After twenty-two years as the most important and influential Chicano novel ever written, although available only from a small press, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima has been reprinted in hardcover and mass-market editions by Warner Books. A timeless work of youth and rites of passage, Tonatiuh-Quinto Sol's edition sold more than 300,000 copies in two decades of classroom use and word-of-mouth readership. Despite Anaya's impact as a storyteller and mentor for many Chicano writers and the fact that he is one of the best fiction writers in the United States, it has taken all this time for his work to reach a mass audience. Up to now, his books have appeared through small and university presses, which meant consistent publication but limited distribution. This was the norm for the majority of Chicano writers until recently. With the boom in Latino literature in the late 1980s and its present flowering, many younger Latino writers—I'm thinking of Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, Dagoberto Gilb and Denise Chavez, for example—will not have to “pay dues” for the length of time that Anaya has. The most recent example of this is Luis Alberto Urrea. His memoir Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (Anchor) was a best seller, and In Search of Snow, his first novel, enjoys the backing of HarperCollins.

The reason such marketing considerations have to be a part of examining these two novels is that the context in which Chicano fiction is received is changing as more work is available on a larger scale. Anaya is enjoying a period of prosperity in his career, though he never stopped writing and has endured for decades; Urrea, a talented essayist novelist and poet who is one of the hottest Chicano writers around now, is almost automatically a “mainstream” property early in his career. In Search of Snow is an ideal novel for the nineties because Urrea does not have to restrict himself to “Chicano” themes, or even characters. It is also an interesting contrast to Bless Me, Ultima because Anaya's famous characters of the boy Antonio Márez and Ultima, the curandera (healer), created the legacy and the world in which Urrea has his story take place.

Both novels revolve around male characters and how they come of age. Antonio grows up in the mythical town of Guadalupe, New Mexico, in a time when strong family ties were the key source in the education of a young boy. His mysterious dreams and his discovery of the natural world of the llano (plain), the desert, owls and the sheer isolation of life in the Southwest will strengthen his spiritual bonds to his family and to his own future. He is blessed to be brought up and guided by Ultima, one of the last curanderas, whose ties to a pagan past meant she had to pass her dying secrets to Antonio.

As one of the first bilingually canted novels, with its heavy use of Spanish phrases, Bless Me, Ultima set the stage for the unique Chicano genre of Catholic-pagan fiction. The now-familiar elements include a supernatural environment, a questioning of traditional Christian values and the presence of a strong mother figure to perplex and guide the young protagonist through his life. Early in the novel Antonio admits:

I was happy with Ultima. … I learned from her that there was a beauty in the time of day and in the time of night, and that there was peace in the river and in the hills. She taught me to listen to the mystery of the groaning earth and to feel complete in the fulfillment of its time. My soul grew under her careful guidance.

Anaya encompassed his native New Mexico landscape in this work, which turned out to be in sharp contrast with the more contemporary urban settings of later Chicano novels. While he was writing about the power of family myths and Antonio was learning the many names for the earth, other Chicano writers were dealing with the barrio, political protest in Vietnam-era America and confrontations in the streets. As a result, the formal style and unfolding beauty of the language in Bless Me, Ultima isolated it from the direction a majority of Chicano writers took in the seventies and eighties.

Reading this book decades after it was written, it is clear that Antonio's apprenticeship at the hands of Ultima is part of the natural evolution of Mexican-American culture. The boy's awareness of good and evil still reverberates in our hearts: Now, with gang death loyalty the only kind of love and brotherhood known to many young boys, Ultima's visionary gifts and Antonio's yearning for them are needed more than ever. This is Anaya's ultimate triumph as a writer and a leader in our community.

After all these years, Bless Me, Ultima endures because Anaya had the vision to see and capture the past, the present and the future of his people in one work of art. It is a difficult task to accomplish in fiction, yet Anaya did it with the same rare magnitude Gabriel García Márquez effected in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Bless Me, Ultima is our Latin American classic because of its dual impact—it clearly defines Chicano culture as founded on family, tradition and the power of myth. Through Antonio and Ultima, we learn how to identify these values in the midst of the dark clouds of change and maturity. Bless Me, Ultima also shows that, like García Márquez, Anaya recognizes that the Latino world is fluid and mysterious and can only be re-created by playing with time and the unpredictable environment that surreal-religious forces create in the lives of all, the young and the elderly, the isolated and the social, the powerful and the weak. …

The central messages of Bless Me, Ultima and In Search of Snow may be quite different, but this shows an evolving quality: These novels stand like opposing bookends in the historical and psychic shape of the Mexican-American experience, meaning this literature is succeeding in encompassing the choices we have as a culture, as writers, and as a people coming from the same landscape to redefine our spiritual and familial needs.