‘Bless Me, Ultima,’ a New Mexico classic of Chicano literature
First published in 1972, “Bless Me, Ultima,” the beloved coming-of-age novel by Rudolfo Anaya, is now standard reading in Albuquerque Public Schools.
It was the 2010 selection for the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read. It has been turned into an opera by Héctor Armienta, the artistic director of the only Latinofocused opera company in the country. It was also made into a movie starring Benito Martinez, Dolores Heredia, Luke Ganalon and Miriam Colon. More recently, it was named in the top 100 Great American Reads in a PBS series.
Told in the voice of Antonio Márez, the story is set in Guadalupe, a rural New Mexican town, around the end of World War II. When Ultima enters Antonio’s life, he is still a young boy ready to start school and nervous about being away from his family, particularly his mother, for the first time. Ultima, a curandera who doesn’t have any relatives left, comes to live with them, accompanied by her pet owl.
The owl appears often in Antonio’s vivid dreams. Though he has heard that owls are brujas, witches in disguise, he soon warms up to it and accepts it as part of Ultima’s identity. Only at the end the reader learns why Ultima’s life is intertwined with her pet’s.
The owl is with Antonio, seemingly protecting him, when the boy witnesses Lupito’s death. Lupito is a WWII veteran who suffers from what today we would call post-traumatic stress disorder.
The effects of the war on young men is mentioned several times in the novel. When Antonio’s brothers return from the battlefield, they are said to have “war-sickness.”
Ultima joins the Márez family not only as a guest but also as a protector. That’s how she is introduced at the beginning of the novel: “Ultima was a curandera, a woman who knew the herbs and remedies of the ancients, a miracle-worker who could heal the sick. And I had heard that Ultima could lift the curses laid by brujas, that she could exorcise the evil the witches planted in people to make them sick.”
She uses her wisdom to help Antonio in his journey from childhood to maturity. She has been present at his birth and knows what his future holds.
While relatives from his maternal family, los Lunas, would like for Antonio to become a priest, his father wants him to follow in his footsteps as a vaquero, a cowboy. At Antonio’s mother’s insistence, Ultima finally predicts that the boy will be “a man of learning.” But in the end, he must decide for himself. The process toward independence is one of the main themes of the novel.
Though Ultima doesn’t try to influence Antonio’s decision, she teaches him to love “el llano,” the countryside, and tells him about the healing power of herbs. In one of the most beautiful scenes of the book, she takes Antonio for a walk and shares her knowledge with him: “For Ultima, even the plants had a spirit, and before I dug she made me speak to the plant and tell it why we pulled it from its home in the earth.” She is particularly happy to find “yerba del manso,” which “could cure bums, sores, colic in babies, bleeding, dysentery and even rheumatism.”
The Spanish language plays an important part in the story. All the chapter numbers are in Spanish and Spanish phrases appear throughout the book. We can assume that, at least at the beginning, Antonio’s mental processes take place in this language: “All of the older people spoke only in Spanish, and I myself understood only Spanish. It was only after one went to school that one learned English.”
Cultural conflicts start for Antonio the first day of school when his name becomes “Anthony” and his classmates make fun of his lunch. “My mother had packed a small jar of hot beans and some good, green chile wrapped in tortillas. When the other children saw my lunch, they laughed and pointed again.
Even the high school girl laughed. They showed me their sandwiches that were made of bread. However, Ultima’s prophecy of him as a future “man of learning” comes true: he learns English so fast and well that at the end of the year, his teacher, Miss Maestas, promotes him from first to third grade.
Later, Antonio becomes Ultima’s helper in one of the scariest episodes: the healing of his uncle Lucas who has been cursed by the Trementina sisters. The sisters are “bad” witches (as opposed to Ultima, who is a “good” one).
But I am not going to tell you the rest of the story. If you haven’t read this novel, go to the library or the bookstore and get it right away. I used it as required reading in my
Santería and Curanderismo class, several years ago, and, in the words of one of my students, “It was the best book I’ve ever read, more magical than Harry Potter and much closer to the New Mexican heart.”