In a recent decision, one of the books I remember reading years ago when I first arrived in New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me Ultima, was banned by one school district in Arizona, claiming it promoted the overthrow of the federal government. The decision prompted me to reread it again, just to seek out the logic behind the decision. Anaya, who died in 2020, was considered one of the founders of the canon of contemporary Chicano literature. Since its publication in 1972, Bless Me, Ultima had inspired countless people across the country and around the globe, both young and old, to read, write, and listen with a sincere appreciation for the cuentistas, those storytellers who grace us with a special presence in our lives. I use the term “storytellers” over “authors” and “writers” because Rudolfo Anaya came from the storytelling tradition.
Rudolfo was a llanero at heart. He was raised in Pastura, a little village in the Río Pecos Valley outside Santa Rosa. He grew up with his ear set to the wind, listening for the next story coming down the whispering plains.
Fifty years on, Bless Me, Ultima pays homage to a passing way of life. In the bestselling Chicano novel of all time, which set a standard for the literature and generations of writers that followed, Anaya sought to capture the essence of what it is to be a person stepping between the thresholds of multiple worlds.
These are the worlds of Antonio, the young boy whose life is being pulled apart by people around him who think they know what is best for him and his future. It is a story of human mediation with the natural environment, the reconciliation between Catholic and Indigenous spiritual traditions, and the exploration of morality. It is a tale of the struggle between good and evil. Through these conflicts comes healing: through faith - a blind faith in oneself and others - and the magical connections we make with everything around us.
From the context of his upbringing and cultural experiences, Rudolfo wrote to honor the working man and woman. He recognized and celebrated the knowledge held by folks living on the margins of society, in rural villages and in the barrios of urban centers. He celebrated their wisdom in his writing. Rudolfo and his Chicano counterparts engaged in the movement of the 1960s and ’70s. They were committed to the preservation of New Mexican culture, language, and traditions. Their work had purpose and served as a form of activism.
His presence as a professor in the English department at the University of New Mexico made students feel as if they had a place at UNM. His work was rooted in the culture, language, and oral traditions of the manito people of northern New Mexico. The voices of the everyday New Mexicans in his writing carried their stories and poetry forward.
To author Abelardo Baeza, who produced a highly praised teaching guide for Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo wrote: “You have done education a great service, Abelardo, and you have done contemporary Chicano and Chicana literature the same service by believing in our work. You knew our voice should be heard, so you took the stories, poems, songs, cuentos, and novels into the classroom and created the move toward a new curriculum. All of us thank you for that. Because of you, and teachers like you, Mexican Americans know their literature, history, and culture better. And you have helped those who are not Chicanos look into our literature and become not only aficionados of literature, but better neighbors.”
But the real thanks ultimately go to Rudolfo Anaya. He was at the forefront of authors whose work initiated the move toward a new, more inclusive curriculum in the classroom. For many students growing up in New Mexico, Bless Me, Ultima was the first literature they were required to read in school that went beyond the traditional Steinbeck, Frost, Whitman, and Dr. Seuss. For native Spanish speakers, it was a hallmark of linguistic affirmation, written in their own language, the language of the New Mexican. Beyond academic institutions and educational settings, Anaya’s work inspired others to take their stories and put them on the page.
In this novel, Latinos found their North Star, a guide back to their villages, their language, culture, traditions, and storytellers. It took them back, even as they went forward in a literary celebration of who they had been, who they were, and what they could become. It honored the concept of community and family, the earth, life, death and the spirit. It was a cleansing and a healing from all that had stained them with a sense of inferiority and rejection.
And it gave readers a template for how each of us could tell our own story, in our own language, and from our own location, our own worldview, or the inbetween space that has been referred to, in Nahuatl, as nepantla. The magical realism in Bless Me, Ultima was not imagined. It was real.
Readers recognized the settings, contexts, characters, and landscapes as coming from the place of their birth and upbringing. They saw their storytellers, relatives, linguistic nuances, and colloquial mannerisms. Rudolfo’s stories, were not postcard images of the cultural landscape, but hardened realities, softened through the crafting of language and symbolism, and made as poetic as the cemetery, bearing the names of our those who had passed before. Rudolfo empowered readers not only as writers and poets, but as everyday people, cooks, waiters, doctors, lawyers, architects, mechanics, receptionists, and anyone with a story to tell.
Rudolfo carved out and legitimized a place in American literature for the kind of bilingualism that many carry with them in the American melting pot. He was one of the first bilingual writers to gain prominence, and his was not a language of italics and translation.
As Chicano literature evolved he did not provide a translation, especially not as part of the text. In his children’s stories he uses a glossary, or footnotes. He was able to honor the text and its rhythm.
As a child, I absorbed my relatives’ and neighbors’ stories, often told in the warmth of a woodstove fire and by lantern light, my mind and soul would travel across other worlds, worlds of sheepherding ranches, railroad camps, faraway worlds of battlefields and foreign lands.
I learned about men and women who had passed on, but who were alive as ever, by mention of their names and through the stories that were shared - local heroes and villains, and real-life comical figures. I learned about the traditions of gardening, on which side of the row to thumb the seeds, why February has 28 days and March has 31, and why a clothesline should be oriented north to south.
I developed a love for the art of storytelling. In it, I found a role as listener and observer.
It fit my introverted nature quite well. My parents understood that his education did not begin or end in the classroom, and that knowledge and wisdom could also be found among those whom local society had dismissed as outcasts - the same types of characters Rudolfo honored and revered in his novels.
These formative childhood experiences and the impact of the oral tradition fed my inquisitive hunger for the solace I found in the world of stories and books. Listening to the stories led me to reading, and reading led me to writing.
It has been said, “The creative adult is the child who has survived.” It is quite conceivable that had my parents not valued the wisdom of the common folk and elderly storytellers, I would not be writing this blog.
Rudolfo once remarked, “The storyteller tells stories for the community as well as for himself. The story goes to the people to heal and reestablish balance and harmony, but the process of the story is also working the same magic on the storyteller… Remember the shaman, the curandero, the mediators do their work for the people, but they live alone.”
In my latest reading of Bless Me, Ultima I had appreciated the book twice as much, this time from both a reader’s and a writer’s perspective.
Like the storytellers of my childhood, in their darkened houses, and the shamans who live alone in their world of healing and creativity, Rudolfo sat before the page, blessing us, not one last time, not one last time, but one more time.
That is the power of story - to endure and to transcend, to bring people together as strangers and neighbors and hold in beauty that which flees from us in shyness of the light.
“Everything is connected,” Ultima reminds us. “Take all that is good and beautiful into your heart. You will see how it is all one marvelous mystery.”
Fifty years on, Bless Me, Ultima pays homage to a passing way of life. In the bestselling Chicano novel of all time, which set a standard for the literature and generations of writers that followed, Anaya sought to capture the essence of what it is to be a person stepping between the thresholds of multiple worlds.
These are the worlds of Antonio, the young boy whose life is being pulled apart by people around him who think they know what is best for him and his future. It is a story of human mediation with the natural environment, the reconciliation between Catholic and Indigenous spiritual traditions, and the exploration of morality. It is a tale of the struggle between good and evil. Through these conflicts comes healing: through faith - a blind faith in oneself and others - and the magical connections we make with everything around us.
From the context of his upbringing and cultural experiences, Rudolfo wrote to honor the working man and woman. He recognized and celebrated the knowledge held by folks living on the margins of society, in rural villages and in the barrios of urban centers. He celebrated their wisdom in his writing. Rudolfo and his Chicano counterparts engaged in the movement of the 1960s and ’70s. They were committed to the preservation of New Mexican culture, language, and traditions. Their work had purpose and served as a form of activism.
His presence as a professor in the English
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