Bless Me, Ultima’s Vision and Its Tribute to the Mexican-American Community

Known for its vivid evocation of Eastern New Mexico and its depiction of the panorama of Mexican-American cultural life, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. For Mexican-Americans in the 1970s and readers since, this book has been something even more—a landmark work that announced the “arrival” of Mexican-American culture in a country where it was not always welcome. Bless Me, Ultima has had a profound impact on a great many readers, as it has demonstrated convincingly that the Mexican-American community was not merely a source of cheap labor, but a distinctive culture in itself that brought together threads of Mexican and American culture as Mexican-American, Chicano, and border culture. Whereas previously one could be “Mexican” or “American,” and the border dividing these mutually-exclusive identities was thin and precise, after Bless Me, Ultima and the “Chicano Renaissance” of culture that this book helped to initiate, the border expanded to become the rich space of Mexican-American cultural life with a new sense of a mixed identity.

The focus of Bless Me, Ultima is the coming-of-age story of Antonio Márez, a young boy living on the llano, plains, of Eastern New Mexico. His mentor is Ultima, a natural healer and midwife who for many years has tended to the health needs of her community. As the story opens, the aged healer has come to live with Antonio’s family. Under her mentorship, Antonio discovers death and evil in the world while she fends off the threats of a male witch and his daughters and helps Antonio to understand the co-existence of beauty and ugliness, life and death, and good and evil. She teaches Antonio to see the world in an indigenous perspective wherein life forces apparently in conflict can be reconciled. She teaches him to account for disharmony and evil without distorting the world’s power and without turning away from its beauty.

When the novel opens, Ultima has come to live with the family of Antonio Márez, a six year-old boy. She delivered all six of the family’s children but shares a special bond with Antonio, the youngest. This young boy has the wisdom and insights of a natural healer himself and often dreams of the grand forces in nature and family that demand his loyalties. He is in turmoil owing to the impossible burden he shoulders. His mother believes it is his destiny to become a priest and work with his uncles, the Lunas, on their farmlands. His father has different dreams for his son to become a rancher and vaquero.

Spending his days after school with Ultima, listening to her stories and helping her gather herbs in the moonlight, Antonio gains perspective on his life and asks her, in essence, to decide his destiny for him. Ultima tells him only that he will be “a man of learning,” and under her guidance Antonio comes to believe that the two parts of his soul are like bodies of water–the calm, fresh waters of the river from the farming valleys of the Lunas and the fierce, salty ocean water that his father’s ancestors, the Márez conquistadores, crossed centuries past.

The theme of finding resolution by accepting that all divisions are false is repeated throughout the novel and is the substance of Antonio’s education under Ultima.

In the novel’s final confrontation, Ultima battles Tenorio Trementina, a vice figure and powerful brujo (witch) who owns the village tavern and barber shop. There is an implicit significance in Tenorio’s occupations. By owning the town bar and barber shop, he symbolically has power over the spiritual and physical strength of all men, specifically men since they frequent these establishments.

That is, as a purveyor of intoxicating beverages, Tenorio has the ability to influence his patron’s behavior. There is also a long tradition of witches using a victim’s hair to cast a spell. Tenorio is widely rumored in his community to be practicing witchcraft with his daughters, but no one is willing to confront him. A great battle with Ultima occurs after one of Antonio’s uncles, Lucas, discovers Tenorio’s three daughters performing a Satanic rite by the river. Lucas then publicly defames the daughters as witches. When Lucas gets his next haircut, the daughters place a curse on him, causing him to become gravely ill. At the family’s request, Ultima finally intervenes with Antonio’s help and performs a curative ritual, or limpia. Over the several days of the cure, Antonio experiences his uncle’s pain and disorientation, and then Lucas recovers.