometimes dialogue— especially curse words—also is in Spanish, with no translation. In addition, every few chapters the reader finds one of Tony’s dreams, demarcated by italics. Again, this gives the sense that Tony is living in two separate worlds; this time, they are the worlds of dream and reality. Through his dreams, Tony sees a combination of the past and the future, and he seems to be working out his understanding of the events in his life. Another way in which the structure of the novel presents Tony’s sense of ambiguity is the narrator’s voice. Similar to Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, Tony, as firstperson narrator, sounds like an adult looking back on his childhood, even though during the events of the story he is a young child.

In the end, the divisive issues in Tony’s life, which first seem to threaten his sense of a cohesive identity, actually prove to be his tool for coming of age: they are the catalyst for self-discovery. In the first part of the novel, Tony believes that he must choose between all of the opposing forces, but in the end he comes to realize that he can—and must—blend elements, combine opposites, to become his own person. Theresa M. Kanoza, in “The Golden Carp and Moby Dick: Rudolfo Anaya’s Multi-Culturalism,” notes that in the character of Ultima, Tony witnesses the merging of pagan and Christian beliefs. Kanoza states that “Recognizing that the disparate elements of creation work in concert, [Ultima] instructs Antonio to respect rather than to fear difference. . . . Her universe, in all its splendid diversity, is coherent, not chaotic.”

With the help of Ultima, Tony learns that his mother’s religion and a faith in the golden carp do not have to be mutually exclusive, and as an extension of this, he can also resolve his parents’ expectations for him. Ultima tells Tony, “I cannot tell you what to believe. Your father and your mother can tell you, because you are their blood, but I cannot. As you grow into manhood you must find your own truths.” However, in a dream, Ultima settles a dispute between Tony’s mother and father by saying, “You both know . . . that the sweet water of the moon which falls as rain is the same water that gathers into rivers and flows to fill the seas.” She is referring to the names of Tony’s parents: his mother is a Luna, which means moon, and his father is a Marez, which means sea. Thus, she sums up her point by saying, “The waters are one.” To Tony she says, “You have been seeing only parts . . . and not looking beyond into the great cycle that binds us all.” It is in learning to combine the many seemingly irreconcilable elements of his life—family agendas, religious beliefs, and language— that Tony will learn his “own truths.”

There are several points in the last few chapters of the novel where the merging of these opposites occurs. While traveling to the Tellez home with his father and Ultima, Tony has the realization that he has learned important values from both sides of his family:

From my mother I had learned that man is of the earth, that his clay feet are part of the ground that nourishes him, and that it is this inextricable mixture that gives man his measure of safety and security. Because man plants in the earth he believes in the miracle of birth, and he provides a home for his family, and he builds a church to preserve his faith and the soul that is bound to his flesh, his clay. But from my father and Ultima I had learned that the greater immortality is in the freedom of man, and that freedom is best nourished by the noble expanse of land and air and pure, white sky.

Interestingly, Tony’s father offers a way to reconcile his differences with Tony’s mother when he says that “We have been at odds all of our lives, the wind and the earth. Perhaps it is time we gave up the old differences.” Tony then realizes that “maybe I do not have to be just Marez, or Luna, perhaps I can be both,” and he expands this understanding when he says, “Take the llano and the river valley, the moon and the sea, God and the golden carp—and make something new . . . can a new religion be made?” Tony takes inspiration from the priest who founded the Luna family by realizing that he, too, could change the old ways and create something new.

At the end of the novel, despite Ultima’s death, imagery shows that Tony is learning to let the opposites coexist: “Around me the moonlight glittered on the pebbles of the llano, and in the night sky a million stars sparkled”; in other words, the moonlight of the Lunas and the llano of the Marez are joined in the cosmos. Tony says that “Sometime in the future I would have to build my own dream out of those things that were so much a part of my childhood.” The reader is left with the impression that Tony will be successful in building his dream.

Source: Emily Smith Riser, Critical Essay on Bless Me, Ultima, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

Principally because of his first novel, Bless Me Ultima (1972), Rudolfo Anaya is considered a major contemporary Mexican-American writer. The book, one of the few Chicano literary best-sellers, appears on high school and college curricula, holds an important place in the landscape of Chicano literary criticism, and (with some of his other novels) has been translated into German and Polish. The book's merit and market success have allowed Anaya to enjoy popularity simultaneously with relative critical acclaim. Since 1972 he has published four more novels and coedited several anthologies.

Anaya was born to Martin and Rafaelita Mares Anaya on 30 October 1937, inPastura, a village lying south of Santa Rosa in eastern New Mexico. He attended public schools in Santa Rosa and Albuquerque despite an extended hospitalization for a spinal injury he suffered as a youth. He earned a B.A. (1963) and M.A. (1968) in English from the University of New Mexico, and he also has an M.A. (1972) in guidance and counseling from the same institution. In 1966 he married Patricia Lawless, who is also trained in guidance and counseling. From 1963 to 1970 Anaya taught in the Albuquerque public schools. He left to become director of counseling at the University of Albuquerque. His current appointment in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico began in 1974. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Albuquerque, the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence, and the President's National Salute to American Poets and Writers in 1980. Perhaps the most important of his honors is the Pre-mio Quinto Sol awarded to Bless Me, Ultima, for it was his first national literary honor and a harbinger of later recognition, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Chicano Council of Higher Education, and a Kellogg Fellowship.

To read Anaya's work is to encounter a preoccupation with, as he describes it, "instinct and the dark blood in which it dwells." The bringing of instinct to light is both an artistic and a moral imperative for Anaya, who perceives the writer's role in shamanistic terms. He points this out with painstaking care in his gloss to his The Silence of the Llano: Short Stories (The Silence of the Plain: Short Stories, 1982):

The storyteller tells stories for the community as well as for himself. The story goes to the people to heal and reestablish balance and harmony, but the process of the story is also working the same magic on the storyteller . . . [who] must be free and honest, and . . . must remain independent of the whims of groups. Remember, the shaman, the curandero [folk healer], the mediator do their work for the people, but they live alone.

Anaya is also concerned with integrating into his work the Jungian ideas associated with intuition and feeling. Nowhere in his work is the integration of subjective insight as effective or inspired as in his first novel.

Bless Me, Ultima takes place in the cultural richness of its author's native soil (New Mexico), one of the continent's oldest communities, a point that bears stressing because primal antiquity girds Anaya's mythic worldview. The novel presents the maturation of Antonio Marez, a boy growing up in Guadalupe, a small New Mexico farm village. The book explores his relationship with his spiritual guide, Ultima, a curandera. Narrated in the first person by seven-year-old Antonio, the events in Bless Me, Ultima unfold as if in the present, but it is soon clear that temporal distance separates the narrator from the experiences he is describing. Anaya achieves this distance by opening the story with the boy's flashback to "the beginning that came with Ultima," a period of time that moves from the year he starts school to the end of the next year when he completes third grade after precociously skipping second. Anaya separates the narrative voice from the events narrated by endowing the narrator—not necessarily the boy in the thick of the plot—with a sensitivity and insight usually reserved for adult maturity. The distancing permits the maturity of the child's vision to work; otherwise the boy's sagacity would strain the reader's disbelief beyond suspension, a concern that has nonetheless bothered some readers.

The moment Antonio's parents welcome Ultima, the curandera they respectfully call "la Grande," into their household in bucolic Guadalupe marks the boy's first clear awareness of time and signals the start of his rite of passage from a state of timeless innocence to one of adolescent understanding of the weight of time. On the first page Antonio observes that "the magical time of childhood stood," while in the final chapter he muses, "sometimes when I look back on that summer I think that it was the last summer I was truly a child." Even the vast difference in ages between the boy and the elderly Ultima becomes an emblem of the temporal changes mirrored in the plot as he learns that "things wouldn't always be the same."

In the course of the novel Antonio enters public school where, despite the initial fear of leaving mother and hearth, he quickly excels academically and also successfully engages a social network outside his family. He is catechized into the Catholic church and struggles with his growing dismay at the artifice connected with its hierarchy and bureaucracy. Much of his struggle relates to his discovery of a genuine spirituality and legitimate morality outside the church—in nature, for example, and in the legends told by "Jason's Indian." More traumatically, he encounters four deaths, including two violent killings and the drowning of his special friend, Florence, a young "heretic." Anaya balances the traumas of the deaths with Antonio's participation in the life-affirming curanderismo practiced by Ultima. She provides him with the one stable certain part of his life, satisfying both his intellectual curiosity and emotional needs and, as a result, inspiring his spiritual growth as well.

Anaya textures his main story with a subplot focusing on Antonio's life within his family (parents, three brothers, and two sisters). He shares the family's agony over the fate of his three brothers who, in their youthful machismo, appear wayward and irresponsible to him, and he also serves as the central figure in his parents' bitter conflict over his destiny. Embodied in his father's aggressive Marez (i.e., turbulent seas) characteristics and his mother's more subdued Luna (i.e., gentle moon) traits—the wild vaquero versus the settled farmer— the family conflict divides him by tugging his natural loyalties and affections in opposite directions. Ultimately, the evocative power of the book lies in the crossweaving of cultural, social, and psychological levels of action to form a seamless, holistic unity.

Anaya expresses his preoccupation with instinct and blood in the dream sequences which filter and mediate for Antonio the conflicts, violence, and other traumas he encounters. Signaling his intuitive grasp of the importance of his dreams, Antonio continually thinks about them even though his youth prevents his full understanding. Each of his dreams has a noticeable effect on his outlook, conduct, and ultimately on (in Jungian terms) the individuation of his personality. For example, as early as the end of chapter 1, Antonio's recollection is that his "dream was good"; and the disturbing dream at the beginning of chapter 9 leads the story directly into an argument between Antonio's parents and his brothers. Antonio's dreams and their effect on him are an index to his development.

Chapter 14 effectively illustrates the efficacy of dreams to Antonio's self-insight. From the hilarity of a school play plagued by calamities to the horror of Narciso's cruel murder and the apocalyptic furor of the concluding pesadilla (nightmare), the chapter obtains its power from the wide range of subjects thrown together with unusually vivid force. By uniting the children's innocent bedlam with Tenorio's sinister mayhem, Anaya sets the stage for the pesadilla, the dream apocalypse that will hurl Antonio's entire life before him, "the whole town," the wicked and the good, the sacred and the profane. The nightmare drowns Antonio with "its awful power" as major and minor figures from his life swirl up in a fiery, bloody chaos of symbols. Besides cataloguing various tortures and rituals suffered by his friends and family members, the nightmare also portrays the boy's own "withering" death after which his "bleached bones [are] laid to rest ... in front of the dark doors of Purgatory."

Important to the novel's ultimate affirmation, the end of the dream shifts the tumultuous horror of the pesadilla into a soothing tranquil scene and a healing experience:

Evening settled over the land and the waters. The stars came out and glittered in the dark sky. In the lake the golden carp appeared. His beautiful body glittered in the moonlight. He had been witness to everything that happened, and he decided that everyone should survive, but in new form. He opened his huge mouth and swallowed everything, everything there was, good and evil. Then he swam into the blue velvet of the night, glittering as he rose towards the stars. The moon smiled on him ... he became a new sun ... to shine its good light upon a new earth.

Anaya transmutes the nightmare's chaos, pain, and violence into the surreal beauty of a nature pure and uncontaminated by human strife, a nature preserved in the indigenous mythology and curan-derismo of Indo-Hispanic—in other words, mestizo—America. By suggesting that good and evil are meaningless abstractions within the timeless power of nature embodied in the night's beauty and the carp's power, the book offers a pantheistic resolution to the nightmare's New Testament-like apocalypse. The story's social realism vanishes into the private realms of dream, fantasy, and primordial legend.

Antonio's dream, like all the others steeped within his subconscious, expresses ideas that he will only fully comprehend in the future when he sets about reconstructing his (and Ultima's) story, and his mature reconstruction enables him to give form to the events which he experienced desultorily as a child. Yet, the boy Antonio intuits wisdom from his dreams. In chapter 15 he shows a more loving tolerance of his father and brothers, and he also exhibits a more realistic acceptance of "the sons seeing the father suddenly old, and the father knowing his sons were men and going away." Throughout the novel dreams contribute to the in-dividuation of Antonio's personality and the seasoning of his moral character.

Another central area of Antonio's life is his involvement with Jason, Samuel, and Cico, the boys who introduce him to the legend of the golden carp which holds that the fish was once a god who "chose to be turned into a carp and swim in the river where he could take care of his people." The legend at first confuses Antonio because "everything he had ever believed in seemed shaken. If the golden carp was a god, who was the man on the cross? The Virgin?" But he eventually fathoms the legend's message regarding the spiritual force of aboriginal nature: "I knew I had witnessed a miraculous thing," he thinks when the fish swims by Cico, "the appearance of a pagan god . . . ; a sudden illumination of beauty and understanding flashed through my mind. This is what I expected God to do at my first holy communion!" The dream he has that night makes explicit the holistic meaning of the legend which probes "beyond into the great cycle that binds us all." A significant part of Antonio's development apart from his family and Ultima relates to his network of school and friends. Through them he conquers many of the familiar fears common to boyhood, as well as those specific to rural Chicanitos (young Chicanos) like him who are teased for packing tortillas and beans instead of white bread sandwiches for school lunch. They "banded together" and in their "union found strength." Each boy has his special talent that adds to Antonio's expanding repertoire of worldly knowledge and experience, an expansion that edges him outside the family's orbit even as it helps him better to understand his family.

Bless Me, Ultima is essentially an extended flashback told in the first person by an involved narrator. Although it resembles a bildungsroman, the novel is technically not an apprenticeship novel because it is limited to only a couple of boyhood years and does not present Antonio's complete rite of passage to young manhood. Critic Daniel Testa notes that even though "the boy-hero of the story is only eight years old at the end ... we are convinced that his character has been formed in a radically profound way." If analyzed alongside the main character in Anaya's novel Tortuga (1979), the main character of Bless Me, Ultima is part of a composite bildungsroman protagonist. Such an approach takes into account Anaya's perception of his first three novels as a "New Mexico trilogy" making Clemente Chavez and his son, Jason, of Heart of Aztlan another resonating part of the character. Antonio's retrospection begins with Ultima's visit, but its depth of insight derives from the artistic process of recalling, ordering, and then sharing the story with others.

Bless Me, Ultima has sold over two hundred thousand copies. Critical analyses and assessments have been extensive and largely favorable. Antonio Marquez asserts that Anaya's work, "especially Bless Me, Ultima, has inspired the largest body of criticism in contemporary Chicano literature." Among the noteworthy extended studies are several which discuss the dream sequences in the book. For example, Roberto Cantu perceives the "structure and meaning" of the dream sequences as integral to both theme and plot, whereas Vernon E. Lat-tin places his analysis of the dreams within the context of the novel's violence and "horror of darkness." Especially illuminating of the work's narration and presentation of time is Daniel Testa's 1977 discussion of its "extensive/intensive dimensionality." Studies which examine Bless Me, Ultima within the context of Anaya's entire work are Antonio Marquez's overview in The Magic of Words and Cordelia Candelaria's in Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide, which examines his use of Jun-gian themes. Of more recent interpretations of the novel, Jose Monleon's "Ilusion y realidad en la obra de Rudolfo Anaya" (Illusion and Reality in the Work of Rudolfo Anaya), while negative in its appraisal, is still very effective in its unified treatment of Anaya's three novels. Most of the criticism of this novel praises it for what Antonio Marquez calls "Anaya's imaginative mythopoesis and his careful and loving attention to the craft of fiction."

Source: Cordelia Candelaria, "Rudolfo A. Anaya: Criticism," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 82: Chicano Writers, First Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley, Gale Research, 1989, pp. 24-35.

Bless Me, Ultima deserves to be described outside of the implicit claims that it is The Chicano Novel, a category as fishy and as detrimental to any clear thinking about our expectations for fiction as The American Novel category has become. Among other things, the millions of chicanos in the U.S. may feel a unity of ancestry and a com- munity in their oppression, but their experience of life is in no other way unified. . . . The people of the book themselves, small-scale farmers and cowboys, some possessing more than three centuries of history with their removed corner of the world, would not recognize themselves as “chicanos” at all. “Hispano” is what they were first called; “Mexican” is the name most of them call themselves to this day.

The place of Bless Me, Ultima is a vast place, and spectacular (which my dictionary coolly defines as “exciting wonder and admiration by unusual display”). At the present moment, most of us probably know it best through the good offices of Georgia O’Keeffe. What we sense in her New Mexico landscapes is that we have arrived at the painting at the very moment of climax in an epic struggle by an after-all puny human force with something we could call Bigness Itself.

A novelist has no recourse, as the painter does, to abstraction. . . . In Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya frames his huge landscape and the diverse possibilities for belief through the perceiving of a small boy.

From quite near the beginning of the book it is clear that, though the action will involve other characters, the primary conflict will be the struggle for possession of the boy narrator’s soul and his destiny. It is a battle for control of his imagination. The “blessing” asked for in the title of the novel is really that singular benediction we all seek—the one which will give us surcease from endless attachment and disillusion with successive visions of how things are—or, more succinctly, the blessing called faith.

How well Anaya lets us participate in Antonio’s conflict is a question we will have to deal with. But there is no doubting as the novelist lays them out one by one the great richness of the choices available to him. . . . Immensity of space seems to permit immense diversity in ways of viewing the world. Through history different peoples have come to live there, but their death, or loss of hegemony, has not caused their ideas of how things are to die. The place where Antonio grows up is like a flea market or back lot of beliefs.

His mother wants him to become a priest. Knowing the vocation planned for him, his school pals anoint him and say their confessions to him.

His maternal uncles hope he will follow them into farming. But if he goes along, ties himself to the land, Antonio almost inevitably will also have to yoke himself to the whole ancient Spanish/Mexican tradition of endless clan feuding and murder, and of the intervention in human affairs through witchcraft. . . .

And then there is Ultima, the solitary old woman of the llano, no relation of blood, who is taken into Antonio’s family out of respect for her past helpfulness to them and more simply for her generosity of spirit. Others think her a witch. The Marez people understand that all of Ultima’s considerable knowledge is devoted only to good causes, to rectification. And of course, as the title of the book predicts, it is Ultima’s blessing which takes hold of the boy’s imagination. “And that,” he says in the end, “was what Ultima tried to teach me, that the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart.”

Bless Me, Ultima is a novel of antecedents. Its fault is a certain impatience. Rudolfo Anaya seems not to have the time to render many things—scenes, feelings—which in patches he shows himself fully capable of doing. The narrator possesses the thinking vocabulary of an adult with its abstractions, but we are given no sense of who this rememberer has become, nothing of the interplay between the man and the boy occupying the same imagination at different levels of understanding. Anaya’s second novel, Heart of Aztlan is more patiently wrought and, in that sense at least, a better piece of fiction. It is as though in the first book it was necessary for Anaya to establish lineage, lay specific claim to the heritage which would enable him to do what he was bound to do.

Source: Carter Wilson, “Magical Strength in the Human Heart,” in Ploughshares, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1978, pp. 190–97.