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 (1976) and Tortuga (1979). With the publication of his novel Alburquerque (1992), Anaya was proclaimed a front-runner by Newsweek in "what is better called not the new multicultural writing, but the new American writing." 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 (BA English, 1963) 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:
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 (2). 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.
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." (188)
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 (i.e., the mestizaje) 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:
as the spiritual experience that allows Antonio's transcendental integration of the conflicts with which he is struggling: