The American Century: Literature since 1945 753A similar awareness of ethnic identity as a borderland, a meeting place between
different cultures, marks the other novel that announced the arrival of chicano
fiction as a significant force, Bless Me, Ultima (1972) by Rudolfo A. Anaya (1937–).
Rich in folklore, moving effortlessly between memory, reality, and dream, the
material, myth, and magic, the book focuses on the experiences of Antonio Marez as
he begins school toward the end of World War II. The novel is attentive to the
specifics of the culture where it is set, a fairly remote area of New Mexico: a culture
rooted in the rich traditions of pre-Columbian aboriginal America and the Spain of
the Golden Age. It also draws on the early experiences of its author. It reaches out
beyond that, however, to map the border territory that, spiritually, all Mexican-
Americans inhabit – perhaps everyone, in a transcultural age. And, as Anaya himself
has observed, Antonio is not so much a fragment of autobiography as a paradigmatic
New World person, a cultural composite who “incorporates the Espanol and the
Indio, the old world and the new.”
As the last of four sons in the family, Antonio bears the burden of the increasingly
desperate hopes of his parents. His mother is a Luna, a descendant of farmers and
priests; his father a Marez, descended from sailors and vaqueros. Their family names
sketch out their different allegiances. Both are alert to tradition. For the mother,
though, tradition involves stillness. “It is the blood of the Lunas to be quiet,” she tells
Antonio, “for only a quiet man can learn the secrets of the earth that are necessary
for planting – They are quiet like the moon.” For the father, it involves independ-
ence, adventure. “It is the blood of the Marez to be wild,” the mother explains, “like
the ocean from which they take their name, and the spaces of the llano that have
become their home.” “Oh, it was hard to grow up,” Antonio comments, as he recalls
struggling with the conflicting ambitions of his parents for him: to be a farmer or a
priest, or to be a vaquero. And, in growing up, he turns to the tutelage of Ultima who
“came to stay with us,” Antonio remembers, “the summer I was almost seven.”
Ultima is “a curandera, a woman who knew the herbs and remedies of the ancients,
a miracle worker.” Through her, he learns of the cultures of the Indians of the region;
he recovers an indigenous education in his cultural origins far more persuasive than
the one offered in school. With her, he also learns what he calls “the secret of my
destiny”; and he experiences a sense of unity with his surroundings, as “the granules
of sand at my feet and the sun and sky above me seemed to dissolve into one strange,
complete being.” “My spirit shared in the spirit of all things,” Antonio confides. It is
that experience, of sharing, that constitutes vital knowledge, the secret by which he
can live. “Does one have to choose?” the young man asks, when he is told he must
decide “between the god of the church, or the beauty that is here and now.” And
quietly Ultima reveals that he does not. As she tells Antonio, when she appears to
him in a dream, existence is interdependence, communality, “the waters are one:”
moon and sea, earth and sun are all in a state of becoming, all part of the same fluid
process. The task of the young protagonist, then, is not to choose between this or
that, but to “take the llano and the river valley, the moon and the sea, the God of the
church and the gods of aboriginal folklore” and make something new: to realize his
deepest potential, for himself and his people, out of the cycle, the confluence ofGGray_c05.indd 753ray_c 05 .indd 753 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM