Essay on "Bless Me, Ultima"

Essay 4 pages (1922 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Bless Me, Ultima is the first in a trilogy of novels that includes Heart of Aztlan and Tortuga. Set in New Mexico in the 1940s, it follows the story of Antonio Marez, a boy who meets a curandera named Ultima. The main plotline involves Ultima's struggle to stop the witchcraft of the three daughters of Tenorio Trementina, the main villain. In the novel, Antonio mentally matures into an adult; hence, it is a coming of age story. In the story Antonio, who is witness to several deaths, is forced to deal with religious and moral issues. He has to choose between two opposing families the wild Marez, the cowboy people from where Antonio's father comes from, and the quiet Lunas, the religious farmers from whom his mother descended.

Anaya uses dream sequences to emphasize the inner conflicts that push Antonio to understand the world around him. The dreams present Antonio's acute intuitive sense, the conflictive understandings he has of the world around him, and his own deep fears. They are windows into Antonio's unconscious world as he matures and deepens his understanding. The dreams foreshadow many of the major events in Antonio's life. In the beginning Antonio is very naive and has an innocent view of the world but later he increases his knowledge and self-understanding. Anaya uses the recurrent dream motif to show how Antonio's interpretations of his thoughts and experiences change as he develops as a character. In his early dreams, for instance, Antonio is largely preoccupied with the question of his destiny, of whether he will become a vaquero or a priest. But in his later dreams, he is preoccupied with much larger questions of family, morality, and duty. This gradual transformation, traced in dreams, reflects Antonio's growth from childhood to maturity. His dreams also offer him a rich and variable set of images and symbols with which to understand his own life.

Antonio's first dream regards his own birth. As he drifts off into sleep, he has a dream in which he floats over the hills of the llano to the village of Las Pasturas and toward the window of a lighted hut. There, a woman is in labor, and Antonio recognizes that he is witnessing his own birth. After the baby Antonio is born, his mother's brothers arrive and declare that he will be a Luna and perhaps become a priest. His father's brothers declare that he will continue their tradition of restless wandering on the llano. Each family wishes to dispose of the afterbirth according to their family traditions: the Lunas seek to bury it in the earth, while the vaqueros seek to burn it and scatter the ashes across the open plains. Ultima claims that she will bury the afterbirth herself. She declares that only she will know Antonio's destiny. Ultima is a curandera, which means she is practicing folk medicine, a healing art heavily influenced by the knowledge and the ancient religions of indigenous peoples. Curanderismo is associated with the treatment of both physical and supernatural illnesses. It was considered a practice made by the witches and also showed the fact that the Catholic Church wasn't able to explain some of the certain kinds of power, especially Ultima's. Her declaration, that she is the one who knows Antonio's future, shows that she is like a guide for Antonio in the process of reconciling his heritages and building a future out of both. The relationship between them is based on harmony and trust. Antonio is developing an independent self-consciousness and learning to combine elements of both his parents' heritages. He is a young boy and this matter doesn't make him consider the consequences of changes, being still naive and vulnerable.

His mother associates growing up with learning how to sin, while Gabriel and Ultima view growing up as an inevitable process that is not good or bad in itself. Maria's worldview results from a primarily religious outlook on life, but Gabriel and Ultima's embodies a natural outlook. As a boy becomes a man, he uses his experiences and his knowledge to make decisions. The pressures that accompany each of these outlooks flare up when the subject of Antonio's future comes up yet again. Maria's religiosity leads her to the conclusion that the only hope for Antonio's salvation lies in his becoming a priest, while Gabriel's love of independence causes him to insist that no one but Antonio should decide whether he becomes a priest. As Antonio's mentor, Ultima does not tell him what to think; rather, she tells him how people like his father and Narciso make moral decisions. Her approach gives Antonio the freedom to apply his understanding to his own decisions. Ultima's style of teaching implies that she is more interested in helping Antonio develop into an independent person than in teaching him any particular moral outlook on life. Maria protests that Antonio is still a baby. She says that she thinks it is a sin for boys to become men. She wants to protect his son and the only way to keep him away from the corrupt world is to make him a priest.

Another symbol in the novel is the Virgin of Guadalupe. Every night, Antonio's family prays before the statue. Antonio loves her and she is his favorite saint because The Virgin is the one who provides forgiveness and also has a pure soul. One night Antonio has another dream. In this specific dream the Virgin speaks to Maria and promises that his older brothers will return home from the war safely. When Maria asks her to make Antonio a priest, Antonio sees the Virgin wearing the clothing of mourning for him while standing on the moon. The dream has some interpretations. It is possible that the Virgin mourning represent his death. It is also possible that the dream means that becoming a priest does not save Antonio from sin as his mother wished. It could also mean that Antonio disappointed his mother's wishes by not becoming a priest. The dream symbolizes many of the interior conflicts that torment Antonio as he grows out of his childhood ignorance and innocence. He thinks about the sin, about the punishment and he is preoccupied with his own morality, also a possible significance of disobeying his mother's wishes for him. The Virgin is the embodiment of both the novel's main forces of conflict and their inherent resolution. Antonio's devotion to the saint shows that he is concerned about forgiveness considering that he can sin too. For him Ultima is like the Virgin, because by the statement Bless me Ultima he refers to her as the women who hadn't sinned.

One of Ultima's predictions is that Antonio might become a man of learning, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he will fulfill Maria's hope of becoming a priest. He has to face the cultural differences, but he desires to obtain knowledge.

Another self-discovery occurs when Maria's brother is near death. Pedro, Lucas's brother, asks for Ultima's help, explaining that Lucas saw the daughters of Tenorio Trementina dancing the Black Mass, a blasphemous satanic ritual. When Lucas challenged them with a cross made from two sticks, they fled the scene. Within the week, Lucas fell ill. No priest or doctor managed to cure him. Ultima asks Antonio to assist her and succeeds to cure Lucas. After this experience Antonio is connected with the power of healing, possessing some of the spirituality encountered in Ultima. Helping her to cure his uncle shows that Antonio is now ready to make his own decisions and to be responsible for the consequences.

The orange of the golden carp appeared at the edge of the pond.... We watched in silence at the beauty and grandeur of the great fish. Out of the corners of my eyes I saw Cico hold his hand to his breast as the golden carp glided by. Then with a switch of his powerful tail the golden carp disappeared into the shadowy water under the thicket."

The golden carp represents a magical religious order not connected to Catholicism. The golden carp legend offers its own brand of wisdom, comfort, and moral guidance. Within the context of the novel's themes, the carp supports the idea that every religious tradition offers different, but equally valid, lessons about the world. Antonio first rejects the golden carp, feeling that he is abandoning God by simply pursuing an interest in the magical fish. The golden carp represents an alternate religion and contains the same kind of moral themes contained in Catholic theology.. He realizes that different religions have many things in common debating the same problems such as life, death, good and evil. This fact represents Antonio as an independent young man who has the freedom to choose.

The elements of betrayal and vengeance can be seen related with the death of Lupito and Narciso and also against Tenorio who blames Ultima for his daughters' sickness and death and also indents to kill her. But later Antonio realizes that… READ MORE

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