Moon/Luna

And when we arrived at the village we saw the horned day-moon fixed exactly between two dark mesas at the southern end of the valley. (____) Victoria

"The moon of the Lunas," my uncle remarked, breaking the silence of the trip. (94) - Victoria

"then a huge golden moon came down from the heavens and settled on the surfaceof the calm waters" (176)  - Marilyn.

Ultima

Ultima

Then the owl cried; it sang to the million stars that dotted the dark-blue sky, the Virgin's gown. All was watched over, all was cared for. I slept. (53) - Victoria

"At night I heard the owl cry in warning, not the soft rhythmic song we were so used to, but cries of alarm." (___) - Laila

Narciso's House

"The garden of Narciso," Cico said with reverence, "is envied by all—Would you like to taste its fruits?" (113) - Victoria

Ultima Article by Theresa Kanoza

The Golden Carp and Moby Dick: Rudolfo Anaya's Multi-Culturalism 

ACADEMIC JOURNAL ARTICLEBy Kanoza, Theresa M.
MELUS , Vol. 24, No. 2  , Summer 1999

PEER-REVIEWED PERIODICAL

-reviewed publications on Questia are publications containing articles which were subject to evaluation for accuracy and substance by professional peers of the article's author(s).  Article excerpt

In Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya presents a world of opposites in the New Mexican village of Guadalupe. The parents of the young protagonist Antonio have strikingly different temperaments, as dissimilar to each other as the backgrounds from which they hail. Maria Luna Marez, the pious daughter of Catholic farmers from the fertile El Puerto valley, steers her son toward the priesthood and a ministry in an agrarian settlement. Gabriel Marez, Antonio's adventurous father, is descended from a long line of nomadic horsemen; he expects his son to share his wanderlust, and he hopes that as compadres they will explore the vanishing llano (plains). The thrust of Anaya's bildungsroman, however, is not that maturation necessitates exclusionary choices between competing options, but that wisdom and experience allow one to look beyond difference to behold unity.

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. 

When I was

Jenny followed us on her bike as I shoved the kids in front of me toward the house. "You're not their mother. You can't tell them what to do!" she cried. (___) - Quentin

Jenny and her new bike

"Jenny followed us on her new bike as I shoved the kids in front of me towards the house" (___) - Laila

Ultima

Curses and threats filled the air, pistols were drawn, and the opposing sides made ready for a battle. But the clash was stopped by the old woman who delivered the baby. (____) - Quentin

Que no hay nadie que lo ayude exclamo mi madre. Ella y mi tio voltearon a ver a Ultima quien habia permanecido callada escuchando su platica. Ahora se puso de pie frente a mi tío "Ay, Pedro Luna!, eres como una mujer vieja que se sienta, habla y pierde valioso tiempo (___) - Fidel

Ultima Article by Ruben O.Martinez.

Ultima Article by Martinez

The number 3

Tripartites. Anaya uses tripartites to structure the novel. Again and again, things occur in "threes." There are, for example, three cultures, three brothers, three Trementina sisters, three prophetic dreams, three revelations of Ultima's identity, three Comanche spirits, three interferences by Ultima in the destinies of others, and so on. While numerology is not a salient feature of the narrative, it is clear that numbers structure the plot.

Ultima Article by Carol Mitchell

Carol Mitchell

SOURCE: Mitchell, Carol. "Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima: Folk Culture in Literature." Critique 22, no. 1 (1980): 55-64.

[In the following essay, Mitchell discusses the amalgam of folk culture and religion in Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima.]

In Bless Me, Ultima (1972) Rudolfo Anaya draws a vivid picture of traditional rural Spanish-American culture of the recent past, and through his characters, especially the folk figures of the curandera and the bruja, he takes the reader into that traditional society where the sacred and secular worlds are closely intertwined—a world that is different from the largely secular contemporary urban society of most readers. In order to understand and appreciate the novel, one needs to pay particular attention to four different aspects of traditional culture: la familiaand the roles of children, adults, and the aged; the conflicts in a traditional patriarchal family between the roles of women and men; the roles of and attitudes toward the curandera and the bruja; and the close ties between the sacred and secular life in traditional society.