156 Anaya, Rudolfo
extended family are the focus of Rudolfo Anaya’s
Bless Me, Ultima. The parents of the six-year-old
protagonist, Antonio, are opposites in terms of their
own upbringing, and both familial lines attempt to
influence Antonio’s future. Antonio’s mother comes
from pious Catholic peasant farmers who insist the
boy must become a priest. On the other hand, Anto-
nio’s father’s kin, restless vaqueros who claim descent
from Spanish conquistadores, want him to be like
them, macho, freedom-loving cowboys. In the novel,
the Márez family is a microcosm representing con-
flicting pressures to conform to colonial European
and modern Anglo influences, all of which threaten
the centrality, solidarity, spiritual essence, and conti-
nuity of la familia, and so of the individual.
Demonstrating a new (though ancient) way of
being to readers, Anaya’s young protagonist rejects
the opposing life paths presented to him in favor of
the much more encompassing earth-oriented spiri-
tuality and healing practice of the ancient curandera
Ultima, who was there at Antonio’s birth and who
has now come to live out her remaining days with
the family. Anaya’s suggestion of a place-based mys-
tical connection unmitigated by colonial social insti-
tutions, like the Catholic Church, or modern-day
Anglo capitalist influences is an important state-
ment of identity politics that helped make Bless Me,
Ultima a hallmark text of the burgeoning Chicano
civil rights movement of 1970s America.
The novel is set at the end of World War II,
after the confrontation between (and new conflu-
ences resulting from the contact of ) American sub-
cultures, as well as world populations and cultures,
that occurred because of the war. Early in the novel,
having survived the global slaughter intact, Anto-
nio’s three older brothers arrive home. The war, they
admit, has made them men too soon. After return-
ing home, the promise of decadent pleasures to
which they had become accustomed as soldiers (for
example, alcohol and prostitution) make them reject
the boredom of small-town living, along with their
father’s dreams of establishing a family vineyard in
California. For these young men, their family focus
and perhaps, Anaya strongly suggests, even their
spirits have been lost to the “war sickness.” Feeling
hemmed in by their father’s expectations, they frag-
ment the family by restlessly seeking fulfillment in
urban living, rather than in the hard work and unity
of la familia and the land.
Antonio’s sisters, like his older brothers, have
learned English and Anglo culture in school and are
thus, Anaya shows, at a remove from the language
and heritage of their family and home. However,
Antonio himself, who begins to attend school
during the time span of the novel, resists the loss
of identity he innocently observes in his beloved
brothers and distanced sisters, instead finding a self-
defining rootedness in the “presence” of the river and
land through Ultima’s clarifying guidance.
The character of Ultima speaks to the impor-
tance of indigenous cultural heritage that predates
brutal colonial influences, a sense of belonging to the
land and, by extension, to one’s natural (as opposed
to culturally constructed) self. The sense of personal
autonomy creates a sense of peace in the novel
that also equates to a supremely strong and effec-
tive resistance to evil, as demonstrated by Ultima’s
protective actions on behalf of the family—espe-
cially Antonio—and greater community. Loyalty,
respect, and an acknowledgement of human inter-
dependence are the marks of the extended familial
connections Anaya emphasizes through Ultima’s
physical and spiritual work in the community.
Every community needs its seers, its prognos-
ticators who are so sensitive to occurrences and
relationships in the present that they can foretell
and therefore positively guide the people’s future. In
Bless Me, Ultima, Antonio is already astonishingly
insightful and emotionally strong for his six-plus
years. His spiritual receptivity and the promise of
his leadership abilities as he matures suggest a new
mystic awareness of self powerfully connected to
indigenous beliefs and the land itself. This earthly
appreciation of Chicano identity and purpose in the
new generation of leaders would, as Anaya and other
visionaries of the Chicano movement emphatically
suggested, allow Mexican Americans to confront the
degrading influences of Anglo culture that threaten
Chicanos’ daily survival and, even more important,
cultural autonomy. Instead, Bless Me, Ultima, as a
key text in the great range of literature, oral perfor-
mance, visual and public art, and music produced by
Chicanos during and since the civil rights era, has