Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima

Report on Bless Me, Ultima
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Report on Bless Me, Ultima
Introduction
Conflict plays an essential role in literature by driving the narrative, revealing deeper meaning, and shaping characters while highlighting their values, desires, motivations, and frustrations. In Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, conflict is among the essential building blocks of the story through the eyes and thoughts of Antonio, the protagonist. The novel's setting is in rural Mexico in the 1940s, immediately after World War II, characterized by a rapidly changing American landscape where political, religious, and cultural conflicts loom. These changes are responsible for the internal conflicts experienced by Antonio as he strives to find his identity.
Novel Summary
Antonio was seven years old when an old healer, Ultima, was taken in by his family. Ultima's healing powers, rich knowledge of plant lore, and ability to use folk magic to assist the community with spiritual needs underpinned the family's reason for taking her in. When she arrives, and as the story develops, Antonio is caught between external and internal conflict. In terms of external conflict, many changes are taking place in Antonio's world, including the arrival of settler ranches, overreaching American mainstream culture, and intra-family differences. For instance, Antonio struggles to reconcile the cultural differences between his mother and father, even though both are of Mexican origin.
The conflict between Antonio's parents has everything to do with Antonio's future. While both parents share the Spanish settler origin, their familial differences characterize how each views Antonio's future. The boy's father grew up as a cowboy on the prairie and still holds onto his cultural inheritance in the cowboy trade. Even after reluctantly moving to Guadalupe, he still makes his living off the trade, always longing to whip his horse and roam freely in the grasslands. The father, Gabriel Marez, embodies the fleeting vaquero notion of self-determination and freedom. He describes himself as "wild, like the ocean and spaces of the Ilano that have since become their home" (Anaya, 1972, p. 45). This kind of freedom and self-determination shapes his desires for Antonio's future. On the other hand, Antonio's mother comes from a conservative family of religious farmers with a predetermined destiny of working on the farm. In her view, she desires Antonio to become a priest, in contrast with the free-spirited life that her husband desires for the boy.
These differences are immediately apparent in the first chapter when Antonio slips into a dream focusing on the moment he is born. The first ones to visit were the Lunas, the mother's side, who are humble farmers who cherish the presence of land and desire peace and calm. Their gifts are mainly farm products, including ripe peaches & apples, fresh green chile & corn, green beans, and pumpkins. Traditionally, they smear the toddler with the "dark earth of the river valley on the forehead" (p. 5). They aim to sway the child so that he grows into a farmer. But the calm and peace brought about by the Lunas were quickly shattered with the thunderous pounding of hooves as the vaqueros surrounded the small hut. They enter the room, drinking, shouting, and laughing while smashing the vegetables and fruits surrounding the bed. Instead, they replaced them with a bottle of whiskey, a saddle, horse blankets, an old guitar, and a new rope. In other words, they expect Antonio to grow into a vaquero like them.
These familial differences begin Antonio's internal conflict as he strives to strike an identity for himself. The events around his birth are also symbolic of the larger cultural conflicts that exist in Guadalupe. Born of purely Mexican American parents, Antonio is accultured in the Spanish culture underlined with Catholicism, hatred for Native Indians, and wary of the larger Anglo-Saxon culture that has swept across America. Therefore, Anaya's main purpose for writing the novel was to explore and interrogate the internal conflicts faced by youth growing up in a period of intense acculturation, which calls for one to find their identity within many conflicting ideas.
These conflicting ideals are rife in the background in which Anaya wrote the book. For instance, while Antonio's parents come from different sub-cultures, they both boast of having descended from the Spanish conquistadors (Mexican settlers) and show blatant discrimination against the Native Indians who occupied the lands before the settlers arrived. The parents share in their hatred of Indian cultures and are arrogantly oblivious to the fact that the Native Indian culture influences their daily life. This communal dismissal of Native Indian's way of life is exemplified by the only Indian character in the story who does not even have a name and lives a lonely life. At the same time, the family and most Mexican settlers must deal with another problem of Anglo-Saxon settlers who have brought with them another mainstream culture that seeks to erase the Mexican American culture. When the first atomic bomb is tested, for instance, there are whispers that "man was not made to know so much…they compete with God, they disturb the seasons, they seek to know more than God himself" (p. 183). Additionally, Antonio describes his brothers as "dying giants" because their war experiences hinder them from settling back into the Guadalupe way of life they left behind. The brothers leave Guadalupe to pursue modernization and other aspects of civilization shaped by the developments that followed World War II.
At the same time, there is also the looming issue of Anglo-Saxon settlers who are on...