Ultima Article by Debra Black

By Black, Debra B.

Bilingual Review , Vol. 25, No. 2  , May-August 2000

Article excerpt

Bless Me, Ultima (1972) by Rudolfo A. Anaya is a novel that at times sweeps across the mind of the reader with prose that sings with the music of poetry; at times it fascinates the reader with the richness of the ethnic history of Chicano culture, and at times it creates nostalgia for the innocence of youth and the chance to find again one's own identity. Not only is it a novel that contains a rich panorama of visual imagery as it describes the New Mexico landscape of the 1940s, but it is also a novel of realistic concepts about life and living that face ordinary and not-so-ordinary people. 

One important view of the novel, largely overlooked, is a reading of Bless Me, Ultima in terms of the power struggles that are a result of acculturation, and how power, if diminished in one cultural discourse, often accelerates in another, where the use of one type of power makes up for the inadequacies that may exist from the loss of another. No matter how many other meanings can be attributed to the text, the underlying themes that the novel examines involve the conflicts of power within cultural structures as a result of acculturation: who has it, and who does not have it. Acculturation, regardless of what else it may be, is a strong political issue with far-reaching ramifications not only for the people physically and psychologically involved, but for generations of people yet to come.

By choosing open forms over closed ones as a result of opting "for conflict over resolution," the Chicano narrative should function to "produce creative structures of knowledge to allow its readers to see, to feel, and to understand their social reality" (Saldivar 7). If this is the function of Chicano narrative, then Anaya fails, at least in part, to realize this purpose in Bless Me, Ultima. While he allows Chicana readers to see their social reality, he denies them the ability to question or to understand it. (1) This paper investigates how the conflicts of acculturation affect the Chicanas in the novel in ways that do not affect the Chicanos. However, it is first necessary to proceed to an overview of acculturation and the history of Anglo/Chicano opposition before examining how acculturation affects the Chicanos in the novel, and eventually the Chicanas. As the encroaching Anglo world disempowers the Chicanos, they increase the oppression of those within their cultural control--the Chicanas.

Acculturation requires the contact of at least two autonomous cultural groups, and some form of change within one of these groups must result from the contact. In principle, this change can occur in either group, but it is more common for one of the groups to dominate and thus be able to force its culture upon the weaker group. The idea of domination suggests that what happens between contact and change is apt to be problematic. "The eventual form of the accommodation between the groups in contact and in conflict is not necessarily one of assimilation," but the accommodation can assume different relationships (Berry 10). 

The process of any acculturation between two cultures is usually long and complicated. The length of time involved for the resulting conflicts to be resolved (if they ever are), and the seriousness of the conflicts is dependent mainly upon two factors: the nature of the contact and the level of differences between the societies involved. The acculturation occurring between the Chicano and the Anglo cultures is no different. Their history of conflict spans a long period of time and continues to have great political, economic, and social consequences. The history deserves a careful and in-depth consideration beyond the scope of this work. However, to help establish a limited background of the conflict between the two cultures that underlies Anaya's novel, it is necessary to note the major points that have figured in the acculturation between the Chicano and the Anglo worlds in the area of New Mexico. 

Since the 1959 appearance of the pioneer Chicano novel, Pocho, by Jose Antonio Villarreal, conflicts between Anglos and Chicanos have become a major theme in the Chicano literature of the Southwest.