Bless Me, Ultima 155of-age theme works on several levels. Through the
six-year-old protagonist, Antonio, Anaya affirms a
new Chicano literary, social, and spiritual identity
for the individual and community. In addition,
Anaya’s Chicano cultural assertion echoes the work
of the multiple other counterculture movements
during the civil rights era that similarly sought to
draw out the widely various narratives comprising
American experience.
Antonio’s family has settled by the river, which
serves as a liminal border between the llano (plain)
and the town. Antonio is caught in a tug of war
between the values and lifestyle of his vaquero
(cowboy) father, a member of the Márez family (mar
meaning the sea, which represents the bold seafar-
ing Spanish conquistadores and the open life of the
llano), and farmer mother, a Luna (luna, the moon,
is indicative of peaceful indigenous farmers in tune
with planting cycles dictated by the moon). His
father wants Antonio to grow up to work livestock
from horseback, free on the llano, while his pious
mother, who cries every time she thinks Antonio
might choose his father’s Márez ways, wants him to
become a priest, to help the villagers.
Mature for his age, Antonio clearly is not
attracted to the macho life of the vaqueros and sees
hypocrisies in the Catholic religion. Although
he desires a life in relationship to family and com-
munity, Antonio does not seem destined to become
a vaquero, farmer, or priest. In order to widen and
complicate his protagonist’s (and reader’s) choices
of identity, Anaya constructs an alternative in the
person of the aged curandera Ultima, who has been
invited to live out the end of her life with Antonio’s
family.
Ultima’s authority and wisdom come in large
part from her knowledge of and relationship to
nature. Townspeople who fear her power call her a
bruja (witch), though they also turn to her when the
evil actions of real brujas cannot be dispelled by the
Catholic priest. As the midwife who helped Antonio
into the world, Ultima is cognizant of the forces at
play on the occasion of his birth and the identities
afforded him, including what she offers. Living
with the family, she helps Antonio to discern more
than just the obvious choices of his dual competing
lineages, and to reach deeper into the wisdom and
magic all around him in nature—especially via his
observances of the mythic wisdom of the “Golden
Carp” in the river.
Antonio comes of age through various encoun-
ters with death, danger, nature, spirituality/the
supernatural, sex and sexuality, and Catholicism.
Ultima consistently reminds him that life cannot be
reduced to dualistic good-bad/either-or Western/
Christian thinking; life is, instead, an intercon-
nected cycle of existence that binds one and all.
Under Ultima’s calm tutelage, Antonio will grow
up to become a new kind of leader following a new
religion rooted in nature, healing, and peacemaking.
Anaya suggests that the only way the adult Antonio
can care for the world is to be at peace in himself,
and the only way to be at peace (which his parents
and the other townspeople are clearly not) is to be
aligned with the real authority of nature rather than
with abstract Catholic dogma. Antonio’s coming of
age is tied to various values of the Chicano move-
ment: the love and support of family; the presence
of and belief in the land; a sense of human dignity in
all social strata; and a grace that is rooted in nature
and the human body, neither any longer viewed as
vile or uncontrolled and in need of conquering, as
European Christian colonialism had insisted were
intrinsically true of the “New World” and her indig-
enous inhabitants.
At the time of Bless Me, Ultima’s publication,
the United States was involved in yet another war
(Vietnam), and the cold war’s threat of nuclear
annihilation was still looming. Liberal members of
society recognized nature as the ultimate authority
that could bring humanity back to its senses. Bless
Me, Ultima is set during World War II, which means
Antonio’s vision would be mature by the time of the
peace, environmental, and civil rights movements of
the 1960s and 1970s. As an adult, then, Antonio’s
leadership and cultural contributions—like that of
Anaya and of Anaya’s readers—could help awaken
others to a peaceful recognition and appreciation of
the diverse American story.
Elizabeth McNeilFamily in Bless Me, Ultima
In keeping with the primary importance of la
familia in Hispanic American life, immediate and